My esteem for wedding planners runs deep. Theirs is a demanding skill set – equal parts etiquette maven, fashion consultant, economist, music scout, florist and therapist. Not my strong suits. (I have enough trouble matching socks with trousers.) Yet every year around this time I find myself channelling Jennifer Lopez to wrestle with that inevitable reader question: “I’m getting married! Can you recommend a decent red and white for 12 bucks? P.S.: We’re having sushi, roast beef and vegan chana masala.” Occasionally I’m also asked about bubbly and spirits.
Besides “lots” in response to that last consideration, I usually have as many questions as answers. Every wedding is unique, and tastes are hard to anticipate. According to a recent poll by Weddingbells magazine, the average Canadian reception this year is expected to include 124 guests. I dare say it’s easier to land Mr. Right (or Jennifer Lopez) than identify two wines for $12 that will bowl over everybody in such a large group – regardless of the food on the table.
With that caveat in mind, let me (cautiously) offer some cheap-chic suggestions as well as general pointers should the Big Day be around the corner for you.
A top white option: Marques de Riscal Rueda 2012 from Spain ($11.40 in Ontario). It’s light and crisp but substantial in flavour, offering notes of melon and red apple that should hold their own against the smog of cologne and perfume. On the red front, I’d suggest Pasqua Villa Borghetti Passimento Rosso 2010, a medium-bodied, velvety Italian that can span the spectrum from fish to beef. Full disclosure: It costs $12.95 in Ontario, but you’re saving 60 cents on the Rueda, and it wouldn’t be a wedding if you came in under budget. Alternatives: Fleur de Coucou Touraine Sauvignon 2011 from France ($11.75) and Castillo de Almansa Reserva 2009 from Spain ($11.95).
By all means opt for a broader selection, including a microbrewed beer and decent spirits, says Roseanne Dela Rosa, associate editor at Weddingbells. “Don’t assume everybody has the same taste as you,” she wisely notes. More choice won’t tax the budget because the outlay ultimately comes down to consumption. If you’re hosting at a private locale and shopping directly from a store, you can in most cases return sealed leftovers for a refund.
One category that could unnecessarily squeeze finances is bubbly. It’s festive, certainly, but don’t feel coerced merely because of the celebratory optics. Geneve McNally, one of the founding partners and principal planners of DreamGroup Productions, a Vancouver wedding and event-planning company, warns that sparkling wine is wasted on a lot of people. “They will just do a toast and then you have half-filled glasses sitting around,” she says. “I say do it for the right crowd.” Her current favourite: Blue Mountain Brut from British Columbia ($23.90), a brilliant choice, I might add. My bargain favourite: Segura Viudas Brut Cava from Spain ($14.25).
Alternatively, you could consider a themed cocktail, which ranks up there on the wedding-trend-o-meter with food trucks, live-streamed video and carbon-neutral receptions. I can’t offer a recipe, since I don’t know your tastes, but I gather that lavender, elderflower liqueur and the colour purple are in vogue. On that last point, McNally offers a warning. Fixating on a colour to match your flower hair clips or the bridesmaids’ dresses is “a mistake. Don’t send a venue a swatch of your dress and say ‘match it’ because it’s going to be full of blue curacao.”
Craft the drink to capture a mood rather than hiring Benjamin Moore to play bartender, she advises. It could be spiked lemonade in mason jars with fat drinking straws for a down-home feel, for example, or margarita shots served in hollowed-out lime halves for an upscale spring-break vibe. And take the time to taste in advance. McNally says she’s seen more pitiable potations than pleasant in her 16 years in the business.
And yet, there are exceptions. Last summer McNally braced for disappointment when a purple-smitten bride and her gal pals devised a vodka-based pitcher drink to match the purple flowers planned for a tony Hotel Vancouver wedding. “It was delicious,” McNally says. After the first few pitchers were drained, “they had to keep going back and making it. They couldn’t keep up with demand.”
As a growing number of wine producers go organic, one frustrating challenge persists for green-conscious oenophiles: Many organic producers simply don’t label their wines as such. The marketing vacuum can seem like a missed opportunity, given the increasing consumer demand for pesticide-free pinots and cabernets, but there’s good reason for it. “Organic” still carries a stigma in some circles.
There are, for example, drinkers who believe the designation is merely a marketing ploy designed to fetch a price premium. Worse, some people expect organic wines to taste inferior, the same bias that unfairly plagues today’s quality kosher wines. But there’s another reason: Most organic producers are driven by imperatives that have nothing to do with sparing you or me from headaches (the main malady cited by the readers of this column who regularly ask for organic-wine recommendations). These producers simply are not targeting the health-conscious segment of the market.
The incentive to work without toxic pesticides and herbicides generally has more to do with ecosystem vitality and vineyard-employee safety (not that nasty chemicals are rampant in fine-wine production, by the way). By getting knee-deep in cow dung and harnessing natural vinepest predators such as wasps and bats, organic producers believe they’re growing healthier vines and better grapes, end of story. The wine, they believe, should stand on its own merits, not on perceived health benefits.
Some of the greatest names in the firmament, including France’s Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Château de Beaucastel, Zind-Humbrecht and Louis Roederer, have quietly embraced zero-pesticide farming. This is not to say that all quality producers remain in the closet. You will find exemplary producers that have taken up the cause – some discreetly, some more openly – including Summerhill Pyramid in British Columbia and Tawse and Southbrook in Niagara.
The first seven wines in the notes below, from today’s release at Ontario Vintages stores, are made from organically grown grapes. The first three were also farmed biodynamically, a sort of super-organic practice that relies on extreme ecological self-sufficiency, often including homemade compost sprays and a sprinkling of cosmic mysticism. They may not spare you from suspected sulphite headaches (since all wine contains sulphites, a byproduct of fermentation), but they do represent less of a headache for the planet.
Quartz Reef Pinot Noir 2010 (New Zealand)
SCORE: 92 PRICE: $44.95
Austrian-born Rudi Bauer landed in New Zealand in the 1980s and pioneered grape growing in Central Otago, the world’s southernmost wine region. His winery, Quartz Reef, is among the country’s finest, and this biodynamically grown pinot offers clear evidence. Resembling a fine, premier cru Burgundy, it is medium-bodied and elegant, with pure berry flavour laced with baking spices, beetroot and moist earth. The tannins are ample but fine-grained and the finish is satisfyingly crisp. Perfect for duck breast, grilled salmon or roast pork.
Wittmann Riesling Trocken 2011 (Germany)
SCORE: 90 PRICE: $20.95
Light but big on flavour, this dry German white tastes as though it were squeezed from ripe peaches. Well, almost. Succulent and initially soft, it pulls up the rear with tangy acidity and a whisper of chalk. Great for simply prepared freshwater fish. Organic and biodynamic.
Southbrook Triomphe Cabernet Franc 2011 (Ontario)
SCORE: 89 PRICE: $21.95
Medium-full-bodied and bone-dry, here is a properly ripe cabernet franc that never lets the grape’s herbal tendencies get the better of it. Well-structured, with an astringent backbone, it offers up additional nuances of earth and smoke. Try it with roast lamb. Organic and biodynamic.
La Cappuccina Soave 2012 (Italy)
SCORE: 89 PRICE: $14.95
It may sound like a Starbucks beverage, but this is white wine – from a Veneto estate that went au naturel way back in the organic stone age of 1985. It is light and crisp, though with more concentration than the run-of-the- mill Soave you’ll find by the glass in cheap Italian restaurants. Crisp peach and tangy herbs give way to pleasant, racy sourness on the finish. A lovely patio sipper, it would suit light seafood and salads. Organic.
