With no warning one weekday morning, investigators entered an organic grocery with a search warrant and ordered the hemp-clad workers to put down their buckets of mashed coconut cream and to step away from the nuts.

Then, guns drawn, four officers fanned out across Rawesome Foods in Venice. Skirting past the arugula and peering under crates of zucchini, they found the raid’s target inside a walk-in refrigerator: unmarked jugs of raw milk.

“I still can’t believe they took our yogurt,” said Rawesome volunteer Sea J. Jones, a few days after the raid. “There’s a medical marijuana shop a couple miles away, and they’re raiding us because we’re selling raw dairy products?”
Cartons of raw goat and cow milk and blocks of unpasteurized goat cheese were among the groceries seized in the June 30 raid by federal, state and local authorities — the latest salvo in the heated food fight over what people can put in their mouths.

On one side are government regulators, who say they are enforcing rules designed to protect consumers from unsafe foods and to provide a level playing field for producers. On the other side are ” healthy food” consumers — a faction of foodies who challenge government science and seek food in its most pure form.

They want almonds cracked fresh from the shell, not those run through a federally mandated pasteurization process that uses either heat or a chemical to kill off salmonella and other possible contaminants. They hunger for meat slaughtered on the farm. And they’re willing to pay a premium — $6, $8 or more — for a gallon of milk straight from the cow.

So despite research outlining the dangers of consuming raw milk and other unprocessed foods, they’re finding ways to circumnavigate federal, state and local laws that seek to control what they can serve at the dinner table. Such defiance, they said, comes from growing distrust of a food sector that has become more industrialized and consolidated — and whose products have been at the root of some of the country’s deadliest food contamination cases.

“This is about control and profit, not our health,” said Aajonus Vonderplanitz, co-founder of Rawesome Foods. “How can we not have the freedom to choose what we eat?”

Scientists and regulators point to epidemiological evidence linking disease outbreaks to raw milk: The milk can transmit bacteria such as E. coli O157:H7, salmonella, campylobacter and listeria, which can result in diarrhea, kidney failure or death.

“This is not about restricting the public’s rights,” said Nicole Neeser, program manager for dairy, meat and poultry inspection at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. “This is about making sure people are safe.”

Demand for all manner of raw foods — including honey, nuts and meat — has been growing, spurred by heightened interest in the way food is produced. But raw milk in particular has drawn a lot of regulatory scrutiny, largely because the politically powerful dairy industry has pressed the government to act.

It is legal for licensed dairies to sell raw milk at retail outlets in California and 10 other states, according to research by the National Conference of State Legislatures. Twenty states allow people to buy unpasteurized milk directly from farms, or take part in a “cow sharing” program (in which a person buys part ownership of an animal and gets some of its milk).

But in the case of Rawesome, regulators allege that the group broke the law by failing to have the proper permits to sell food to the public. While the raid was happening at Rawesome, another went down at one of its suppliers, Healthy Family Farms in Ventura County. California agriculture officials said farm owner Sharon Palmer’s processing plant had not met standards to obtain a license. Palmer could not be reached for comment.

Rawesome’s fans, though, shrugged off such concerns.

“I always had problems with my stomach and digestion with normal milk,” said Darin Nellis, 41, who runs a nonprofit production company in Culver City and has been a member of Rawesome for three months. “I like how raw goat milk tastes, and I feel better.”

Such sentiments exasperate officials at the Food and Drug Administration, which bans interstate sales of raw milk and advises that both milk and honey should be pasteurized.

The debate has boiled at the state level for years. Alta Dena Dairy founder Harold J.J. Stueve fought for decades to help keep raw milk sales legal in California. This year, Wisconsin legislators approved a bill aimed largely at allowing the state’s struggling small farmers to sell more raw milk products. But Gov. Jim Doyle vetoed that bill under pressure from large producers. In neighboring Minnesota, whose official state drink is milk, authorities recently raided a private club similar to Rawesome in south Minneapolis.

