"There is no more important mission at USDA than ensuring the safety of our food, and we are working every day as part of the President's Food Safety Working Group to lower the danger of foodborne illness. The new standards announced today mark an important step in our efforts to protect consumers by further reducing the incidence of Salmonella and opening a new front in the fight against Campylobacter," announced Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack on Monday.
Under these new proposed regulations, 7.5% of the chicken at a processing plant may test positive for salmonella. In 2009, average salmonella levels were at 7.1%, so I guess these giant food conglomerates won't have to stretch too hard to meet the proposed rule. I suppose it's better than the 20% salmonella contamination that's allowed under current regulations. But perhaps current regulations are not the best standard with which to judge the new rules, given that they don't regulate campylobacter at all. Campylobacter causes diarrhea, cramping, fever, and there are no federal standards governing how much of it can be in your food. Under the proposed regulations, companies may not have more than 10% of their carcasses "highly-contaminated" by campylobacter, and no more than 46% may be contaminated at a "low-level." I feel better, don't you?
William James once wrote that "habit" functions as "the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent." (Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1, p. 121). With regard to transportation, I'd like to think that I've taken care of more bad habits than most people. For instance, on most workdays, I commute by bicycle, and it's a 10-mile round trip (my odometer just rolled to 14,000 miles, accumulated over 11 years). Although I don't often go on trail rides for fun, I do ride 5-miles to work, 5 back home again, 5, 5, 5, 5 . . . . I also pride myself on walking one or two mile distances every few days, distances many people would insist on driving.
A couple days ago, I was buying a replacement hard drive at a local computer store. After coming out of the computer store, I decided to pick up a few food items at a Trader Joe's that was located about 100 yards away, across a big parking lot. It occurred to me that I should get in my car and drive the 100 yards in order to shop at Trader Joe's, and I almost did get into my car for that purpose.
Then it occurred to me what an absurd thing it would be, so incredibly unhealthy, to not walk 100 yards. To fail to walk would be to turn down a chance to get the blood flowing--free exercise. After scolding myself, I walked briskly across the lot, which took all of one minute, and then wondered how it ever got to be this way that anyone would consider driving such a short distance. I took a photo of that "long" walk after returning to my car (see below)--I wanted to drive the point home with an image, to remind myself that it should never be an option to drive a car 100 yards. Never. Yet I know that numerous people would have driven 100 yards rather than walked. It's part of American culture to waste fuel and avoid exercise.
I used to live next door to a family that often drove their cars 1/4 mile to the nearby church and school, even though they were perfectly able to walk. I often see another neighbor taking almost 45-minutes to cut his small lawn with a power mower. He's needlessly out there breathing 2-cycle engine fumes three times longer than necessary. What gives? For some people, I think the problem is that they forget how to walk fast. Walking fast turns walking into a bona fide mode of transportation (the Obama Administration has recently recognized this).
I know people who will always wait for elevators rather than walk even one flight of stairs. The St. Louis County, Missouri, Courthouse escalator has been broken for a few months, and I have seen dozens ofpeople dragging their bodies up a single set of stairs as if they were about to die. I know what the problem is: they are not used to walking up stairs. Much of the time, these people weigh 50 - 100 pounds too much. Two-thirds of Americans are not physically active on a regular basis, and one-fourth get no exercise at all. Two-third of Americans are overweight or obese.
It's so easy to slip back into bad habits, especially when in a hurry. We've designed our environment so that it's easy to not walk and it's too easy to eat lots of high-calorie non-nutritious food that we pop into our mouths with or fingers while we watch television. Anyone looking at our situation and our physiques from the outside would immediately know that we are living an unhealthy/dysfunctional lifestyle. It's not just a matter of opinion.
I think that I'm getting more and more tuned to these issues of bad eating and poor exercise because I've been watching a fantastic new show called Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution (on ABC). Check it out, and you'll be amazed at the dozens of hurdles we put up to keep ourselves and our children from being healthy. It's truly mind-twisting. And I've decided that Jamie Oliver is one of my heroes, and I'm not alone in this thinking--he was recently awarded the 2010 TED Prize. You can watch the Food Revolution trailer and all of the individual episodes on the Internet here. It's time to get angry about the way that we are abusing ourselves and our children, just like Jamie says on his show and at his recent TED lecture--it's time to join Jamie's revolution. Give just 20-minutes to watching this video and get angry enough to do something. Talk it up with the people you care about.
A new study published in Nature Neuroscience suggests that high-calorie, high-fat foods may be just as addictive as cocaine and heroin. "When rats consume these foods in great enough quantities, it leads to compulsive eating habits that resemble drug addiction, the study found," Health.com reported.
Jamie Oliver is a chef who wants to talk about people who are killing themselves by eating dangerous food. Obesity is killing us in huge numbers, though the media still would rather scare us about homicides, which are relatively rare. We have become so big that there is a significant market for double-sized coffins.
The system is rife with misinformation. We are a country where food manufacturers make prominent "no fat" labels when the food (including milk) is full of sugar. One of his messages is that we've got to stop trusting food manufacturers to properly label their food products. What we do to our children by feeding them crappy food is "child abuse." Our schools are complicit, along with food manufacturers.
Oliver's talk is an up front and personal look at the perpetrators and victims of the problem, and they are often the same people. But consider, also, that we now live is a system where accountants choose our food, not nutritionists.
The low-light of the video is at the 11-minute mark. How well do our kids recognize fruits and vegetables? Not well at all. We are failing miserably at educating our children about food.
We can do a lot better, and Jamie offers some promising solutions that all focus on educating our families and children. Oliver offers a positive energy and an urgency that we desperately need.
Here's Oliver's wish:
Would you like to eat local fresh food, but you're wondering what is grown locally and when? The NRDC (National Resource Defense League) has the answers you seek.
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