Domaine Saint-Rémy Gewurztraminer Réserve 2011 (France)
SCORE: 88 PRICE: $18.95
A dollop sweeter than off-dry, here is an Alsatian white with all the classic gewurztraminer nuances – lychee, ginger and flowers – plus a note of honey. The texture is delectably smooth, almost syrupy, but it is well-balanced. Perfect with foie gras or liver pâtés. Organic.
Frog’s Leap Chardonnay 2011 (California)
SCORE: 89 PRICE: $36.95
Barrel-fermented, Frog’s Leap’s 2011 chardonnay was mainly aged in neutral concrete vats, with just 7.5 per cent matured in wood barrels. Despite the modest oak treatment, it is rich and smooth, with big tropical fruit bathed in toffee and brown butter, balanced by crisp acidity. It is ideal for fish or chicken in cream sauce. Organic.
Familia Zuccardi Organica Cabernet Sauvignon 2011 (Argentina)
SCORE: 85 PRICE: $13.95
Big producers are more likely to play up the organic status of their wines, as is the case here. If you are looking for a green bargain, this may be worth considering. It is concentrated and ripe in a crowd-pleasing way, but the fruit veers toward the confected, wine-gum side, with a grip of bitter herbs on the finish. Good for braised meats. Organic.
Quails’ Gate Merlot 2010 (British Columbia)
SCORE: 90 PRICE: $26.95
This is a meaty merlot, full-bodied and ripe, with flavours of plum, blackberry, vanilla and coffee. Very dry, it is supported by substantial fine tannins. Not organic. Pair it with big steaks or braised red meats. $22.97 in B.C., $27.19 in Sask., $22.99 in Man.
Yalumba Patchwork Shiraz 2010 (Australia)
SCORE: 90 PRICE: $21.95
It is not organic, but it claims another ethical virtue. It is “vegan and vegetarian friendly.” Translation: No animal-derived clarifying agents, such as milk or egg whites. Rich and boldly fruity, this Barossa Valley red delivers concentrated plum and blackberry flavours supported by vanilla, spice and tangy acidity. Pair it with substantial red-meat dishes. $25.99 in B.C., $24.99 in N.S.
Clos de Nouys Demi-Sec Vouvray 2011 (France)
SCORE: 90 PRICE: $19.95 Prepare yourself for considerable off-dry sweetness. But this is sumptuously balanced chenin blanc from the Loire Valley, with honeyed cantaloupe lifted by juicy acidity, spice and a tingle of chalky minerality. It is perfect for spicy crab cakes or the cheese course. Available only in Ontario. Not organic.
Young, hip restaurants? No thanks, I’m happy being the unwanted oldster
by JOHN ALLEMANG
The Globe and Mail Published
Old people are offensive – I get it. As The Globe’s food writer Chris Nuttall-Smith suggested on CBC’s The Current last week, people in their 50s and 60s don’t belong in today’s trendy restaurants, and not just because our grey hair is an unsightly reminder of human decay. Because we’re decrepit stiffs stuck with outmoded baby-boomer bodies and values, we’ve become the deserving casualties of a downtown-hipster scene that defines itself by eardrum-perforating ambience, unchewable house-cured offal, self-taught twentysomething chefs with laughable tats and a two-hour wait for unpadded seats at the communal picnic table.
Predictably, we even take offence at being mocked, to judge from the social-media outbursts that tasked my colleague for fomenting intergenerational strife. All Nuttall-Smith said, more or less, was that once you hit the age of a Barack Obama, the kind of restlessly fashionable dining experience that serious restaurant critics overvalue becomes disorienting, confusing and hard to take. Which is entirely true – with the exception of a few friendly, tradition-respecting Mediterranean and Asian joints, and a cloistered hideaway at the University of Toronto, I haven’t eaten at a local restaurant for nearly a decade.
My reluctance is entirely stereotypical, on both sides of the generational divide. I want to talk and this gang of restaurateurs wants to blast music that codifies their centre-of-the-universe specialness. I want to eat and they want me to wait, preferably with bizarre cocktails and insipid wines that privilege the hipster notion of laborious obscurity. I want to enter a world different from my own and they want to segregate according to age, taste, social class and, often, ethnicity.
These are niche restaurants, private clubs imbued with a self-referential silliness and a sadistic no-reservation policy. As an unwanted outsider, I could happily live with that – while awaiting my imminent mortality – if they didn’t pretend to be so much more. The idea that a few conformist kitchens in an off-centre (but not suburban!) neighbourhood of a dour North American city could define the meaning of food is laughable to anyone who has travelled, who has cooked for themselves, who has lived with their eyes and mind wide open. There is so much more out there, and so much less – who bothers with hipster Paris when you can eat perfect bread and cheese? – and I pity my fellow oldsters who still feel some atavistic urge to follow fashion and impale themselves on the culinary cutting edge. Get over it, get old, eat what you want with people you like.
But what really troubles the out-of-date and price-sensitive egalitarian in me is the idea expressed by the cool crowd that the modern restaurant scene is fundamentally more democratic. Compared to some high-end, faux-French, hushed-tone, Michelin-courting edifice of the 1980s, maybe. But let’s not get too carried away with our Momofuku brand of populism: If levelling is what you’re looking for, the average McDonald’s is far more accessible, diverse and inexpensive. And somehow they’ve managed to hang on to the ancient and still-wonderful idea that our meals should be happy.
Organic farming is the "only way to produce food" without harming the planet and people's health
Reports trying to create doubts about organic agriculture are suddenly flooding the media. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, people are fed up of the corporate assault of toxics and GMOs. Secondly, people are turning to organic agriculture and organic food as a way to end the toxic war against the earth and our bodies.
At a time when industry has set its eyes on the super profits to be harvested from seed monopolies through patented seeds and seeds engineered with toxic genes and genes for making crops resistant to herbicides, people are seeking food freedom through organic, non-industrial food.
The food revolution is the biggest revolution of our times, and the industry is panicking. So it spins propaganda, hoping that in the footsteps of Goebbels, a lie told a hundred times will become the truth. But food is different.
We are what we eat. We are our own barometers. Our farms and our bodies are our labs, and every farmer and every citizen is a scientist who knows best how bad farming and bad food hurts the land and our health, and how good farming and good food heals the planet and people.
One example of an industrial agriculture myth is found in "The Great Organic Myths" by Rob Johnston, published in the August 8 issue of The Tribune. It tries to argue:
"Organic foods are not healthier or better for the environment - and they're packed with pesticides. In an age of climate change and shortages, these foods are an indulgence the world can't afford."
This article had been published in the Independent and rebutted, but was used by the Tribune without the rebuttal.
Every argument in the article is fraudulent.
The dominant myth of industrial agriculture is that it produces more food and is land-saving. However, the more industrial agriculture spreads, the more hungry people we have. And the more industrial agriculture spreads, the more land is grabbed.
The case against industrial agriculture
Productivity in industrial agriculture is measured in terms of "yield" per acre, not overall output. And the only input taken into account is labour, which is abundant, not natural resources which are scarce.
"Industrial agriculture is an inefficient and wasteful system which is chemical intensive, fossil fuel intensive and capital intensive."
A resource hungry and resource destructive system of agriculture is not land saving, it is land demanding. That is why industrial agriculture is driving a massive planetary land grab. It is leading to the deforestation of the rainforests in the Amazon for soya and in Indonesia for palm oil. And it is fuelling a land grab in Africa, displacing pastoralists and peasants.
