Brown Bag it!

Bring Your Lunch to Work

By MARK BITTMAN

There are few brown-baggers in the building where I work. This is not because the food in the neighborhood is so great (it isn’t), or because the cafeteria is Google-like (it isn’t), but because many people are either “too busy” or too embarrassed to bring their lunch. Somehow one of our oldest and sanest traditions has become a laughingstock: it’s not hip to bring lunch.

      

Let’s try to fix that.

      

As a meal, lunch is undeniably tough; most people say that and I recognize it. But something good happens when you make the default a brown bag.

      

I am not talking literally about brown bags; you can bring your groovy REI lunchbox, or your authentic Mumbai tiffin carrier (actually, where I work, the people who seem to bring their lunch most often are of South Asian origin) or — as I tend to do — your assortment of recycled takeout containers.

      

Whatever you pack it in, what happens when you bring your lunch is that you start to see it as primary, and the restaurants and fast-food joints and company cafeterias as backups, rather than the other way around.

      

It’s no major feat, of course, to develop a ham-and-Swiss-on-rye habit and accompany it with a salad and a piece of fruit, in that way producing a lunch that’s cheaper and no doubt of higher quality than almost anything you’re able to buy in your neighborhood. Still, few people seem to do that these days, at least in my circles.

      

More often (this is an observation, not a study), those who bring their lunches are going one of three routes:

      

Carrots, celery sticks, apples, a tomato, a banana. Basically a few things they can grab in two seconds and eat without guilt.

      

Leftovers. This is obviously the simplest route and, because almost every workplace has a microwave now, an extremely practical and often savory one. To make this work, you may have to hold back at dinner, or cook more than you’re used to, without eating more.

Then there is the creative assortment that may require last-minute assembly at work. Again, the microwave helps here.

      

My strategy is to try to have all of these things working for me. I’m not above bringing leftover pasta, or stews, or other things that are easy to reheat. I do resort to the grab-and-go style of raw food at least once a week. And I often try (I really do) to pack a few components separately and then ready them for microwaving at lunchtime.

      

The key, as in so much good eating, is having a well-stocked pantry. I’m talking here not only about olive oil and vinegar and soy sauce, the kinds of things that every cook has. And I’m talking not only about tuna and sardines and maybe bread and tomatoes, the staples of many brown-baggers.

I’m also talking about building blocks, like tomato sauce, a pot of beans (or grains, equally valuable), a pan of roasted vegetables, perhaps even a roast chicken. These are the kinds of elements that you can put together while you’re doing something else — whether cooking a meal or watching a football game or catching up on e-mail — and that will last all week, adding substance, flavor and real appeal to whatever else you have lying around. Get that kind of thing going, and you’ll be overwhelmed not by the challenges of putting together a decent lunch before you leave the house but by the possibilities.

      

There’s at least one other decidedly easy way to add character to even the most mundane dishes. That involves creating a fresh sauce of the type that takes little or no cooking (I’ve provided five no-cook types here) and keeps for a few days. You can think of a vinaigrette as the prototype here, but even the kinds of things we might once have thought of as exotic — soy-ginger dipping sauce! — are quickly put together using now-common ingredients.

      

Planned leftovers, as opposed to random ones, can make a huge difference. What you can do with a few pieces of cooked chicken or steak, a couple of fish fillets, even a pile of cooked vegetables is nothing short of creating another meal. And there is almost nothing that won’t sleep soundly in the refrigerator, with little or no loss in quality, from any given Sunday until the following Friday.

This is, of course, a strategy built on cooking: you can’t have leftovers or a container of roasted vegetables unless you cook. And in a way, the intent to bring lunch can help turn you into a cook who’s more efficient, less wasteful and ultimately less recipe-dependent. Because the lunch thing really isn’t about cooking, but assembling.

      

If you have beans, grains, greens — cooked and raw (but washed, of course) — cooked and raw vegetables, a sauce or two (including, at least sometimes, tomato sauce, which can turn almost anything into a soup or stew with just the addition of water), plus the staples you normally have in your pantry and then a leftover or two, lunch becomes a snap.

