Food Law Prof Blog

How a mouse got in the salad

Marlerblog has posted a link to a great powerpoint presentation about the investigation of a mouse-in-the-salad restaurant incident:

CSI: Critter Salad

Warning:  includes some closeups of the dead mouse, but you don't have to look closely if you don't want to.

Saturated Fat, Cholesterol, and Heart Disease --not connected

This is a video of a presentation to British Medical Association last November.  The presenter is a physician, Dr. Malcolm Kendrick.  He presents data about saturated fat, blood cholesterol, and heart disease and makes a very credible and compelling argument that eating saturated fat does not cause heart disease and that high blood cholesterol does not predict heart disease.There are 5 parts to Dr. Kendrick's presentation. If the embedded video doesn't work, here's the YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPPYaVcXo1I 

Is It Love or Food Poisoning? -- music video with accordion

I knew there had to be some way to get an accordion into this blog.  This is Slim's Cyder Co. performing an acoustic version of Slim's song, Is it Love or Food Poisoning, at the 12 Bar Club in London. The sound quality is better in this Mp3 file from the Cyder Co website, but you can't see the accordion.

UK study: consumers misinformed about food risks

From Food Productiondaily.com (Europe)

A survey of consumer perceptions of food risks in the United Kingdom indicates that many people are misinformed, prompting the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to seek out constructive ways of engaging with the public over concerns.

“The survey, which involved 2,019 adults aged over the age of 16, set out to assess the level of risk that consumers associate with food-related issues and who consumers trust most to provide them with accurate information.”

“Professor Colin Blakemore, chair of the FSA's new committee, expressed concern at the results, which included 90 per cent of people being unnecessarily concerned about eating chicken from a factory contaminated with bird 'flu, and almost a quarter wrongly believing there is little or no risk from drinking raw [un-pasteurized] milk.”

The Survey Found:

Bird Flu
”Contrary to the belief of the 90 per cent [surveyed], the FSA says that there is no evidence that humans can catch bird 'flu from food - and, in any case, proper cooking would kill the disease before it reached the plate.”

Raw milk
”As for raw milk, the FSA said it cannot be guaranteed to be germ-free, no matter how high the hygiene standards.”

GM
”Sixty-five per cent of people said they were concerned about the safety of consuming GM food.”

”The scientific evidence tells us that the GM foods currently available are as safe as their non-GM counterparts, and pose no additional risk to the consumer," said the FSA. It did, however, point out that there is general agreement that GM foods should be labeled to allow for consumer choice.”

Link to FSA General Committee on Science: http://www.food.gov.uk/science/ouradvisors/gacs/

Thank you to William Mitchell College of Law student Brian Adamovich, who prepared this post.

YouTube video about sea lice and salmon

The Farmed Salmon Cases decision a couple weeks ago (blogged here), which I was asked to write about for FindLaw (here) has me thinking more about salmon. I wrote briefly about the sea lice problem in my guest commentary for FindLaw:

Another reason consumers might be interested in making an informed choice between farmed and wild salmon is that salmon farming can endanger native salmon species. Salmon is an anadramous fish, which means that it lives its adult life in salt water, then returns to freshwater streams to spawn and die. In the spring, the eggs hatch, and the little fish (called "fry," but not worth frying) start to grow and make their way out to the ocean. The adults never see their offspring.

This is a fine system for salmon. Blood-sucking sea lice often attach themselves to adult salmon, but the tiny parasites are not a big deal on a big fish. Moreover, sea lice can't live in fresh water, so they die off when the salmon go upstream to spawn. By the time the fry make it out to the ocean, they are big enough to withstand occasional sea lice, and the really small fish never encounter large numbers of sea lice.

However, when salmon farms are located near salmon migration routes, the large numbers of adult fish swimming close together mean that sea lice infestations are inevitable. The problem that has made headlines recently is that small fish swimming out to sea encounter large numbers of sea lice on the way out. The fry, which can't withstand large numbers of lice, never make it to adulthood. In some areas, this means that natural populations are declining in the face of salmon farming. Interestingly, the California Supreme Court's decision may indirectly help rectify this situation somewhat if labeling causes more consumers to choose wild salmon over farmed salmon, thus decreasing the viability of salmon farming and the negative effect on migration.

The video below shows sea lice up close.  Towards the very end, the researchers sing a rousing rendition of "Salmon Swims Tonight" (based loosely on In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight).

