Posts Tagged ‘Food safety’

McDonald’s Dumps McMuffin Egg Factory Over Health Concerns – ABC News

Friday, November 18th, 2011

It seems that the 5th largest egg supplier in the US was slapped with a warning from the FDA for 13 violations of the new egg regulations.

McDonald’s fired them, since there were violations, but how long were they in violation prior to the warning issued by the FDA? How many egg sandwiches were sold before the change in suppliers occurred?

Another reason we should all know who supplies us our daily diet!

Read the story here:

McDonald’s Dumps McMuffin Egg Factory Over Health Concerns – ABC News.

Top ten lies about Senate Bill 510

Friday, December 3rd, 2010

Natural News has provided a list of issues about S.510. Yopu can read it at the link below:

Top ten lies about Senate Bill 510.

for those of you that don’t want to jump from site to site, I am republishing it here in its entirety:

Here are the ten biggest lies that have been promoted about S.510 by the U.S. Congress, the food industry giants and the mainstream media:
Lie #1 – Most deaths from food poisoning are caused by fresh produce
Here’s a whopper the mainstream media won’t dare report: Out of the 1,809 people who die in America every year from food-borne pathogens (CDC estimate), only a fraction die from the manufacturer’s contamination of fresh produce. By far the majority of food poisoning is caused by the consumption of spoiled processed foods, dead foods and animal-human transmission of pathogens.

For example, one of the largest food-borne killers according to the CDC is Toxoplasma gondii, a disease that people acquire from cat feces coming into contact with their food, which can happen right in their own homes (http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/Vol5n…). Salmonella poisoning accounts for 553 deaths a year. As a reference for relative risk, over 42,000 people die each year from road accidents in the USA, meaning driving a car has a roughly 7600% higher chance of killing you than eating fresh produce. (http://www.driveandstayalive.com/in…)

In terms of food-borne illness, many of the deaths come from things like spoiled tomato sauce, spoiled canned foods and spoiled pasteurized milk. S 510, of course, does absolutely nothing to address these food contamination deaths, since those foods are considered “sterilized” at the time of sale.
Lie #2 – Under S.510, the FDA would only recall products it knows to be contaminated
Not true. S.510 merely requires the FDA to have “reason to believe” a food is contaminated. So right there, that means all raw milk will be targeted by the FDA because even without conducting any scientific tests at all, the FDA can say it has “reason to believe” the milk is contaminated merely because it is raw.

In other words, the FDA no longer needs science to outlaw a food product. It merely needs an opinion.

Is this “reason to believe” section really true? Yep, and here’s how it was amended:

SEC. 208. ADMINISTRATIVE DETENTION OF FOOD.
23 (a) IN GENERAL. – Section 304(h)(1)(A) (21 U.S.C.24 334(h)(1)(A)) is amended by
(1) striking ”credible evidence or information indicating” and inserting ”reason to believe”;
(http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi…)

In other words, in negotiating this bill, the U.S. Senate removed the requirement that the FDA needed “credible evidence” in order to recall a product and, instead, replaced that with the FDA only needing “reason to believe.”

It is utterly amazing that the U.S. Congress would give the FDA to conduct large-scale product recalls and even imprison people based entirely on what the agency “has reason to believe.”

Last time I checked, the FDA held some pretty bizarre (if not downright moronic) beliefs, including this jaw-dropping whopper: The FDA literally believes that there is no food, no herb, no vitamin or supplement that has any ability to prevent disease of any kind. They don’t even believe limes can prevent scurvy, and you’d have to nutritionally illiterate to believe that.

The FDA believes foods are inert and that all the amazing phytonutrients in those foods (carotenoids, antioxidants, therapeutic fats like omega-3 and so on) are utterly useless for human biology.

This belief, held by the FDA that has now been put in charge of the food supply, is the belief system of an insane government agency that has completely lost touch with reality while abandoning nutritional science.

Lie #3 – They didn’t tell you that nearly 70% of grocery store chickens are contaminated with salmonella every day

Yep, it’s true: Amid all the fear-mongering over salmonella, everybody forgot to notice that the vast majority of fresh chickens sold at grocery stores every single day are widely contaminated with salmonella (http://www.naturalnews.com/028661_c…). Yet S 510 does absolutely nothing to address this. It’s not even mentioned in the bill.

In fact, it is these contaminated chickens that end up cross-contaminating the fresh produce in many kitchens across America. So the so-called “food poisoning” that’s often blamed on spinach or onions often originates with the contaminated chicken meat people bring home and slice on their kitchen cutting boards.