      

And as it becomes ritualized, the process becomes both more pleasurable (you could have a favorite bowl at work to make it even more so, and real silverware and napkins) and more rewarding. Monotony becomes a thing of the past, as does the dread of figuring out where and what to eat: You have taken control. Let the others laugh.

 

THREE KEY RECIPES

 

Basic Tomato Sauce

Put three tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil or butter in a 10- or 12-inch skillet over medium-high heat. When the oil is hot or the butter is melted, add one chopped onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until soft, two to three minutes. (Or alternatively, use three or four smashed cloves garlic and a dried chile or two; cook until the garlic has browned a bit.) Add four cups fresh or canned chopped tomatoes and a sprinkling of salt and pepper. Cook, stirring occasionally over lively heat until the tomatoes break down and the mixture becomes saucy, 10 to 15 minutes. Basil or parsley at the last minute never hurts. It stores in the fridge for up to a week. Makes four servings.

      

Roasted Vegetables

Heat the oven to 425 degrees while you prepare around two pounds of varied vegetables: root vegetables, squash, eggplant, fennel, celery and so on. Peel, stem, seed, chop or cube as needed; it’s good if pieces are all about the same size. Put 1/4 cup oil in the bottom of a roasting pan and toss the vegetables with it and a lot of salt and pepper. Roast the vegetables, shaking the pan occasionally, until they are tender and beginning to brown, anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour depending on the type of vegetable. If they are browning too fast, lower the temperature a bit. Taste and adjust the seasoning. Store in covered containers and reheat before eating. Makes four servings.

      

A Well-Seasoned Pot of Beans

Put one pound washed beans (black, for example) in a large pot with water to cover. Turn the heat to high and bring to a boil. Add two bay leaves and two crushed garlic cloves, along with two tablespoons cumin or chile powder and a few sprigs of thyme (or 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme). Cover loosely and adjust the heat so the beans simmer. When the beans begin to soften, season with salt and pepper. Continue to cook, stirring occasionally, until the beans are very tender, at least one hour; add more water if necessary. Add two cloves minced garlic to the pot along with one minced onion. Cook 5 to 10 minutes longer (until the edge is off the garlic) and season with more salt, pepper and cumin or chile powder. Remove and discard the bay leaves. Store in a sealed plastic bag or container. Makes up to eight servings.

      

FIVE NO-COOK SAUCES

 

Basic Vinaigrette

You have to decide whether you like 50 percent vinegar, 30 percent or more like 25 percent. Experiment. But start with 1/2 cup good olive oil, 1/4 cup lemon juice or sherry (or other) vinegar, a minced shallot and some salt and pepper. If you use a blender, the emulsion will hold for days.

      

Sesame Dipping Sauce

Whisk together two tablespoons dark sesame oil, two tablespoons peanut oil, one tablespoon minced onion or shallot or a little garlic, two tablespoons soy sauce and, if you like, one tablespoon sesame seeds or finely chopped peanuts. Cilantro is a good garnish.

      

Tahini Sauce

Combine 1/2 cup tahini with some of its oil, 1/2 cup water, the juice of one lemon, one peeled garlic clove, salt, pepper and 1/2 teaspoon cumin in a food processor; process until smooth. Or whisk the ingredients in a bowl (mince the garlic first). Taste and adjust the seasoning, adding more lemon juice, oil, water or garlic as needed.

      

Pico de Gallo

Combine 1 1/2 cup chopped fresh tomatoes, 1/2 large chopped white onion or three or four scallions, one teaspoon minced garlic, minced fresh chile (jalapeño, Thai or habanero) to taste, 1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro or parsley leaves and two tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice or one tablespoon red wine vinegar. Season with salt and pepper to taste and let sit to allow the flavors to develop.

      

Raw Onion Chutney

Finely chop two small to medium or one large white onion and combine with one teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon coarsely cracked black peppercorns, 1/4 cup red wine (or distilled white) vinegar and one teaspoon paprika. Let sit for an hour. Stir in cayenne to taste, then taste and adjust seasoning.

Pic Nic - The history of carefree outdoor eating and living!

http://envisioningtheamericandream.com/2012/08/23/picnic-in-the-post-war-park/

Long before we became a fast food, disposable nation, picnicking required something more substantial and permanent than a Styrofoam clamshell tossed in a brown paper bag.