According to the FAO International Technical Conference on Plant Genetic Resources in Leipzig (1995), industrial agriculture is responsible for 75 per cent biodiversity erosion, 75 per cent water destruction, 75 per cent land degradation and 40 per cent greenhouse gases. It is too heavy a burden on the planet. And as the 270,000 farmers' suicides since 1997 in India show, it is too heavy a burden on our farmers.
The toxics and poisons used in chemical farming are creating a health burden for our society. Remember Bhopal. Remember the Endosulfan victims in Kerala. And remember Punjab's Cancer train.
Navdanya's forthcoming report "Poisons in our Food" is a synthesis of all studies on the health burden of pesticides which are used in industrial agriculture but not in organic farming.
Industrial agriculture is an inefficient and wasteful system which is chemical intensive, fossil fuel intensive and capital intensive. It destroys nature's capital on the one hand and society’s capital on the other, by displacing small farms and destroying health. According to David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agricultural sciences at Cornell University, it uses 10 units of energy as input to produce one unit of energy as food.
This waste is amplified by another factor of 10 when animals are put in factory farms and fed grain, instead of grass in free range ecological systems. Rob Johnston celebrates these animal prisons as efficient, ignoring the fact that it takes 7kg of grain to produce one kg of beef, 4kg of grain to produce 1kg of pork and 2.4kg of grain to produce 1kg of chicken.
The diversion of food grains to feed is a major contributor to world hunger. And the shadow acres to produce this grain are never counted. Europe uses 7 times the area outside Europe to produce feed for its factory farms.
Small farms of the world provide 70 per cent of the food, yet are being destroyed in the name of low "yields". Eighty eight per cent of the food is consumed within the same eco-region or country where it is grown.
Industrialisation and globalisation is the exception, not the norm. And where industrialisation has not destroyed small farms and local food economies, biodiversity and food are bringing sustenance to people. The biodiversity of agriculture is being maintained by small farmers.
As the ETC report states in "Who Will Feed Us", "Peasants breed and nurture 40 livestock species and almost 8,000 breeds. Peasants also breed 5,000 domesticated crops and have donated more than 1.9 million plant varieties to the world's gene banks."
"Peasant fishers harvest and protect more than 15,000 freshwater species. The work of peasants and pastoralists maintaining soil fertility is 18 times more valuable than the synthetic fertilisers provided by the seven largest corporations."
When this biodiversity rich food system is replaced by industrial monocultures, when food is commoditised, the result is hunger and malnutrition. Of the world's 6.6bn, 1bn are not getting enough food; another billion might get enough calories but not enough nutrition, especially micro nutrients.
Another 1.3bn who are obese suffer malnutrition of being condemned to artificially cheap, calorie-rich, nutrient-poor processed food.
Biodiversity of agriculture is maintained by farmers [EPA]
Half of the world's population is a victim of structural hunger and food injustice in today's dominant design for food. We have had hunger in the past, but it was caused by external factors - wars and natural disasters. It was localised in space and time.
Today's hunger is permanent and global. It is hunger by design. This does not mean that those who design the contemporary food systems intend to create hunger. It does mean that creation of hunger is built into the corporate design of industrial production and globalised distribution of food.
A series of media reports have covered another study bya team led by Bravata, a senior affiliate with Stanford's Centre for Health Policy, and Crystal Smith-Spangler, MD, MS, an instructor in the school's Division of General Medical Disciplines and a physician-investigator at VA Palo Alto Health Care System, who did the most comprehensive meta-analysis to date of existing studies comparing organic and conventional foods.
They did not find strong evidence that organic foods are more nutritious or carry fewer health risks than conventional alternatives, though consumption of organic foods can reduce the risk of pesticide exposure.
This study can hardly be called the "most comprehensive meta - analysis"; the researchers sifted through thousands of papers and identified 237 of the most relevant to analyse. This already exposes the bias. The biggest meta-analysis on food and agriculture has been done by the United Nations as the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD).
Four hundred scientists from across the world worked for four years to analyse all publications on different approaches to agriculture, and concluded that chemical industrial agriculture is no longer an option, only ecological farming is.
Yet the Stanford team presents itself as the most comprehensive study, and claims there are no health benefits from organic agriculture, even though there were no long-term studies of health outcomes of people consuming organic versus conventionally produced food; the duration of the studies involving human subjects ranged from two days to two years.
Two days does not make a scientific study. No impact can be measured in a two-day study. This is junk science parading as science.
"Ecological, organic farming is the only way to produce food without harming the planet and people's health."
One principle about food and health is that our food is as healthy as the soil on which it grows is. And it is as deficient as the soils become with chemical farming.
Industrial chemical agriculture creates hunger and malnutrition by robbing crops of nutrients. Industrially produced food is nutritionally empty mass, loaded with chemicals and toxins. Nutrition in food comes from the nutrients in the soil.
Industrial agriculture, based on the NPK mentality of synthetic nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium-based fertilisers leads to depletion of vital micronutrients and trace elements such as magnesium, zinc, calcium and iron.
David Thomas, a geologist-turned-nutritionist, discovered that between 1940 and 1991, vegetables had lost - on an average - 24 per cent of their magnesium, 46 per cent of their calcium, 27 per cent of their iron and no less than 76 per cent of their copper (Ref: David Thomas "A study on the mineral depletion of the foods available to us as a nation over the period 1940 to 1991", Nutrition and Health, 2003; 17(2): 85-115).
Carrots had lost 75 per cent of their calcium, 46 per cent of their iron, and 75 per cent of their copper. Potatoes had lost 30 per cent of their magnesium, 35 per cent calcium, 45 per cent iron and 47 per cent copper.
To get the same amount of nutrition, people will need to eat much more food. The increase in "yields" of empty mass does not translate into more nutrition. In fact it is leading to malnutrition.
The IAASTD recognises that through an agro-ecological approach "agro-ecosystems of even the poorest societies have the potential through ecological agriculture and IPM to meet or significantly exceed yields produced by conventional methods, reduce the demand for land conversion for agriculture, restore ecosystem services (particularly water) reduce the use of and need for synthetic fertilisers derived from fossil fuels, and the use of harsh insecticides and herbicides".
Our 25 years of experience in Navdanya shows that ecological, organic farming is the only way to produce food without harming the planet and people's health. This is a trend that will grow, no matter how many pseudo-scientific stories are planted in the media by the industry.
Dr Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecofeminist, philosopher, activist, and author of more than 20 books and 500 papers. She is the founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and has campaigned for biodiversity, conservation and farmers' rights - winning the Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel Prize) in 1993.
2026
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
This article came high recommended to me. I
was told that reading Mr. Mark Lynas’ views regarding the anti-GMO movement
will assist me in formulating my own. I have now read this article. In fact I
have read it twice. Yet, I don’t get it! What am I supposed to take from this ?
Mr. Lynas says that “people’s concerns about
GM foods are based on mythology”, just cuz he says so does not make it real.
Nothing he says is an epiphany to me or earth shattering. What he has done is
taken a debate that has substance and layers and limited to scope of the
conversation to the sole issue that benefits and promotes his agenda. For
example, he says “We actually can tell whether GM foods are safe.”. Is this the
source of the debate? Or is the debate about so much more – sustainability of
land, crop mutation, displacement of farmers, disappearance and erosion of
biodiversity, the continued monopoly of corporations such as Monsanto and a few
others in controlling the creation, production and distribution of food through
patents, destruction and contamination of water and land, unending
contamination and poisoning of our food supply, etc. Mr. Lynas, did you know
that small farms of the world provide 70 per cent of
the food? So what the heck are you talking about ?