Such battles have had a chilling effect on some retailers. Whole Foods Market used to carry raw milk and raw milk products in California and three other states. But in March, the chain pulled all but a few cheeses off its shelves. Part of the reason, it said in a statement, was “the realities of the very high additional costs for liability insurance … because of the potential risks from selling unpasteurized milk and milk products.”

Rawesome was born of consumer frustration. In 1998, James Stewart — a vegetarian who drank raw milk — couldn’t find the stuff in Southern California grocery stores. So he started making road trips to dairies in northern California and to Whole Foods in San Jose, which at the time carried raw milk. Word spread. Family and friends wanted it too.

So Stewart and Vonderplanitz created a private food club where, for a $25 annual fee, members “lease” the land and livestock directly from a farmer. Then, members pay an additional service fee attached to each grocery item, which they say covers the cost of transporting each food item from the farm to Venice.

The pair reasoned that they didn’t need to obtain a license from state or local agencies because they weren’t technically retailers. In 2004, Rawesome opened on Rose Avenue in Venice. “We’re just a place where people come to pick up the products they already own,” Vonderplanitz said.

The L.A. County Public Health Department didn’t see it that way. Vonderplanitz said that in 2005 the agency told Rawesome staff they needed a food-business license. Vonderplanitz said that he objected in a letter, and that the county never replied or followed up. (County officials declined to comment.)
Five years passed. Rawesome now boasts 1,600 members, who battle for street parking every Wednesday and Saturday when the club is open.

Squeezed between a coffee shop and a vintage guitar store, Rawesome looks from the outside like a forgotten storage unit. A tiny club sign hangs on the 10-foot-tall corrugated fence that hides the windowless storefront.

But inside, the shop is bright and airy, a bohemian farmers market surrounded by burnt-orange walls and a white tarp roof to keep out the rain. Boxes of coconuts and ginger from Hawaii sit nestled next to crates of California squash. Labels identify where each bite of produce was grown: onions from the Viva Tierra farm in Harlingen, Texas, and King’s Crown Organic farm in King Hill, Idaho.

The members — a mix of tattooed young people and middle-aged executives in Italian shoes — chat as they head to the walk-in cooler in the back. It is jam-packed with meat and dairy. Ziploc bags are filled with chicken, beef and pork. Many don’t have an expiration date. The other side is stocked with Amish buttermilk ($7.95 a quart), Amish cream cheese ($12.75 a pound) and whole milk ($8.59 per half-gallon).

Agencies that participated in the raid on Rawesome included the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, the California Department of Food and Agriculture, the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Investigators confiscated the club’s computer and 17 coolers packed with, among other things, 24 bottles of organic honey, 10 gallons of raw whole milk and two bottles of raw cane syrup. Stewart said the health department slapped a closure notice on the club’s front door that said it was “operating a food facility without a valid public health permit.”

The health department, district attorney’s office and the FDA declined to comment, citing the pending investigation. The state Department of Food and Agriculture, which was the agency of record on the search warrant, said it continues to work with the district attorney’s office.

Co-op members are undeterred. Four days after the raid, Rawesome reopened its doors. The shelves were restocked. They have remained so ever since.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, the line stretched halfway down the block. A stern young man in baggy cargo pants and sunglasses guarded the entrance, checking drivers’ licenses. Lela Buttery, a Rawesome volunteer and professional biologist, handed out legal waivers to sign.

One woman, digging into her green grocery bag for a pen, asked, “You guys got shut down last week?”

“Yes,” Buttery said.

“That’s nuts,” the woman replied. “You’re not going to stop, right?”

Buttery grinned. “Can I see your membership card?”

Tumbling milk prices have enraged European dairy farmers over the past two years, but one Czech farmer has found a creative way to increase profits by bringing his milk directly to customers and, in the process, has created a new business model.

Residents of Plzeň, west Bohemia, have seen something new at farmers’ markets in the past few weeks as dairy farmer Jaromír Boháček has inaugurated an innovative way of selling milk: a milk truck. Boháček, owner of Líšťany Farms, which produces 6,000 liters of milk daily from 236 cows, says low milk prices over the past two years left him in dire straits but have sparked a successful solution.