According to a 1948 advertisement by Aladdin, every day was a holiday with your “Aladdin Outing Kit”. Aladdin, the Nashville manufacturers of those classic metal school lunch boxes with the pictures of your favorite TV star emblazoned on them were previously manufacturers of some more sedate adult fare.

Basically a picnic basket, The Aladdin Outing Kit shared in that marvelous post-war exuberance of carefree living and convenience.





Here’s how they explain their playtime snack bar in a 1948 advertisement ”,,,all outdoors is your dining room when you are the proud possessor of a handsome Aladdin outing kit.”
“With it you’re ready in a jiffy to dine outdoors on food kept fresh and appetizing a coaxing invitation to carefree outdoor hours the year-round. Completely equipped from salt shakers, to Aladdin Hy-Lo Vacuum Bottles, smartly and sturdily cased in lightweight gleaming aluminum…from the time you buy it all outdoors is your living room.”
Apparently sales of the Outing Kit paled in comparison to their maiden venture into manufacturing decaled children’s school lunch boxes.

 

Hopalong Cassidy metal lunchbox produced in 1950

Pic Nic - Two words that bring me so much joy!

Who Made That Picnic?

By PAGAN KENNEDY

“It’s part of our DNA,” says Walter Levy, author of “The Picnic: A History,” who points out that “picniclike” events appear in the writings of Ovid, Plutarch and Seneca. The word “picnic,” however, is of more recent vintage. An early mention can be traced to a 1649 satirical French poem, which features the Frères Pique-nicques, known for visiting friends “armed with bottles and dishes.” In 1802, the term made a hop to Britain after a group of Francophiles in London formed a Pic-Nic Society to gorge, guzzle and perform amateur theatricals. Participants drew lots to determine who would supply which dish — from calf’s-foot jelly to blancmange. “Depending on your luck,” Levy says, “you might have to bring something expensive, like pie made from truffles.”

      

In the 1800s, British authors began to chronicle the adventures of picnickers who staged their meals in pastoral locations, almost like theater sets. In “Emma,” Jane Austen’s character Mrs. Elton plans a “sort of Gipsy party. We are to walk about your gardens and gather the strawberries ourselves and sit under trees. . . . Every thing as natural and simple as possible.”

      

Cars, Levy says, may have been the best thing ever to happen to picnics. In the early 20th century, the automobile was built more for amusement than long-distance travel — the early Oldsmobile, for instance, could be set up as a dining room on wheels with a strap-on “motor hamper” behind the passengers. In 1911, Mrs. A. Sherman Hitchcock instructed hostesses on how to put on a motor party with gadgets and foods designed specially for car picnics — doilies, motor-themed napkins, thermos bottles and “an envelope-shaped leather case containing aseptic cups that are destroyed after use.” Picnics, she advised, were not just divertissements; our health depended on them. “There never was, and never will be, such a remedy for the tired, overworked human body.”

      

Perhaps the picnic has endured because it can be adapted to so many tastes. “A picnic can be anything,” Laurie Colwin wrote. “It can resemble the Mad Hatter’s tea party if you want it to. It’s heart and soul is breeziness, invention and enough to eat for people made ravenous by fresh air.”

 

PICNIC ZIP

Rachel Gant — along with Andrew Deming — designed the Yield Picnic Bag, a tote that can be turned into a picnic blanket.

 

How exactly does the bag turn into a blanket? There’s a zipper running through the handle and the seam. When you unzip it, all the fabric lies perfectly flat.

      

How did you come by this idea? We were just observing how people would go to the park on a lunch break. They’d have a bag, and they would have stopped by a market for food, but they didn’t have the blanket, so they would use their coat or a paper bag to sit on. That’s why it made sense to me that the blanket should be incorporated in a bag.

      

Now that you’ve started a design company, do you still have time to go on picnics? We make a point of going on weekend trips. The last time we used the bag was up in Marin County; we found a little spot in the redwoods. We try to document the different places we’ve been with the bag. We’re not filming. We just like to take a photo or two.

I am surprised – man made tomato tastes better?

Building a Better Mass-Market Tomato

By KENNETH CHANG

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Science is trying to build a better supermarket tomato.