Mr. Lynas says that “recombinant
DNA is actually a potentially very powerful technology for designing crop
plants that can help humanity tackle our food-supply shortages, and also reduce
our environmental footprint. They can help us use less fertilizer, and
dramatically reduce pesticide applications. We can reduce our exposure to
climate change through drought and heat-tolerant crops.” – I don’t believe such
a complicated issue can be condensed into such a simplified statement, so prove
it! According to the International Technical
Conference on Plant Genetic Resources in Leipzig (1995), industrial agriculture
is responsible for 75 per cent biodiversity erosion, 75 per cent water
destruction, 75 per cent land degradation and 40 per cent greenhouse gases.
I suggesting
reading this and making your own opinion out of what Mr.
Lynas is saying. Let me know what you think!
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Photographs by Randy Quan
Mark Lynas used to be the kind of fire-breathing activist who sneaked onto test farms and destroyed genetically modified (GM) crops. Today, he’s one of Britain’s most respected science writers and an influential voice in the battle against climate change—winner of a coveted Royal Society Prize for his 2008 book, Six Degrees. In January, Lynas sent shockwaves through environmental circles by publicly apologizing for his role in launching the anti-GM movement. (GM is also referred to as to GMO, for “genetically modified organisms.”) “The GM debate is over,” he told Oxford University’s annual farming conference. “Three trillion meals eaten and there has never been a single substantiated case of harm.” Video of his speech went viral, and he’s been living with the backlash ever since.
Q:You’ve disavowed a cause you were identified with for decades. How are you feeling about your decision?
A: It’s been traumatic, but it’s also been something of a liberation. I’ve obviously been inconsistent in my life, but so are we all. In my view, it’s better to be inconsistent and half-right, than to be consistently wrong. Even the pope doesn’t claim these days to be infallible, yet that’s what most environmental groups do.
Q:Still, you’ve offended your former allies, a lot of whom are now trying to discredit you. Some say you exaggerated your part in founding the anti-GM movement to start with. What’s that been like on a personal level?
A: My whole social scene has been characterized by my environmentalism. I’m in a situation where I can go to a party and I don’t know who’s currently not speaking to me.
Q:On Twitter, Vandana Shiva, a prominent environmentalist in India, likened your calls for farmers to be able to plant GMOs to saying rapists should have the freedom to rape.
A: That was simply astonishing, and frankly, hurtful to people who have actually suffered the trauma of rape. Look, these attacks on me are obviously done in the interests of damage limitation. It’s sort of an emperor’s-new-clothes thing. I have helped expose the fact most people’s concerns about GM foods are based on mythology. Once you can get past the idea that there’s something inherently dangerous about GM foods, it’s a whole different conversation. We actually can tell whether GM foods are safe. They have been extensively tested hundreds and hundreds of times, using different techniques. Many of the tests were conducted independently. The jury is entirely in on this issue.
Q:Why did you choose this time and place to make your mea culpa?
A: I live in Oxford and I was invited. It wasn’t choreographed or preplanned in any way. I just got some ideas together and was asked to speak in a slot that emphasizes some freedom of thought and is meant to be provocative. It wasn’t as if I had a road-to-Damascus conversion, either. I have been developing these themes for several years, and I think this caught media headlines around the world because people [outside the U.K.] hadn’t heard of me before.
Q:You say this wasn’t an epiphany. Describe the intellectual and moral process that brought you to this point.
A: The process was really about familiarizing myself with the scientific evidence, and in fact, with an evidence-based world view in general. I got to that point by becoming less an environmental activist and more of a science writer through my work on climate change and having written two books on global warming. I’d been involved in countless debates with climate skeptics where I would be saying scientific evidence has to be the gold standard. Well, you don’t have to be a complete genius to figure out that scientific evidence is not with the anti-GM lobby. There is this mischaracterization of science, a sort of circular myth-building, at the heart of the anti-GMO cant.
Q:People are going to ask, though: if you admit you were massaging the truth then, how do we know you’re not massaging it now?
A. What I’ve done is difficult, and it’s why so few political leaders ever admit making a U-turn. They need to build up an aura of invincibility, and people’s belief in other people as leaders depends on this mirage. Fortunately that’s not something I’m interested in. This isn’t about me. It’s about the evidence and the truth.
Q.You argue that opposing GMOs is actually anti-environmental.
A. That was the realization that changed my mind. That recombinant DNA is actually a potentially very powerful technology for designing crop plants that can help humanity tackle our food-supply shortages, and also reduce our environmental footprint. They can help us use less fertilizer, and dramatically reduce pesticide applications. We can reduce our exposure to climate change through drought and heat-tolerant crops. So the potential is enormous.
Q:But even if one accepts that GMOs pose no threat to human health, is it not reasonable to worry about unintended consequences? If you make a crop that can’t be choked off by other plants, what might be the impact on the crop land or ecology of a given area?
A: It’s not reasonable, because all of those concerns would apply to any crop plant developed by humans—whether it’s done by genetic modification or conventional breeding. What’s so natural about mutagenesis, which creates a higher level of mutation of the genome through exposure to gamma radiation or mutagenic chemicals—then selects the mutations that confer a cultivation advantage? Conventional [plant] breeders have no idea what the impact is on the rest of the genome, or what allergens might have been created, because the results are not tested. They go straight into the food supply.
Q:You draw an interesting parallel between the denialism over global warming and denialism as it relates to GMOs. Both causes had been close to your heart. Did you reach a point where you had to choose between the two?
A: My overall effort has been to try to crash out an environmentalist perspective that is fully supported by evidence where there’s a scientific consensus. It’s interesting: the GM denialism seems to come from the left, and is particularly motivated by an anti-corporate world view; the climate-change denialism tends to come from the right and is motivated by suspicion of government.
Q:It strikes me that this is very much a story about the power of ideology—how it can blind people to the facts.
A: I agree, but you have to look at where the ideology is coming from, and why it’s so powerful and self-supporting. To my mind, anti-GM is a backward-looking, reactionary ideology, where you have a mythological, romanticized view of pre-industrialized agriculture being taken as the ideal. GM is seen as the opposite of that because it’s the epitome of technological and human progress in agriculture. So you have this collision of world views, where people who are fixated on doing things the old way simply cannot accept that you can even understand DNA, let alone work with it precisely and intentionally.
Q.The organic movement has staked a lot to anti-GM. Can it survive if the global public embraces GMOs?
A. The organic movement itself should embrace GM. The best applications of it mean that crops can be entirely pest-resistant by working in harmony with nature, which is after all what the organic movement is supposed to want. I don’t see any a priori reason why the organic movement accepts mutagenic crops and not GM crops. Ultimately it comes down to an aesthetic or even spiritual preference. We’re beyond a conversation where you can employ logic and science.
Q:So how do you think the organic movement should respond?
A: It’s a key test for them. Remember that most of what the organic movement has claimed is not true. Their food is not more nutritious. It’s not better for the environment. It’s not safer for human health. So what is left? You’re paying a premium for foods which, as Nina Fedoroff said on my blog, is a massive scam. That’s the recent board chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science talking.
Q:Maybe it’s just a matter of time before you have a splinter group of organic farmers willing work with GM crops.