Lie #4 – S.510 will exclude and protect small farmers

The Tester Amendment, which was finally included in S.510, excludes farmers who sell less than $500,000 worth of food each year from the more onerous paperwork and compliance burdens described in the bill. But this dollar amount is not indexed to inflation, meaning that as the U.S. dollar continues to lose value due to the Federal Reserve counterfeiting machine running at full speed (more “quantitative easing,” anyone?), food prices will continue to skyrocket — and this will shift even small family farms into the $500,000 sales range within just a few years.

In fact, a single-family farm with just four people could easily sell $500,000 worth of fresh produce a year right now, even before inflation. Remember, $500,000 is not their profit, but rather the gross sales amount. The profits on that might be only $50,000 or even less.

Furthermore, this $500,000 threshold means that small, successful farms that are doing well and would like to expand will refuse to hire more people or expand their operations. To avoid the tyranny of S 510, small farms will try to stay small, and that means avoiding the kind of business expansion that would create new jobs.

Lie #5 – The FDA needs more power to enforce food safety

The FDA already has the power to effectively recall foods by publicly announcing a product has been found to be contaminated. The FDA already has the power to confiscate “misbranded” products, too, and it could easily use this power to halt the sale of contaminated food items.

But the FDA simply refuses to enforce the laws already on the books and, instead, has sought to expand its power by hyping up the e.coli food scares. The ploy apparently worked: Now in a reaction to the food scare-mongering, the FDA is being handed not just new powers, but more funding, too! And you can bet it will find creative new ways to put this power to work suppressing the health freedoms and food freedoms of the American people.

Lie #6 – Fresh produce is contaminated because of a lack of paperwork

There is no evidence that requiring farms to fill out more paperwork will make their food safer. The real cause of produce contamination is the existence of factory animal farms whose effluent output (huge rivers of cow feces, basically), end up in the water supply, soils and equipment that comes into contact with fresh produce.

The food contamination problem is an UPSTREAM problem where you’ve got to reform the factory animal operations that now dominate the American meat industry. S.510, however, does absolutely nothing to address this. Factory animal farms aren’t even addressed in the bill!

Lie #7 – The American people are dying in droves from unsafe fresh food

The truth is that Americans are dying from processed food laced with toxic chemical additives, not from fresh, raw produce. Partially-hydrogenated oils, white sugar, aspartame, MSG and artificial food colors almost certainly kill far more people than bacterial contaminations.

The American public is also dying from pharmaceuticals — anywhere from 100,000 to 240,000 people a year are killed by FDA-approved drugs (http://www.naturalnews.com/001894.html), most of which have been approved under the guise of blatantly fraudulent science and drug company trickery. The FDA doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, it has been a willful co-conspirator in the scientific fraud carried out by Big Pharma in the name of “medicine.” (http://www.naturalnews.com/027851_h…)

To think that the FDA — the very same agency responsible for the Big Pharma death machine — is now going to “save us” by controlling food safety is highly irrational.

Lie #8 – The FDA just wants to make food “safer”

Actually, the FDA wants to make the food more DEAD. Both the FDA and the USDA are vocal opponents of live food. They think that the only safe food is sterilized food, which is why they’ve supported the fumigation, pasteurization and irradiation efforts that have been pushed over the last few years.

California almond growers, for example, must now either chemically fumigate or pasteurize their almonds before selling them (http://www.naturalnews.com/021776.html). This has destroyed the incomes of U.S. almond farmers and forced U.S. food companies to buy raw almonds from Spain and other countries.

Lie #9 – Food smuggling is a huge problem in America

One of the main sections of S.510 addresses “food smuggling.” Yep — people smuggling food across the country. If you’ve never heard of this problem that’s because it’s not actually a problem.

Not yet anyway.

But there’s a reason why they put this into the bill: Because they’re probably planning on criminalizing fresh produce and then arresting people for transporting broccoli with the “intent to distribute.”

Yep, farmers bringing fresh produce to sell at the weekend farmer’s market could soon be arrested and imprisoned as if they were drug smugglers. Hence the need for the “food smuggling” provisions of S.510.

Soon, we will all have to meet in secret locations just to trade carrots for cash.

Lie #10 – S.510 will make America’s food supply the safest in the world

Actually, even with S.510 in place, America’s food supply is among the most chemically contaminated in the world, second only to China. You can find mercury in the seafood, BPA in the canned soup, yeast extract (MSG) in the “natural” potato chips, and artificial petrochemical coloring agents in children’s foods.