OpEd: [Organic] "Cod is Dead"

OpEd article in the Sunday Herald in Scotland March 9, 2008:

Cod is dead...now let's get rid of fish-farm blight

by award-winning food writer Joanna Blythman

"I'D BE lying if I said that I was sorry to see Johnson Seafarms in Shetland going down the tube. More like "I told you so". My first reaction, when I heard of the launch of its "No Catch" farmed cod three years ago, was sadness. Here we go again, another fine wild fish was to be debased, just like that sad travesty, the farmed salmon. This was followed by astonishment that any organic certifying body - in this case, the Organic Food Federation - was daft or greedy enough to lend its credentials to an operation which had all the hallmarks of being another flash-in-the-pan goldrush, like ostrich farming and biofuels, brought to you by speculators and venture capitalists who promise everything then don't deliver, not unlike Daniel Day-Lewis's scary oil man in There Will Be Blood".

. . .

"The fact that No Catch cod has gone belly up should crystallise the debate about farmed versus wild fish. It should have established the principle that farmed fish at £20 a kilo is not the white night riding in on a charger to save depleted fish stocks. Fish farming is riven with structural problems. Fish like salmon and cod are notoriously poor converters of food, and almost wholly dependent on wild fish stocks. Their wastes, which are concentrated under packed cages thick with sluggish, bored specimens, debase water quality and spread disease throughout an alarmingly wide marine ecosystem".

The article ends with:

"AND yet the dominant thinking within the old Scotland Office, and now I fear, in the Scottish government, is that fish farming is an industry that deserves knee-jerk support. What a tragedy for Scotland that we should have been hoodwinked by such a bankrupt proposition and allowed ourselves to sell down the river the heritage we should have protected: inspirational wild fish and a clean marine environment. Our 30-year love affair with fish farming has proven to be the biggest ecological disaster to hit the west coast of Scotland in living memory.

Perhaps the worst thing about all the over-hyped claims made for fish farming is that it allows us to take our eye off the ball of wild fish stocks. It gives us an excuse to write off the seas and oceans as a source of future sustenance for the world's rising population. But if we can't manage our wild stocks for the common good then we might as well give up now and start looking for another planet to colonise. The penny must drop that, far from taking the pressure off wild stocks, aquaculture depletes them.

Greenpeace, which wisely has always seen fish farming as an environmental threat, not an opportunity, argues that depletion of wild fish stocks can be halted, even reversed, by creating marine reserves, a bit like wildlife parks, where no fishing is allowed and stocks can recover. There is persuasive evidence from New Zealand that stocks can bounce back in just a few years.

But marine reserves are a grown-up, low-tech solution that necessarily entails some short-term pain for fishermen and consumers, and offers nobody any immediate prospect of making money. In discussions of what to do about the looming crash in key fish stocks, we have always been in thrall to the guy with the quick fix, high-tech panacea, which just happens, incidentally, to guarantee a windfall for investors and miscellaneous stakeholders. More fool us."

Full article and online discussion via: http://www.sundayherald.com/oped/opinion/display.var.2104813.0.0.php

You can also read an article - "Why organic salmon is causing a nasty smell" - by Joanna Blythman in the October 2006 issue of The Observer Food Monthly: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/oct/22/food.foodanddrink

Thank you to Don Staniford for providing this information.  The cod and salmon pictures are from the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)website: http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/lineart/

Study shows association between Glycemic Index and Disease Risk

Study published in the Amercian Journal of Clinical Nutrition: Glycemic index, glycemic load, and chronic disease risk—a meta-analysis of observational studies

From an article on Medical News Today.com:

The first meta-analysis to evaluate the association between the GI (glycemic index) and GL (glycemic load) of the diet, and the risk of developing common lifestyle-related diseases was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition March 1 [2008; 87 (3)].

The study provides compelling evidence that diets with a high GI or a high GL will increase your risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease. It also shows there is good evidence for links between high blood glucose and gall stones and some types of cancer.

Conducted by Alan Barclay, Joanna McMillan Price, Prof Jennie Brand-Miller and colleagues, the meta-analysis systematically reviewed the results of 37 prospective cohort studies of nearly two million (1,950,198) healthy men and women worldwide.

Abstract: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition March 1 [2008; 87 (3)].

Study finds natural trans fats not as bad as industrial trans fats

From Food Productiondaily.com (Europe):

Trans fatty acids are not created equal, according to the results of the European-wide TRANSFACT study, with natural sources not sharing the detrimental health effects as their industrially-produced counterparts.

"The TRANSFACT study is the first to directly compare the effects of food products containing trans-fatty acids (TFAs) from industrially produced and those containing TFAs from natural sources on CVD risk markers," wrote lead author Jean-Michel Chardigny in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Though trace amounts of trans fats are found naturally, in dairy and meats, the vast majority are formed during the partial hydrogenation of vegetable oil (PHVO) that converts the oil into semi-solids for a variety of food applications.

Read the article