A: I don’t know. My father is an organic farmer in north Wales and has been asking the Soil Association, the U.K.’s organic certification body, why he can’t grow a blight-resistant GM potato. It wouldn’t need to be sprayed with fungicide, and he could grow potatoes in wet years and not lose the entire crop. They can’t come up with any logical reason why.
Q:Do you eat organic food?
A: I try to avoid it, but my wife keeps buying it.
Q.Why do you avoid it?
A. Partly through bloody-mindedness. Partly because I object to paying more for something that is worse for the environment. And partly because I was shocked about the food contamination and health impacts—you know, the E.coli outbreak in Germany in 2011. I wouldn’t eat organic bean sprouts without giving them a thorough boiling.
Q.It would be easy for you to become a poster boy for genetically modified agriculture.
A. I’m no one’s poster boy, and I’m very careful about distinguishing myself from any industry lobbies. I don’t even speak on the same panels as industry people. For me this is a much wider struggle to reconcile environmentalism, which has so much good about it, with the reality of scientific evidence.
In our latest report, Helena Bottemiller investigates a controversial feed additive ractopamine hydrochloride, which has become the focus of a long-running international trade dispute that centers on concerns about its effect on human health. The story, “Dispute Over Drug in Feed Limiting US Meat Exports,” appears today on msnbc.com, one of the top three global news sites on the web, and was produced by the Food & Environment Reporting Network.
“Although few Americans outside of the livestock industry have ever heard of ractopamine, the drug is controversial,” Bottemiller writes. “Fed to an estimated 60 to 80 percent of pigs in the United States, it has sickened or killed more of them than any other livestock drug on the market, Food and Drug Administration records show. Cattle and turkeys have also suffered high numbers of illnesses from the drug.”
The story reports that USDA meat inspectors have reported an increase in the number of “downer pigs”—lame animals unable to walk—who have been fed ractopamine. The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously struck down a California law that had sought to keep out of the food supply downer livestock. It overturned the lower court’s ruling on the grounds of federal preemption.
The report explains that ractopamine, which has not been proposed for human use, mimics stress hormones, making the heartbeat faster and relaxing blood vessels. In animals, it revs up production of lean meat, reducing fat. Pigs raised on it produce an average of 10 percent more meat, raising profits by $2 per head. The drug is fed to animals right up until slaughter and minute traces of it have been found in meat.
The European Union, China, Taiwan and many others have banned its use, limiting U.S. meat exports to key markets. Bottemiller explains that U.S. trade officials are pressing more countries to accept meat from animals raised on ractopamine—a move opposed by China and the EU, reporting: “Resolving the impasse is now a top agricultural trade priority for the Obama administration, which is trying to boost exports and help revive the economy.”
The trade dispute centers on safety studies conducted by drug maker Elanco. It conducted only one human study with six healthy young men, one of whom was removed because his heart began racing and pounding abnormally, Bottemiller writes. Elanco has reported that “no adverse effects were observed for any treatments,” but, within a few years of its approval, it received hundreds of reports of sickened pigs, according to records obtained by Bottemiller from the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine.
The issue has been deadlocked since 2008 at the U.N.’s Codex Alimentarius Commission, which sets global food-safety standards, on the acceptable level, if any, of ractopamine in meat. Setting a Codex standard for ractopamine would strengthen Washington’s ability to challenge other countries’ meat import bans at the World Trade Organization, Bottemiller explains. The EU and China—which together produce and consume about 70 percent of the world’s pork—have blocked repeated efforts of U.S. trade officials to set a residue limit. U.S. officials say the EU does not want to risk a public outcry by importing meat raised with growth-promoting drugs, which are illegal there.
You can read the full story in our archive here, as well as additional reporting on the process at Codex here. The piece in our archive also contains additional reporting on the testing of ractopamine.
Adrienne LeBeouf recognized the symptoms when they started. The burning and the urge to head to the bathroom signaled a urinary tract infection, a painful but everyday annoyance that afflicts up to 8 million U.S. women a year. LeBeouf, who is 29 and works as a medical assistant, headed to her doctor, assuming that a quick course of antibiotics would send the UTI on its way.
That was two years ago, and LeBeouf has suffered recurring bouts of cystitis ever since. She is one of a growing number of women, and some men, who have unknowingly become infected with antibiotic-resistant versions of E. coli, the ubiquitous intestinal bacterium that is the usual cause of UTIs.
There is no national registry for drug-resistant infections, and so no one can say for sure how many resistant UTIs there are. But they have become so common that last year the specialty society for infectious-disease physicians had to revise its recommendations for which drugs to prescribe for cystitis — and many infectious-disease physicians and gynecologists say informally that they see such infections every week.
Dr. Jehan El-Bayoumi, LeBeouf’s physician and an associate professor of medicine at George Washington University Medical Center, said she has seen “a really significant increase, especially within the past two to three years.”
But the origin of these newly resistant E. coli has been a mystery — except to a small group of researchers in several countries. They contend there is persuasive evidence that the bacteria are coming from poultry. More precisely, coming from poultry raised with the routine use of antibiotics, which takes in most of the 8.6 billion chickens raised for meat in the U.S. each year.
Their research in the United States, Canada, and Europe (published most recently this month, in June, and in March) has found close genetic matches between resistant E. coli collected from human patients and resistant strains found on chicken or turkey sold in supermarkets or collected from birds being slaughtered. The researchers contend that poultry — especially chicken, the low-cost, low-fat protein that Americans eat more than any other meat — is the bridge that allows resistant bacteria to move to humans, taking up residence in the body and sparking infections when conditions are right. Touching raw meat that contains the resistant bacteria, or coming into environmental contact with it — say, by eating lettuce that was cross-contaminated — are easy ways to become infected.
“The E. coli that is circulating at the same time, and in the same area — from food animal sources, retail meat, and the E. coli that’s causing women’s infections — is very closely related genetically,” said Amee Manges, Ph.D., an associate professorof epidemiology at McGill University in Montreal who has been researching resistant UTIs for a decade. “And the E. coli that you recover from poultry meat tends to have the highest levels of resistance. Of all retail meats, it’s the most problematic that way.”
Policy concern over antibiotic-resistant bacteria — where they come from and how they affect human health — is at a peak right now.
About 80 percent of the antibiotics sold in the United States each year are given to livestock as “growth promoters” that allow animals to put on weight more quickly, or as prophylactic regimens that protect against the confined conditions in which they are raised. (That figure, taken from FDA documents, is not universally accepted; the Animal Health Institute, an industry group, puts non-human use closer to 28 percent.) For decades, public health and agriculture have been at loggerheads over the practice. Health officials argue that these uses create resistant bacteria that move off large-scale farms via wind, water, dust, and in the animals themselves and the meat they become — and create difficult-to-treat human infections. Agricultural interests counter that human infections have far more to do with medical misuse of antibiotics than with farming, and that the cost of stopping the drugs would be too great for producers to bear.
TheU.S. Food and Drug Administration, which regulates agricultural use of antibiotics, has been aware for decades of evidence that farm overuse of antibiotics creates resistant human infections, but has done little to help.In 1977, the agency proposed withdrawing its own approvals for penicillin and tetracycline use as growth promoters, and the proposal remained on the books even though the FDA was repeatedly stymied by legislative opposition. Last December, the agency actually gave up, and announced that it was cancelling its then 34-year-old attempts, opting instead for a voluntary approach. But this March, and again in June, a district court judge in New York City ruled the FDA must go through with its original program for re-examining agricultural antibiotic use, including holding hearings to examine the drugs’ off-farm effects.
