I Can Get Fired Up on This Subject

In my last blog I mentioned an inability to find a topic I can really get fired up about in a blog since G. W. is no longer around to kick. Since then I have had two hot topics fall in my lap. One of them I am still researching. I was Googling articles on the FDA when this gem popped up from a New York Times headline:

The Senate voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to impose federal
regulation on cigarettes and other forms of tobacco, passing a landmark bill to empower the Food and Drug Administration to control products that eventually kill half their regular users.

I will suppress all urges to say, "What took you so long?" because I know the strong tobacco lobby pays for a lot of congressional seats and junkets and campaigns, etc. And even this historic bill has the hand of big tobacco in the framing: The FDA can regulate but not ban.

And let us put this in realistic perspective. The FDA does not have budget or manpower to regulate those substances they are already put in control of. This is the agency that cannot stop fake protein of a poisonous nature showing up in your baby and pet food made in China.

Hopefully they will pay some attention to the additives that go into your cigarette and other tobacco products; additives that do not have to be listed on the packaging because they are trade secrets. Most are flavorings like chocolate and cherry syrup to give a normally sage tasting leaf flavor. But the industry commonly uses ingredients like ammonia to rush the nicotine in tobacco to your blood stream (also used in freebasing crack cocaine I am told) to increase craving. Or a drying agent that stops the breathing of new workers on the assembly line or visitors as the wet tobacco passes through the ovens. Maybe they can pay attention to the fact that to increase usage of their product big tobacco ups the nicotine content by 14%. Nicotine, by the way, is a metabolic poison not unlike that fake protein used by China in baby formula only deadlier.

What other product that kills 50% of its users, not to mention their families from second hand smoke, would be allowed to stay on the market with or without regulation. Sorry, Congress, I think this is too little and too late.

They Haven't a Clue

After all the scare over tomatoes they now say they don't think that was the source of the salmonella. Or is it that they could not find out where the tomatoes came from?

Their guess at the moment is a local favorite salad called Pico de Gallo or rooster beak salad. It contains tomatoes, onions, jalapeno peppers, and cilantro. The ingredients are finally chopped and mixed together. How can they tell which of these ingredients is the carrier of the disease?

Certainly if it was the onions there would be a lot more illness sweeping the country. They think it is not the tomatoes only because people are not eating them and yet the spread of the salmonella continues. So cilantro? Or jalapenos? And if they could find which could then then find the source of the contagion? Somehow I doubt it.

The Federal Food and Drug Administration hasn't a clue. And one of the reasons is the lack of labeling of country of origin. And NAFTA. It is time to call a halt on free and open borders. It is time to label all products and enforce the labeling and inspections of products at our ports. It is time for all American citizens to be safe. And buy American products. Oh, but if we only could. But all our manufacturing companies have moved overseas. And food products from Mexico and Canada are not clearly labeled or monitored. We should be outraged. We should be marching in the streets.

On the upcoming 4th of July we should renew our pride in America and American products. Buy nothing this week from any other country. Then maybe we can get their attention and they will start doing their duty.

Consumer Confidence?

I think maybe consumer confidence is an oxymoron. I certainly have very little.

My confidence in the foods I buy at the market has reached an all time low. Admitted it has been eroding for some time. In 1981 I discovered rather painfully and almost fatally that the ingredient sulfur does not have to be mentioned on a product label because it is not added to the final product deliberately.

Sulfur, which an alarming number of people are deathly allergic to is a "hitchhiker" on any corn byproduct. It is used on corn to prevent it germinating while it is waiting to become corn syrup or corn starch, etc. And it does not go away in the processing. The incident of the emergency ward alerted me to this little known fact. There has been a very strong lobby to try to get it listed for decades now. Until then I and millions others like me just simply avoid products with corn in them. And dehydrated fruits, and artificial creamers, some sugar substitutes, etc.

I had become used to this process when I discovered a sensitivity to petrochemicals. Also obliquely named on product ingredient labels. Sun block gives me sun blisters of mega proportions. Hand creams cause rashes not heal them, etc. Then came pet food. After losing my aging cat at about the same time my other two got put on an organic diet. The dogs are on the only dog food that has not been named in a recall. I avoid lettuce and spinach in plastic bags and have devoted part of my sun porch to a green house for tomatoes.

When beginning my spring garden this year I discovered the problem with seeds. Burpee and other seed companies are treating their seeds so not only do they not germinate for longer than the one season for which they are purchased but the plants grown from these seeds are sterile. Does this sound like we are painting ourselves into a corner? I live in an area where Anasazi beans discovered in pre-Columbian pottery can be planted and they grow. Now we have genetically altered plants and animals that cannot reproduce.

I am growing my own lettuce, spinach, chard and herbs as well as the tomatoes and sweet bell peppers. I am looking for a good general hunting rifle and have plans with my neighbor for a deer hunt this year. I am also splitting a pig or lamb with her grown by one of our animal raising neighbors. I have my eye on a little chest freezer and thankfully never got rid of the pressure cooker. Back to canning I think. What I don't raise myself I can get from the local farmers' markets. And I buy organic any product I cannot get locally like milk and cheese.

Oh, yeah, they could be mislabeling organic products. But I did read that there is a higher likelihood that organic products will be produced locally. Translate that to mean not Mexico or China. I urge all food producers in Canada and USA to label their products clearly as to point of origin. I find this raises my level of confidence in the product. And I avoid any highly processed food because that increases the chances of some ingredient coming from China or Mexico which does not have any product controls or safety, nor any EPA oversite. That is why the companies moved there to manufacture. It is not all because of low cost labor. Well, I'm not buying.

Now what are you going to do? I am shopping local and shunning global.