At a laboratory here at the University of Florida’s Institute for Plant Innovation, researchers chop tomatoes from nearby greenhouses and plop them into glass tubes to extract flavor compounds — the essence of tomato, so to speak. These flavor compounds are identified and quantified by machine. People taste and rate the hybrid tomatoes grown in the university’s fields.

      

“I’m 98 percent confident we can make a tomato that tastes substantially better,” said Harry J. Klee, a professor of horticultural sciences. He hopes that the fruits of his labor will be available to commercial growers within four or five years and in supermarkets a couple of years after that. He thinks he can make seeds for better tomatoes available to home gardeners even sooner, within a year or two.

      

The insipid-tomato problem is well known both to salad lovers and scientists. For example, a gene mutation that tomato breeders love because it turns the fruit a luscious red also happens to make it blander. Refrigeration, transportation and other factors also take their toll. Over the decades, the average tomato has become not only less tasty but less nutritious.

      

Enter Dr. Klee, who helped found the Institute for Plant Innovation a decade ago and has been in a quest for a more flavorful and nutritious mass-market tomato ever since.

      

It is easy to find a better tasting and more nutritious tomato. Go to a farmer’s market or grow one in the backyard. It is also easy to breed a plant that produces something tastier than a supermarket tomato — cross a sweet heirloom with the supermarket variety. In the greenhouse, Dr. Klee pulls one such hybrid tomato off a vine, and it does taste sweeter. But a hybrid also loses some of the qualities highly valued by commercial growers — it is not as fecund, not as resistant to disease, not as easily grown, not as pretty.

      

As growers are paid by the pound, a better-tasting but less productive tomato holds little economic appeal, and thus was the supermarket tomato doomed to blandness.

      

Dr. Klee’s goal is to tweak the tomato DNA — through traditional breeding, not genetic engineering — to add desired flavors while not compromising the traits needed for it to thrive commercially. “I figure that with approximately five key genes we could very significantly improve flavor,” he said. He said three genes that control the production of key flavor compounds have already been located. The next step is to identify versions of the genes that lead the tomato plant to produce more of them.

The chemistry of tomato flavor has three primary components: sugars, acids and what are known as volatile chemicals — the flavor compounds that waft into the air carrying the fruit’s aroma. There are more than 400 volatiles in a tomato, and Dr. Klee and his collaborators set out to first determine which ones are the most important in making a tasty tomato.

      

This involved grinding up a lot of tomatoes, looking at what was in them, and asking a lot of people to taste them (unpulverized), gathering comments like “a bland firm watermelon,” “soft and sloppy,” and “Sweet! Finally a sample with some sweetness.”

      

From there, Dr. Klee and his collaborators, who include Linda Bartoshuk, director of human research at the university’s Center for Smell and Taste, used statistics to correlate people’s preferences with the presence, or absence, of particular flavor compounds, to devise a chemical recipe for the ideal tomato.

      

The supermarket tomato — even when grown with care and picked ripe — did not excel. “The best it will do is middle-of-the-pack,” Dr. Klee said.

      

Cherry Roma tomatoes were at the top of the charts, followed by heirloom varieties like Matina, Ailsa Craig and Bloody Butcher. Other heirlooms like Marmande and Oaxacan Pink ranked at the bottom, below the supermarket tomatoes, though perhaps these particular types just do not grow well in Florida.

      

The taste analysis produced several surprises. Some compounds, abundant in many tomato varieties and thus thought to be major contributors to flavor, turned out to be irrelevant, while others, in scant quantities, had major influences. With the new knowledge, “you can’t help but get a better tomato,” Dr. Bartoshuk said.

      

The most important attribute was sweetness. The sweeter the tomato, the higher the rating. The biggest surprise, though, was that it was not just sugar that made a tomato sweet. Some of the flavor compounds enhanced the perception of sweetness.

      

That is the key to Dr. Klee’s plans. Tomato breeders have already tried to maximize sugar, but the plants are bred to produce a lot of big tomatoes all at once, and then do not have energy and sunlight through photosynthesis to make enough sugar to go around.

      

The sweetness-enhancing compounds, however, are present in much smaller quantities, so getting a plant to produce more of those is a much more achievable goal, Dr. Klee said. (The compounds also offer promise for sweetening other foods without adding the calories of sugar.)