Because UTIs are such an everyday occurrence, rising resistance has not been a major priority for medicine.
The proposed link between resistant bacteria in chickens and those causing UTIs is not the first time researchers have traced connections between agricultural antibiotic use and human illness. But because the UTI epidemic is so large and costly, the assertion that it might be tied to chicken production has brought renewed attention to the issue.
Investigators have been examining a possible link between growth promoters, chickens, and human infections since at least 2001, when Manges and others published in the New England Journal of Medicine an analysis of clusters of UTIs in California, Michigan, and Minnesota. The striking thing at the time was that the clusters appeared to be outbreaks caused by very similar E. coli strains that were resistant to the common drug Bactrim. In the United States, one out of every nine women has a UTI every year. If a single small group of E. coli was causing some proportion of the infections, that would be alarming — but it might also offer a clue to defusing the overall epidemic. Initially, though, the researchers had no idea where the strains were coming from.
As a follow-up, Manges and other investigators looked for vehicles that might be transporting particular E. coli strains. That was an unusual challenge, because E. coli is one of the most common organisms on the planet, with a huge variety residing in the guts of humans and every warm-blooded animal, and in reptiles and fish as well. The particular subset of strains they examined are called “ExPEC,” for “extra-intestinal pathogenic E. coli” — that is, E. coli that escapes the gut to cause illness elsewhere in the body, including in the urinary tract.
ExPECs were already a medical-research concern, because E. coli that moves from the gut into the bladder may not stay there. Infections that are not treated can climb up to the kidneys and enter the bloodstream. ExPEC E. coli cause up to 40,000 deaths from sepsis — the most serious form of bloodborne bacterial infection — in the United States each year, and since about 2000, antibiotic resistance in ExPEC strains has been climbing.
In 2005, University of Minnesota professor of medicine Dr. James R. Johnsonpublished results of two projects in which he analyzed meat bought in local supermarkets during 1999-2000 and 2001-2003. In both cases, he found resistant ExPEC E. coli strains that matched ones from human E. coli infections. Other researchers soon found similar matches in meat–particularly poultry–from across Europe, in Canada, and in additional studies from Minnesota and Wisconsin.
In that research, investigators began to sort out two things. They became convinced that the resistance pattern could be traced back to animal antibiotic use, because resistance genes in the bacteria causing human infections matched genes found in bacteria on conventionally raised meat. And they began to understand that E. coli’s complexity would make this new resistance problem a difficult one to solve. The strains that cross to humans via poultry meat “don’t establish themselves as big, successful lineages” of bacteria that would be easy to target, Johnson said. “But collectively they can cause a lot of infections, because there are just so many of them and they’re so diverse.”
There has been no way, to this point, to prove that a single specific UTI arose from a portion of meat that in turn came from a single animal given antibiotics. The investigators tracing the connection acknowledge this is a weakness in their case, but point out that modern medical ethics do not permit experimenters to deliberately cause infections in healthy humans as a way to prove a disease risk. What researchers do, in cases like this, is to gather evidence from big groups of people that shows a disease emerging on a population level — and based on the molecular evidence from animals, meat, and humans, they believe they have done so with ExPEC E.coli from chicken and UTIs.
Not everyone agrees, of course. Dr. Charles Hofacre, professor at the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safetyand an officer of the American Association of Avian Pathologists, points out that while the resistance factors in chicken- and human-associated bacteria resemble each other, no study has yet proven that a transfer occurs. Antibiotic resistance is so common, Hofacre said, that “it isn’t surprising that genes carried by human E. coli are going to be similar to resistance genes in chicken E. coli – or pig E. coli, or salamander E. coli.” He adds: “That doesn’t necessarily mean the antibiotic resistance genes in the human came from the salamander, or the chicken or the pig.”
Dr. Randall Singer, of the University of Minnesota’s College of Veterinary Medicine, points out that some recent research suggests that antibiotic resistance genes in E. coli may actually originate from humans, spreading through sewage into ground and surface waters, and from there into the environment and livestock. The resistance found in human and poultry E. coli ”is a typical multi-drug resistant pattern that you find all over the world, including in wild animal populations that have had no exposure to” humans, he said. “To say these genes exist in a person because of an antibiotic that was given to a chicken is too narrow an interpretation.”
The cost in the United States of treating UTIs runs more than $1 billion per year.
On the front lines of medicine, physicians report that they regularly see rising amounts of resistant infections in patients for whom the resistance has no obvious explanation — for example, in patients who have not been treated in a hospital or other health-care facility where antibiotics might have been overused or misused. Because they are front-line physicians, and not microbiologists, these doctors do not analyze their patients’ diets and match their infections to any animal strains. But when they do perform enough genetic analysisof their patients’ infections to be able to tell which drugs will work, they see the same resistance factors in their patients’ E. coli that Johnson, Manges, and others have spotted in their research. And for many of them, the proposed connection between agricultural antibiotic use, resistant animal infections, and resistant human infections makes intuitive sense.And particularly in the case of the new outbreaks of UTIs.
“Medicine certainly does contribute to [antibiotic-resistant bacteria], but there have been studies of other infectious diseases that have implicated animals and antibiotics in propagating certain types of infections,” said Dr. Connie Price, chief of infectious diseases at Denver Health & Hospital in Colorado. “It makes sense to me that resistant urinary tract infections could absolutely be one of those.”
In Washington, El-Bayoumi said resistant UTIs are common among her patients, describing one woman whose infection did not respond to the first drug she tried but did to the second, and another whose infection recurred despite rounds of three different antibiotics before finally responding to a fourth drug. She has treated LeBeouf for nine recurrences so far without ever being able to eradicate her multi-drug resistant infection. “It stops for a while, and then it eases back in,” said LeBeouf, who describes losing work hours and sleep time to the nagging pressure and pain. “We do a urine culture to see what medications will work. Dr. El-Bayoumi’s at the point where she is saying, ‘I don’t know what else we can do.’”
People unlucky enough to contract these infections describe a consistent pattern. They assume they have an ordinary UTI, go to their doctors for treatment, get a prescription, and feel better for a few days — and then are puzzled to find that the same painful symptoms are recurring, and they have to return to the doctor again.
Because UTIs are such an everyday occurrence, the problem of rising resistance — along with the question of where the resistance comes from — has not been a major priority for medicine. Nor has tracing the possible cause back to chicken: by the time women realize they need treatment, they usually have long forgotten when and how they might have been in contact with raw meat, and their doctors are seldom epidemiologists.
“We tend to dismiss bladder infections as trivial,” said Dr. Richard Colgan, an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “But a woman who gets one — and they mostly occur in women — usually endures symptoms for an average of a week until she can get treated. She usually has to miss school or work on average of one week. A woman on average will postpone sexual relations for a week.”
The victims are not always women. And the infections are not always uncomplicated. The cost in the United States of treating UTIs runs more than $1 billion per year, including hospitalizations for the most serious complications and intermediate care for patients whose infections are resistant to the easy-to-administer drugs.
There have been a few times, in the past few decades, where disease-causing E. coli crossing to humans from meat became a national priority. The poster-child case is E. coli O157:H7, which became notorious after the 1993 Jack-in-the-Box hamburger outbreakin which hundreds were sickened and three children died; in response, the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared the O157 strain an adulterant, making it illegal to distribute. But in contrast, it took almost two more decades — until September last year– for other similar strains to be declared adulterants as well.