“We’ve sold milk below cost for the past two years, and of course this has caused us difficulty. We had to come up with a suitable solution for us as well as the customer,” he said. “So we came up with the idea of selling milk from a mobile milk vender.”

Boháček said the mobility of his milk vending machine allows him to sell milk in every district of Plzeň, as well as the suburbs, for 15 Kč (75 U.S. cents) per liter, about the same price as milk in a supermarket. And of course, customers have the chance to buy fresh milk, which has proved a popular novelty. Boháček is considering spreading his route to other villages and cities, depending on demand.

Boháček stopped short of recommending a mobile milk van for every dairy farmer on the market but said dairy farmers need to begin taking their fate into their own hands.

“It’s difficult to recommend anything to other farmers, because every farm has its own specific needs and conditions, so each farmer has to sit down with a calculator and make sure something like this will be profitable. But generally it is a good practice for farmers to sell directly from the farm, and I think it should escalate,” he said.

The mobile milk van is unique in the Czech Republic, but Boháček’s innovation builds on a burgeoning industry of farmer-operated milk dispensers. Milk dispensers are maintained by dairy farmers who are able to deliver raw milk directly to potential customers, cutting out the supermarket middlemen and getting more of a handle on their profits.

Milk dispensers began appearing in the Czech Republic in October 2009, as milk prices hit historic lows of about 6 Kč per pint, leading to 4.5 billion Kč in losses for dairy farmers in the first half of 2009. Industry representatives were unanimous in voicing the need for regulation, but there was no agreement on exactly what form that regulation should take.

“The idea is that, if you put more and more money into the dairy industry, you don’t know if you’ll get it back. But the situation is so bad that we’ve got to do something,” said Barbora Daňková, spokeswoman for Czech milk-processing company Madeta.

The European Union’s solution was to offer a total of 318 million euros in support funds for European dairy farmers in dire need, beginning in December 2009.

But for many Czech dairy farmers, a more fundamental shift in the way they did business was necessary. Milk dispensers offered an immediate solution, both allowing farmers to charge almost twice as much for milk as supermarkets – about 20 Kč per liter – and requiring the customer to provide the bottle, thus advantaging farmers rather than retailers.

Milk dispensers were lauded by the Czech and Moravian Dairy Association, which nevertheless cautioned that more is needed to be done to help support domestic dairy farmers. Milk dispensers are only a viable solution for small dairy farms, according to Dairy Association President Jiří Kopáček.

Nonetheless, “the milk dispensers have improved markedly, and at the moment, there are about 200 in the Czech Republic,” he said.

Many of these dispensers are located at farmers’ markets, such as the one at Prague’s Kubánské náměstí, where excited customers lined up for fresh milk July 10. Toko, the company that supplies most of the milk dispensers, has also begun manufacturing machines offering meat, vegetables, fruit juices and other fresh farm products.

An increase in the popularity of milk dispensers, however, coupled with the growing number of urban farmers’ markets, has given rise to opposition. Tetra Pak, producer of milk cartons for all major Czech milk companies, issued a warning April 26 about the dangers of drinking raw milk from dispensers, saying, “It is important to realize that drinking raw milk, which means untreated milk, is always a risk.”

Jan Veleba, president of the Czech Agrarian Chamber, has called the warnings against raw milk “lies,” saying they unnecessarily disadvantage farmers struggling to make ends meet.

Boháček seems unconcerned about the controversy, which doesn’t seem to have harmed his brisk milk vending business.

“All we are doing is putting 100 percent milk on the market,” he said. “What you usually see in the markets under the dairy products sign should really be under a chemical products sign.”

Source: The Prague Post

The balanced mix of insects and fungi in organic fields does a superior job of keeping pests in check, leading to larger plants, according to researchers at Washington State University in Pullman. Potato plants exposed to conditions typical of pesticide-treated fields fared more poorly in the research team’s experiments.

The findings may help potato growers cut back on spraying and make more effective use of natural predators to control pests, said entomologist David Crowder, who led the study published Thursday in the journal Nature.