      

“His work is really groundbreaking,” said James Giovannoni, a professor of plant biology at Cornell who studies the ripening of fruit and was one of the leaders in the sequencing of the tomato genome published last year.

      

He said Dr. Klee has been deciphering the molecular machineries in tomatoes that produce the flavor compounds, and that is not an easy task. “One, there is a lot of them,” Dr. Giovannoni said, “and two, a lot of them are really not understood, how some of these produce these compounds hasn’t been known.”

      

Modern genetic engineering has provided tools to study that, and tomatoes are one of the most common plants that plant geneticists study, much in the same way that animal geneticists focus on mice, and now researchers can knock out particular compounds and see if they played a key role in flavor or not.

      

There has been one genetically engineered tomato in the supermarket. In the 1980s, plant geneticists at the University of California, Davis, just as frustrated by bland tasting tomatoes, also tried to make a better tomato. That led to a biotechnology company, Calgene, in 1994, developing the Flavr Savr tomato, the first genetically engineered food of any kind in the supermarket, its DNA tweaked to inhibit a protein that turns a tomato mushy over time. While it sold well, Calgene foundered in the logistics of industrial agriculture and was bought by Monsanto, which discontinued selling the seeds.

The Florida team is not repeating the Flavr Savr game plan.

      

Although Dr. Klee experiments with genetically engineered tomatoes to test and confirm findings, he said that none of the ones eventually destined for supermarkets will be — partly to avoid potential consumer backlash and partly because his university cannot afford the estimated $1.5 million that would be needed to obtain regulatory approval to sell a genetically engineered tomato.

      

Instead, the tomato would be created through traditional breeding techniques, but using genetic tests to determine which of the plants possess the desired genes.

      

The quest for year-round produce at the supermarket has also led to tomatoes being grown in less-than-ideal places — like Florida, where the soil is too sandy and there are plenty of pests — when the traditional tomato-growing areas farther north are too chilly.

      

Dr. Klee does not expect the improved tomato to taste as good as the best heirlooms. Supermarket tomatoes would still be grown in large quantities, picked green and shipped long distances before being gassed with ethylene to ripen. In addition, the tomatoes are often mishandled en route. Refrigeration, Dr. Klee notes, destroys the flavor compounds in even the best tomato. “I might be able to get 75 percent” of the best tomato in one that can be grown in greater quantities, he said.

Some traditional breeders are skeptical that Dr. Klee can do what he thinks he can as quickly as he predicts. “I don’t think the taste of tomatoes is going to be fixed by molecular biologists,” said David Francis, a professor at The Ohio State University who has bred and released several tomato varieties, “because flavor is a lot more complicated than manipulating one or two genes.”

      

After working with tomatoes for so long, Dr. Klee admits he does not eat many of them, but he does want the public to be able to buy appetizing ones. Part of his quest is to get people to eat less junk food. If he can improve the taste of tomatoes, he said, it could be an important way to coax Americans to eat healthier foods.

      

Tomatoes aren’t the only focus of the Institute for Plant Innovation. Researchers are working on a more fragrant rose, a project that involves the genetic engineering feat of inserting — yes — a tomato gene in a rose plant. They are also trying to grow tastier strawberries and blueberries. One new blueberry variety could be described as positively crispy, almost apple-like in its texture.

Consumers who tasted these blueberries liked their firmness, and the quality is also a boon to growers, because the fruit lasts longer.

      

“It’s a blueprint,” Dr. Klee said of his tomato quest, “for a much bigger program of bringing back flavor.”

      

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 28, 2013
An article on Tuesday about the quest for a tastier supermarket tomato misstated part of the name of one variety of heirloom tomato. It is Ailsa Craig (not Alisa).

This is interesting for those if you who use Spices

Salmonella in Spices Prompts Changes in Farming

By GARDINER HARRIS

IDUKKI, India — Spices grown in the mist-shrouded Western Ghats here have fueled wars, fortunes and even the discovery of continents, and for thousands of years farmers harvested them in the same traditional ways. Until now. 