Eating the “Standard American Diet” is probably the single most harmful thing a person can do for their health. It’s the fastest way to get cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Every nation in the world that begins to consume the American diet starts to show record rates of degenerative disease within one generation. This is the “safe food” that the U.S. Senate is now pushing on everyone.

Remember, with S.510, SAFE = DEAD. And the FDA says it wants to keep everybody safe.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/030587_Senate_Bill_510_Food_Safety.html#ixzz173VuSL2D

ADHD linked to Pesticide usage – my comments…

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

I just need to vent.
I gave you the facts, and the link to the story on this topic yesterday.
[ http://weber-farms.com/blog/2010/05/17/can-pesticides…order-abc-news/ ]
I didn’t put in my own 2 cents worth. Well… Here it is:

It amazes me that the Federal government (in this case, foolish, power/money hungry senators, representatives and the USDA), in the name of “Food safety” are doing everything possible to shut down small farmers [see senate bill S 519]. That includes farmers like me, that aren’t using pesticides, chemical fertilizers or GMO seeds and plants. We’re the ones that are working to make foods “safer” and healthier by growing food naturally, and providing people with a choice.

All the big-AG corporation farms are throwing pesticides, chemical fertilizers and herbicides at their genetically altered plants because it cuts down on the labor involved in growing the foods they long to put on your tables. And the government is behind them 120%!

Why does all of this enrage me??? Because, once again, articles like this prove over and over that the government and Big-AG corporate farms are NOT looking after your interest, but their own. Their only concern is profit! And they will poison us and take away our choices to get it.

So, ADHD is linked to pesticides – pesticides are linked to big-AG, conventional farms – and the USDA and some of our duly elected senators and congressmen are in bed with the corporate, conventional big-AG farms that want to stop US from growing food – due to “food safety” issues??
Or is it because we are a T-H-R-E-A-T???

‘Nuff said…

The Associated Press: E. coli forces lettuce recall; 19 ill in 3 states

Friday, May 7th, 2010

Once again, there is E. coli poisoning occurring. Is it from small farmers?

NO!!! Once again, it is from BIG AG companies (Freshway Foods of Ohio) using processing plants.

But Senate bill S-510 is going to shut down your link to safe foods, raised by your local farmer and give all that business to the BigAG firms that will continue doing “business as usual” – all under the guise of “Food Safety”

That means “poison for profits”.

Read the full article below

The Associated Press: E. coli forces lettuce recall; 19 ill in 3 states.

Neurologist finds tape worm – in woman’s brain!

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

The next time you want to eat out, remember this story…

A woman went in for surgery for what was believed to be a small tumor on her brain. But it turned out to be a tape worm – specifically named “Taenia solium”.

How did a tape worm get in her brain, You might ask?

It seems that the minute eggs from a tape worm in the body can pass out of the body and end up in “tainted” food – food that has been handled by someone that came into contact with the eggs of tape worms, most likely in feces.

And this is not an extremely rare case any longer: “We’ve got a lot more of cases of this in the United States now,” said Raymond Kuhn, professor of biology and an expert on parasites at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. “Upwards of 20 percent of neurology offices in California have seen it.”

you can read the entire story here

So the next time you want to go out to eat, think about it….

–Pat

For safer food… – 12/18/2007

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

There is an organization — “The Center for Food Safety” – that has done some great work on the behalf of all those that want natural, wholesome foods to eat.
In the past year alone, they have:
<ul>
<li>Won a major federal court victory that stopped the planting of a new genetically engineered crop – Roundup Ready alfalfa – for the first time in history; </li>
<li>Halted risky field tests growing experimental drug crops (pharmacrops) in open fields through other federal court victories;</li>
<li>Defended the organic standards from numerous threats by agribusiness to weaken them;</li>
<li>Generated over 145,000 comments to FDA from people opposing milk and meat from cloned animals in our food supply;</li>
<li>Won the passage of the Mikulski-Specter amendment in the Senate version of the Farm Bill demanding further testing of food from cloned animals before FDA allows such products on the market;</li>
<li>Fought for and won a ban on animal cloning in organic production;</li>
<li>Successfully pressured Congress to remove language in the Farm Bill that would have eliminated the rights of states and local governments to regulate genetically engineered crops;</li>
<li><font size=”3″>Pressured FDA to maintain strong and accurate labels on irradiated foods.</li>
</ul>
You can keep abreast of all food safety issues, or support this great organization by going to their website:

http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/index.cfm