Researchers who have been tracking the highly resistant E. coli wonder what it will take for these strains to have their Jack-in-the-Box moment. They cause more illness than O157 — but in a diffuse, slow-moving epidemic that even the victims may not know they are part of, like the current outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant UTIs. And defusing this one will be far more politically complex, because itwill require addressing the economic imperatives that drive farmers to use antibiotics — and consumers’ role in supporting large-scale agriculture as well.
“I see people voting with their feet, buying cheap produce, meat that is less expensive, eggs that are less expensive,” said Dr. Jorge Parada, professor of medicine and infectious disease at Loyola University’s Stritch School of Medicine in Chicago. “My personal point of view is, this is unsustainable in the long run. It has a whole series of side effects that are not negligible, and antibiotic resistance is important among them.”
In a study published last year in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers put five San Francisco families on a three-day diet of food that hadn’t been in contact with plastic. When they compared urine samples before and after the diet, the scientists were stunned to see what a difference a few days could make: The participants’ levels of bisphenol A (BPA), which is used to harden polycarbonate plastic, plunged – by two-thirds, on average – while those of the phthalate DEHP, which imparts flexibility to plastics, dropped by more than half.
The findings seemed to confirm what many experts suspected: Plastic food packaging is a major source of these potentially harmful chemicals, which most Americans harbor in their bodies. Other studies have shown phthalates (pronounced THAL-ates) passing into food from processing equipment and food-prep gloves, gaskets and seals on non-plastic containers, inks used on labels – which can permeate packaging – and even the plastic film used in agriculture.
The government has long known that tiny amounts of chemicals used to make plastics can sometimes migrate into food. The Food and Drug Administration regulates these migrants as “indirect food additives” and has approved more than 3,000 such chemicals for use in food-contact applications since 1958. It judges safety based on models that estimate how much of a given substance might end up on someone’s dinner plate. If the concentration is low enough (and when these substances occur in food, it is almost always in trace amounts), further safety testing isn’t required.
Meanwhile, however, scientists are beginning to piece together data about the ubiquity of chemicals in the food supply and the cumulative impact of chemicals at minute doses. What they’re finding has some health advocates worried.
This is “a huge issue, and no [regulator] is paying attention,” says Janet Nudelman, program and policy director at the Breast Cancer Fund, a nonprofit that focuses on the environmental causes of the disease. “It doesn’t make sense to regulate the safety of food and then put the food in an unsafe package.”
A complicated issue
How common are these chemicals? Researchers have found traces of styrene, a likely carcinogen, in instant noodles sold in polystyrene cups. They’ve detected nonylphenol – an estrogen-mimicking chemical produced by the breakdown of antioxidants used in plastics – in apple juice and baby formula. They’ve found traces of other hormone-disrupting chemicals in various foods: fire retardants in butter, Teflon components in microwave popcorn, and dibutyltin – a heat stabilizer for polyvinyl chloride – in beer, margarine, mayonnaise, processed cheese and wine. They’ve found unidentified estrogenic substances leaching from plastic water bottles.
Is It Possible to Build a Safer Plastic Package?
A growing number of companies are using “green chemistry” to create new polymers and additives without known hazards. But Mike Usey, CEO of a small Texas start-up called Plastipure, says there’s a simpler solution: Find the existing plastic resins and additives that don’t interfere with natural hormones. There are plenty out there, he says, but identifying them is complicated because one type of plastic can be formulated in many different ways, making some brands or grades safer than others.
Plastipure was started in 2000 by George Bittner, a University of Texas neurobiologist who developed analytic methods to systematically recognize synthetic chemicals that are not estrogenically active, or “EA-free,” in the company parlance. They don’t, in other words, mimic estrogens naturally produced by the body. “We’ve taken thousands and thousands of tests on materials and chemicals and additives, so we know now what is commercially used that is EA-free and what is not,” says Usey. Their first product, released in 2008, was a water bottle they proclaimed to be entirely EA-free.
In 2011, Plastipure scientists published a study in which they tested some 500 plastic packages and products. Their results showed 92 percent were estrogenically active, even products that claimed to be BPA-free. Although the research was “obviously commercially motivated, I think they raised a very legitimate issue,” says Bill Pease, a toxicologist for GoodGuide, a group that rates the health and environmental safety of consumer products. In 2011, the National Science Foundation awarded Plastipure a $650,000 grant to further develop its EA-free technology.
But Usey says while consumers may like the idea of an EA-free plastic, it’s been a tough sell, even to well-meaning food companies. Despite interest, no one wants to be the first to adopt a new type of package. “Everybody wants … to be second,” he says with a sigh of frustration. “The companies’ first concern is liability – if we put something out that we say is safer, are we admitting what we did before is unsafe?”
Finding out which chemicals might have seeped into your groceries is nearly impossible, given the limited information collected and disclosed by regulators, the scientific challenges of this research and the secrecy of the food and packaging industries, which view their components as proprietary information. Although scientists are learning more about the pathways of these substances – and their potential effect on health – there is an enormous debate among scientists, policymakers and industry experts about what levels are safe.
The issue is complicated by questions about cumulative exposure, as Americans come into contact with multiple chemical-leaching products every day. Those questions are still unresolved, says Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Science, part of the National Institutes of Health. Still, she said, “we do know that if chemicals act by the same pathway that they will act in an additive manner” – meaning that a variety of chemicals ingested separately in very small doses may act on certain organ systems or tissues as if they were a single cumulative dose.
The American Chemistry Council says there is no cause for concern. “All materials intended for contact with food must meet stringent FDA safety requirements before they are allowed on the market,” says spokeswoman Kathryn Murray St. John. “Scientific experts review the full weight of all the evidence when making such safety determinations.”
Hard to measure
When it comes to food packaging and processing, among the most frequently studied agents are phthalates, a family of chemicals used in lubricants and solvents and to make polyvinyl chloride pliable. (PVC is used throughout the food processing and packaging industries for such things as tubing, conveyor belts, food-prep gloves and packaging.)
Because they are not chemically bonded to the plastic, phthalates can escape fairly easily. Some appear to do little harm, but animal studies and human epidemiological studies suggest that one phthalate, called DEHP, can interfere with testosterone during development. Studies have associated low-dose exposure to the chemical with male reproductive disorders, thyroid dysfunction and subtle behavioral changes.
But measuring the amount of phthalates that end up in food is notoriously difficult. Because these chemicals are ubiquitous, they contaminate equipment in even purportedly sterile labs.
In the first study of its kind in the United States, Kurunthachalam Kannan, a chemist at the New York State Department of Health, and Arnold Schecter, an environmental health specialist at the University of Texas Health Science Center, have devised a protocol to analyze 72 different grocery items for phthalates. Schecter won’t reveal the results before they’re published – later this year, he hopes – except to say he found DEHP in many of the samples tested.
Perhaps the most controversial chemical in food packaging is BPA, which is chiefly found in the epoxy lining of food cans and which mimics natural estrogen in the body. Many researchers have correlated low-dose exposures to BPA with later problems such as breast cancer, heart disease and diabetes. But other studies have found no association. Canada declared BPA toxic in October 2010, but industry and regulators in the United States and in other countries maintain that health concerns are overblown.
Last month, the FDA denied a petition to ban the chemical, saying in a statement that while “some studies have raised questions as to whether BPA may be associated with a variety of health effects, there remain serious questions about these studies, particularly as they relate to humans and the public health impact.”
The fact that a plastic bottle or bag or tub can leach chemicals doesn’t necessarily make it a hazard to human health. Indeed, to the FDA, the key issue isn’t whether a chemical can migrate into food, but how much of that substance consumers might ingest.