     

Science has revealed what ancient kings and sultans never knew: instead of improving health, spices sometimes make people very sick, so Indian government officials are quietly pushing some of the most far-reaching changes ever in the way farmers here pick, dry and thresh their rich bounty.

The United States Food and Drug Administration will soon release a comprehensive analysis that pinpoints imported spices, found in just about every kitchen in the Western world, as a surprisingly potent source of salmonella poisoning.

      

In a study of more than 20,000 food shipments, the food agency found that nearly 7 percent of spice lots were contaminated with salmonella, twice the average of all other imported foods. Some 15 percent of coriander and 12 percent of oregano and basil shipments were contaminated, with high contamination levels also found in sesame seeds, curry powder and cumin. Four percent of black pepper shipments were contaminated.

      

Each year, 1.2 million people in the United States become sick from salmonella, one of the most common causes of food-borne illness. More than 23,000 are hospitalized and 450 die. Symptoms include diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps that begin 12 to 36 hours after infection and can last three to five days. Death can result when infection spreads from the intestines to the bloodstream and affects vital organs. Infants and older people are most at risk.

      

Mexico and India had the highest share of contaminated spices. About 14 percent of the samples from Mexico contained salmonella, the study found, a result Mexican officials disputed.

      

India’s exports were the second-most contaminated, at approximately 9 percent, but India ships nearly four times the amount of spices to the United States that Mexico does, so its contamination problems are particularly worrisome, officials said. Nearly one-quarter of the spices, oils and food colorings used in the United States comes from India.

      

The findings, the result of a three-year study that F.D.A. officials have on occasion discussed publicly and recently published in the journal Food Microbiology, form an important part of the spice analysis that will be made public “soon,” agency officials said.

      

“Salmonella is a widespread problem with respect to imported spices,” Michael Taylor, deputy F.D.A. commissioner for food, said in an interview. “We have decided that spices are one of the significant issues we need to be addressing right now.”

      

Westerners are particularly vulnerable to contaminated spices because pepper and other spices are added at the table, so bacterial hitchhikers are consumed live and unharmed. Bacteria do not survive high temperatures, so contaminated spices present fewer problems when added during cooking, as is typical in the cuisine of India and most other Asian countries.

      

Mexico’s chief of food safety inspections insisted that Mexican spices are checked daily and are safe, although a separate study found high levels of salmonella contamination in some Mexican vegetables.

“We have a constant, daily scheme of verification” of food products, said Álvaro Pérez Vega, sanitary operations commissioner at Mexico’s Federal Commission for the Protection Against Sanitary Risk. “We don’t have reports of spices or condiments being out of norm,” he added.

In India, the world’s largest producer, consumer and exporter of spices, government officials are taking Washington’s concerns seriously.

      

“The world wants safe spices, and we are committed to making that happen,” said Dr. A. Jayathilak, chairman of the Spices Board of India, a government agency that regulates and promotes spices.

F.D.A. tests found that contaminated spices tend to have many more salmonella types than is typically found on contaminated meat. The agency, which visually inspects less than 1 percent of all imported foods and performs lab tests on a tiny fraction, rejects imports with any signs of salmonella contamination because as few as 10 cells have been shown to cause serious illness.

      

Illnesses caused by spices are hard to trace. When asked what might have made them sick, people rarely think to mention adding pepper to a salad. Spices sit on kitchen shelves indefinitely, so linking illnesses that can occur years apart is often impossible.

      

But sophisticated DNA sequencing of salmonella types is finally allowing food officials to pinpoint spices as a cause of repeated outbreaks, including one in 2010 involving black and red pepper that sickened more than 250 people in 44 states. After a 2009 outbreak linked to white pepper, an inspection found that salmonella had colonized much of the Union City, Calif., spice processing facility at the heart of the outbreak.

      

The United States is one of the world’s largest spice importers, bringing in 326 metric tons in 2012 valued at $1.1 billion, according to the Department of Agriculture. Of those imports, which account for more than 80 percent of the total United States spice supply, 19 percent were from India and 5 percent from Mexico.

      

The F.D.A. now has offices in New Delhi and Mumbai, and its commissioner, Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, intends to visit soon.

      

New agency rules governing imported foods have given the agency the power to restrict imports based solely on suspicion that foods may be unsafe, a powerful cudgel to demand changes.