“The goal is to learn as much as we can about how these natural enemies are doing their jobs and what impact they’re having, so we can incorporate their effects into management practices,” he said.

Washington is second only to Idaho in potato production in the nation, and the state’s crop is valued at nearly $700 million a year. But potatoes can be very vulnerable to pests. Washington potato farmers applied more than 19 million pounds of weed- and bug-killing chemicals in 2005, according to the latest data available from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Less than 1 percent of the state’s potatoes are organically grown, and even many organic farmers use some type of chemicals or natural toxins to control pests. But farmers are under pressure from such companies as McDonald’s — the nation’s top potato customer — to green up their practices.

“People who buy a lot of potatoes are asking the growers to reduce insecticide use as much as possible, to document pesticide use, and include biological control as a consideration,” said WSU entomologist William Snyder, a study co-author.

Snyder recently received a $2 million USDA grant to help potato growers shift their practices.

“We have some pretty progressive farmers who already spray much less, compared to the industry average,” Snyder said. “It’s kind of ‘organic lite.’”

The Washington State Potato Commission also funds some of Snyder’s research and hopes to translate the science into practical advice its members can use, said Andrew Jensen, the group’s research director.

For the Nature study, the WSU scientists wanted to find out whether a balanced mix of insects could be beneficial. They examined bug counts from conventional and organic fields around the world, growing a range of crops.

Since many pesticides wipe out the majority of insects, it wasn’t surprising to discover that the conventional fields were often dominated by only a few hardy species. In contrast, the organic fields had a much more even mix.

But would that mix provide any real-world advantage? To test that, Crowder set up 42 potato plots enclosed in fine mesh. He seeded each of his mini fields with Colorado potato beetles, one of the industry’s worst scourges. Then he added varying numbers of insects, fungi and microscopic worms called nematodes that attack the beetles’ eggs and larvae.

The potato plots with the most balanced mix of insects and fungi, typical of organic fields, performed the best: Pest numbers were 20 percent lower and plants were 30 percent bigger than in the plots with the lopsided insect mix typical of pesticide-treated fields.

The study didn’t follow the potatoes to harvest, but plant size is closely correlated with potato size and yield, Crowder said.

Though it’s not clear how the results would scale up, the study does suggest that farmers who reduce pesticide use might be able to rely on a mix of natural predators to take up the slack in controlling pests, he added.

The work also suggests a way to short-circuit the “pesticide treadmill” that forces farmers to use more and different chemicals as pests evolve resistance, said an accompanying article in Nature from researchers at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

The results have broader ecological implications, Crowder said. Scientists have long focused on the number of species in an ecosystem as a measure of its health. The WSU experiments show that it’s also important to have a balanced mix of species.

Research on organic farming has received short shrift in the past, said Jennifer Miller, sustainable-agriculture coordinator at the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides in Boise.

“Often the natural pest control that’s happening on organic farms is overlooked,” she said. “It’s really great to see research looking at the value of this effect and cheaper ways of pest management that come with reduced pesticide use.”

Source: Seattle Times

By Pete Kennedy, Esq.

For the past month, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA) has been working to erode the freedom of the state’s residents to obtain the food of their choice from the source of their choice, particularly raw milk.  Through various enforcement actions taken since the last week in May, MDA has created a chilling effect on the exercise of basic rights by consumers to purchase the foods they believe best for the health of their families.  Likewise, MDA’s actions have shown little regard for rights of farmers guaranteed by the Minnesota Constitution to sell the products of the farm direct to consumers.

MDA’s first enforcement action occurred on May 26 when officials from MDA and the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) along with the Sibley County Sheriff and eight armed deputies set foot on the farm of Mike and Diana Hartmann to execute a criminal search warrant.  The officials were at the farm for more than six hours and embargoed (i.e., ordered the Hartmanns not to sell existing inventory) thousands of dollars in meat and dairy products as well as ordering the Hartmanns to discontinue the sales of any product whose production, processing or sale was not in compliance with applicable law, including an order that the Hartmanns cease delivering raw milk and that they only make occasional on-farm sales to consumers.