If simulations and modeling studies predict that a serving contains less than 0.5 parts of a suspect chemical per billion – equivalent to half a grain of salt in an Olympic-size swimming pool – FDA’s guidance does not call for any further safety testing. On the premise that the dose makes the poison, the agency has approved a number of potentially hazardous substances for food-contact uses, including phosphoric acid, vinyl chloride and formaldehyde.
Emerging science
But critics now question that logic. For one thing, it doesn’t take into account the emerging science on chemicals that interfere with natural hormones and might be harmful at much lower doses than has been thought to cause health problems. Animal studies have found that exposing fetuses to doses of BPA below the FDA’s safety threshold can affect breast and prostate cells, brain structure and chemistry, and even later behavior.
According to Jane Muncke, a Swiss researcher who has reviewed decades’ worth of literature on chemicals used in packaging, at least 50 compounds with known or suspected endocrine-disrupting activity have been approved as food-contact materials.
“Some of those chemicals were approved back in the 1960s, and I think we’ve learned a few things about health since then,” says Thomas Neltner, director of a Pew Charitable Trusts project that examines how the FDA regulates food additives. “Unless someone in the FDA goes back and looks at those decisions in light of the scientific developments in the past 30 years, it’s pretty hard to say what is and isn’t safe in the food supply.”
FDA spokesman Doug Karas in an e-mail interview said that before approving new food-contact materials, the agency investigates the potential for hormonal disruption “when estimated exposures suggest a need.” But FDA officials don’t think the data on low-dose exposures prove a need to revise that 0.5 ppb exposure threshold or reassess substances that have already been approved.
Another criticism is that the FDA doesn’t consider cumulative dietary exposure. “The risk assessments have been done only one chemical at a time, and yet that’s not how we eat,” Schecter notes. (Karas counters that “there currently are no good methods to assess these types of effects.”)
“The whole system is stacked in favor of the food and packaging companies and against the protecting of public health,” Nudelman, of the Breast Cancer Fund, says. She and others are concerned that the FDA relies on manufacturers to provide migration data and preliminary safety information, and that the agency protects its findings as confidential. So consumers have no way of knowing what chemicals, and in what amounts, they are putting on the table every day.
It’s not just consumers who lack information. The companies that make the food in the packages can face the same black box. Brand owners often do not know the complete chemical contents of their packaging, which typically comes through a long line of suppliers.
What’s more, they might have trouble getting answers if they ask. Nancy Hirshberg, vice president of natural resources at Stonyfield Farm, describes how in 2010, the organic yogurt producer decided to launch a multipack yogurt for children in a container made of PLA, a corn-based plastic. Because children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of hormone disrupters and other chemicals, the company wanted to ensure that no harmful chemicals would migrate into the food.
Stonyfield was able to figure out all but 3 percent of the ingredients in the new packaging. But when asked to identify that 3 percent, the plastic supplier balked at revealing what it considered a trade secret. To break the impasse, Stonyfield hired a consultant who put together a list of 2,600 chemicals that the dairy didn’t want in its packaging. The supplier confirmed that none were in the yogurt cups, and a third party verified the information.
By Tom Laskawy ShutterstockTake a deep breath, carnivores: 87 percent of supermarket meat — including beef, pork, chicken, and turkey products — tests positive for normal and antibiotic-resistant forms of Enterococcus bacteria. Fifty percent of ground turkey contains resistant E. coli, 10 percent of chicken parts and ground turkey tests positive for resistant salmonella, and 26 percent of chicken parts come contaminated with resistant campylobacter. Resistant or not, the mere presence of these types of microbes means the majority of our meat comes into contact with fecal matter at some point. Not very appetizing, is it?
The government recently admitted something a lot of conscious eaters probably already suspect: A significant majority of supermarket meat is contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. But it did so vewwy, vewwy quietly. It came buried in the FDA’s 2011 Retail Meat Report, which reveals the results from periodic testing of common supermarket meat products for bacterial contamination and bacterial resistance to multiple antibiotics. The FDA leaves these numbers opaque, but thanks to calculations by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) using the government’s data, we know just how terrifying these results are.
The threat of these superbugs goes beyond the academic. Three of the bugs listed above cause tens of thousands of illnesses and hundreds of deaths a year. Resistant salmonella-tainted meat recently caused several outbreaks, one of them quite deadly. And E. coli from supermarket chicken has been linked to millions of antibiotic-resistant urinary tract infections in women.
For dedicated Grist readers, this shouldn’t be a total surprise. We’ve been reporting that researchers have been tracking antibiotic-resistant bacteria on meat for several years. But the fact that most forms of superbugs seem to be on the increase is no less disturbing.
The reasons why aren’t a mystery to most scientists. While overuse of antibiotics in human medicine plays a role, the preponderance of evidence suggests that the rampant overuse of antibiotics in livestock drives resistant microbe strains off the farm and into communities.
Medical researchers are all but begging livestock producers to scale back on the heaps of antibiotics fed to food animals every year — sound advice since 80 percent of all antibiotics consumed in the U.S. go to food animals — but the industry contends that such a reduction would be impossible. That’s true in a way: Most livestock would not be able to survive the cramped, stressful, disease-ridden conditions in which they are raised without a constant low-level dosing of antibiotics. As an additional boon, these antibiotics seem not only to prevent disease but also to increase animal size and weight for reasons that are not well understood (although scientists are suggesting it has something to do with screwing up animals’ microbiomes).
Of course, large-scale agriculture has shown the ability to severely restrict antibiotic use in livestock without courting disaster — in Denmark. Back in 1994, that country, one of the largest exporters of pork in the world [PDF], embarked on the so-called “Danish experiment” that prohibited farmers from feeding healthy pigs low doses of antibiotics. Even though farmers were still allowed to treat sick animals with antibiotics, usage since that time has dropped by about 40 percent. Meanwhile, pork production continued to increase.
Agribusiness was so threatened by the Danes’ positive results (which included a general reduction in the prevalence of resistant bacteria on and off farms), that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) of pork-rich Iowa took to the Senate floor to [erroneously] denounce their methods. The reason for agribusiness aggression? Denmark did have to make changes to the way its farmers raised hogs — something U.S. agribusiness has not been willing to attempt (with perhaps one notable exception).
Meanwhile, the FDA, which gets low marks in this area from government watchdog agencies, remains a willing conspirator in this indiscriminate overuse of antibiotics. It recently ended efforts to regulate their use, preferring to rely on an ineffective, “voluntary” approach. Since companies don’t have to report — and the FDA doesn’t have to track — the exact amounts and types of antibiotics fed to animals, it’s easy enough to deny culpability.
For now, it’s up to consumers to protect themselves from superbugs as best they can. As EWG concludes, they must “assume that all meat is contaminated with disease-causing bacteria.” EWG recommends avoiding factory-farmed (i.e. supermarket) meat and instead choosing meat from small producers or labeled as antibiotic-free. There’s no guarantee that local or organic meat will be free from superbugs, but it tilts the odds in your favor. EWG also offers a downloadable guide to avoiding superbugs in meat. Aside from that, practicing food safety in the home becomes more important than ever. Until the FDA or industry gets its act together, we’re on our own.
Tom Laskawy is a founder and executive director of the Food & Environment Reporting Network and a contributing writer at Grist covering food and agricultural policy. His writing has also appeared in The American Prospect, Slate, The New York Times, and The New Republic. Follow him on Twitter.