On a tour through a tropical landscape teeming with pepper and cardamom farms, rubber plantations, tea estates and wild elephants, Indian spice officials showed some voluntary changes they are pushing.

      

The first stop was Noble Joseph’s 10-acre pepper farm, about a four-hour drive from the southwestern port city of Kochi, in the state of Kerala, up several thousand feet of twisting mountain roads.

      

Mr. Joseph’s hilly farm is dominated by slim silver oaks and erythrina trees planted every eight feet; each tree is encircled by four or five pepper vines.

During harvest season, starting in February, 15 workers cram into a small farmhouse for nearly two months and use long, single-rail bamboo ladders to pluck the pepper seeds from the vines as high as 40 feet.

      

Not so long ago, pepper farmers almost universally dried the seeds on bamboo mats or dirt floors and then gathered them for manual threshing. Dirt, dung and salmonella were simply part of the harvest, so much so that in 1987, the F.D.A. blocked shipments of black pepper from India. The ban was lifted two years later, after the Indian government began a testing program.

      

Now, the Josephs boil their harvest in water to clean the kernels, speed drying and encourage a uniform color. They are then placed on tarps spread over a concrete slab with nets above to catch bird droppings. Ovens would be even more sanitary, but ovens and electricity are expensive “and sunlight is free,” Mr. Joseph said.

      

The spices board underwrites a third of the cost of concrete slabs, tarps and mechanical threshers, and since most farms are smaller than an acre, it has organized growers’ cooperatives to pool facilities. Board officials recently attended F.D.A. training seminars in Maryland.

      

Salmonella can survive indefinitely on dried spices, and killing the bacterium on the craggy surface of dried peppercorns without ruining their taste is especially challenging.

      

Government officials in India emphasized in interviews that spices slated for export are often treated to kill any bacteria. Such treatments include steam-heating, irradiation or ethylene oxide gas. But F.D.A. inspectors have found high levels of salmonella contamination in shipments said to have received such treatments, documents show. Much of the contaminated pepper in the 2010 outbreak had been treated with steam and ethylene oxide and had been certified as tested and safe, officials said.

      

At another spice farm, in the village of Chemmanar, Bipin Sebastian is in the midst of a four-year transition to organic farming in hope of earning a premium price for his pepper, cloves, cardamom, turmeric and coffee. Mr. Sebastian says he has used government subsidies to buy tarps, netting and a machine thresher.

      

“We used to put our pepper directly on the ground,” Mr. Sebastian said. “Now, we put down tarps and netting over it to protect it from the birds. And I’ve been getting a higher price. It’s been great.”

Hari Kumar contributed reporting from Kerala, India, and Karla Zabludovsky from Mexico City.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/world/asia/farmers-change-over-spices-link-to-food-ills.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

yuck - Diet Soda's Effect On Teeth Terrifyingly Similar To Effects Of Meth, Crack Cocaine

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/28/diet-soda-teeth-similar-to-meth-photos_n_3348158.html?ir=Foodv

Diet soda can have the same effect on your tooth enamel as methamphetamine or crack cocaine use -- and it's not pretty.

In a three-person case study published in the March/April 2013 issue of the journal General Dentistry, Dr. Mohamed Bassiouny studied the teeth of a diet soda drinker and two drug addicts and found similar dental erosion among all three.

"You look at it side-to-side with 'meth mouth' or 'coke mouth,' it is startling to see the intensity and extent of damage more or less the same," Bassiouny, a professor of restorative dentistry at Temple University's Kornberg School of Dentistry, told HealthDay.

The three participants included a woman in her thirties who drank two liters of diet soda daily for three to five years, a 29-year-old methamphetamine addict and a 51-year-old habitual crack cocaine addict, according to the case study. All three came from similar socioeconomic backgrounds and lived in urban areas with fluoridated public water.

According to an Academy of General Dentistry press release, the three people experienced severe erosion of their tooth enamel, a condition caused by acid. When the enamel is worn away, teeth become more susceptible to cavities and other problems. Diet soda, methamphetamine and crack cocaine are all highly acidic substances, the release notes.

The American Beverage Association disputed the study's claims, telling HealthDay in a statement that "the body of available science does not support that beverages are a unique factor in causing tooth decay or erosion," and to imply that diet soda consumption caused the woman's tooth erosion "is irresponsible."

However, in an interview with Business Insider, Bassiouny defended his comparison, adding that over a long dental career he had observed hundreds of similar soda-caused erosion cases.
"I was trying to make a parallel between drug abusers — and the usual neglect for themselves — and put this with the same traits of someone who drinks diet soda," Bassiouny said.
 Diet Soda's Effect On Teeth Terrifyingly Similar To Effects Of Meth, Crack Cocaine (PHOTO)

 

The damaged teeth of a meth user appear very similar to the damaged teeth of a diet soda drinker in this photo released by the Academy of General Dentistry.

 

Smithfield-Shuanghui Merger Faces Opposition From Food Safety Advocates

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/29/smithfield-shuanghui-merger_n_3355326.html

One of China’s largest food conglomerates on Wednesday announced a $4.7 billion purchase of Smithfield Foods, the biggest pork producer in the United States, prompting food-safety advocates to warn of potential dangers to American consumers' health.

The proposed deal -- the largest Chinese takeover of an American firm in history -- would put Smithfield in the hands of Shuanghui International, a company based in the central Chinese province of Henan.

Two years ago, Shuanghui was embroiled in a food-safety scandal at home, eventually admitting it had blended a banned, carcinogenic additive into its pig feed. No deaths resulted from the tainted feed, and the company publicly apologized and closed down the plant that made the product.
But Elisabeth Holmes, a staff attorney at the nonprofit Center for Food Safety, said her group was encouraging the public to oppose the deal between Shuanghui and Smithfield over health concerns.
“This company, through lack of oversight, caused one of the largest food scandals in China,” she said. “The practices of this company in terms of what it allows and what its priorities are, it’s certainly going to affect the U.S. operation. What’s the standard going to be?”

Executives at both Shuanghui and Smithfield asserted that they have no plans to alter operations at Smithfield’s existing American plants. They said Smithfield would continue operating as an independent business, free of changes to its management structure, labor arrangements or safety standards.

“We like it the way it is,” said Shuanghui’s managing director, Zhijun Yang, during a conference call with analysts Wednesday morning. “We will not try to change the company, the leaders, the products. We want it to be the same, but better.”

Smithfield chief executive C. Larry Pope echoed those remarks.
“There will be no impact on how we do business operationally in America as a result of this transaction,” he said.

In years past, high-profile takeovers of American companies by Chinese firms have tended to snag on claims that national security interests could be compromised. Such concerns scuttled a bid by a state-owned Chinese oil company CNOOC Ltd. to take over Unocal in 2005.

Lenovo successfully purchased the laptop-making arm of IBM that same year, but only after a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., an inter-agency body that has the authority to nix buyouts by foreign companies.

The Smithfield-Shuanghui deal also is expected to face a CFIUS review, the companies said, though it seems little more than a formality: Pork may be beloved, but it exists in ample supply and its production does not amount to a key component of war-making or surveillance, nor is it a likely focus of terrorism.

But some food-safety advocates suggested that placing much of the American pork supply in the hands of a company that has proven prone to dangerous mishaps at best and malevolent short-cutting at worst could indeed jeopardize American lives.

“It’s clear with a number of crises that we’ve had on the food-safety front -- from human food to dog food to milk -- that Chinese food producers seem inherently unable to follow regulations,” Holmes said.

Smithfield executives emphasized that the deal has nothing to do with bringing Chinese products to the American table. Rather, it’s about tapping American producers to satisfy growing demands for meat in China, where the ranks of the middle class have been growing faster than anywhere else on Earth.

“This is not a strategy to import Chinese pork into the United States,” Pope said. “This is exporting America to the world.”

Rick Quinn, a principal at FDAImports.com, a regulatory consultant that helps Chinese food producers navigate U.S. food-safety rules, said the two companies should have little difficulty satisfying American regulators.

“You can expect the usual suspects to come out and attack the merger as a blow to U.S. food safety,” he said. “They’re ideological blowhards and they have constituents. But Shuanghui is not stupid. They’re not going to buy a $7 billion target and screw with stuff from the food-safety standards view.”