The reason MDA and MDH obtained the search warrant was that the agencies suspected raw milk produced at the Hartmanns’ farm was responsible for three cases of illness from E. coli O157:H7.  When the officials were at the farm, they collected samples of various dairy products as well as fecal samples from the farm animals for testing.  According to an MDH press release issued the same day the warrant was executed, the department was investigating a cluster of four E. coli O157:H7 illnesses that all have the same DNA fingerprint, with three of the four cases reporting a link to raw milk from the Hartmann farm.  A subsequent MDH press release issued on June 3 stated, the “strong epidemiological link [to Hartmann Dairy] is now reinforced by the laboratory confirmation that the specific strain of E. coli O157:H7 found in the ill patients has also been found in multiple animals and at multiple sites on the Hartmann Farm.”  In a press release issued shortly afterwards on behalf of the Hartmanns, it was pointed out that MDH had not found the matching strain of E. coli O157:H7 in any of the food samples tested.

On June 16, MDA officials raided the Hartmann farm a second time.  By this date, MDA had concluded that eight people had become ill consuming the milk produced at the Hartmann farm.  This time the officials not only embargoed additional meat and dairy products but also issued the Hartmanns an order requiring them to stop the sale of all food products except eggs and poultry processed at a state-inspected plant.   The officials also ordered the Hartmanns to keep records on the “quantity and use date” of any of the embargoed food they removed for their personal consumption.   Overall, the agency issued the Hartmanns twenty-six (26) orders for the farmers to comply with, including one for the farm to register with the FDA as a ‘food facility’ per the federal Bioterrorism Act.  When the agents left the farm, they took financial and processing records as well as the Hartmanns’ computer hard drives.

The day before the second Hartmann raid, officials from MDA and the Minneapolis Health Department paid a visit to the Traditional Food Warehouse (TFW), a store featuring foods made by local small-scale producers that is open only to members of a private buying club.   After being in the store for about one and a half hours, the officials who were accompanied by a city policeman went to the store manager and informed him that either he could close the store on his own or the officials would do it for him.  Before the manager closed the door, one of the buying club members reminded him that he had the right not to answer any questions the officials asked him. One official asked to the see the member’s I.D.; when she refused, the official asked the policeman to request her I.D.  When the policeman asked for her I.D., she declined and left the store.  At that point, the MDA official in charge of the group asked another agency official present to take pictures of the member and her car as well as taking down her license plate number.

After the patrons had all left the store, the officials conducted an inspection and wound up embargoing every single food product in the store.  MDA left an inspection report with one of TFW’s owners which contained an order prohibiting the store owner from reopening until a license had been obtained from the Minneapolis Department of Health.  The question for MDA is:  why did the agency have to resort to this type of enforcement action and treat TFW like it was a criminal enterprise?  TFW had made no secret about its existence; since it opened in September 2008, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune has run two major stories on the warehouse.  It is not possible for MDA to have been unaware of it.  There had never been a complaint filed against the warehouse nor had there ever been any allegation that food purchased at the warehouse had made someone sick.  MDA could have made its position on the licensing issue known to the TFW owners without having to embargo every food product in the warehouse.

As uncalled for as was the MDA enforcement action against the Traditional Foods Warehouse, it pales in comparison to the action the department took against a family whose private residence in the Twin Cities area MDA discovered was being used as a distribution point for products from the Hartmann farm.  When MDA officials raided the Hartmanns’ on May 26, they obtained a list of drop sites for the distribution of the farm’s products that led them to obtain a criminal search warrant against the family.

The warrant stated,

. . . the Court finds probable cause exists for the issuance of a search warrant upon the following grounds:

1. The possession of, particularly the sale or distribution of raw, unpasteurized milk or milk products and the packaging or sale of other food products at a home, the property above-described constitutes a crime;
2. The property above-described constitutes evidence which tends to show a crime has been committed, or tends to show that a particular person has committed a crime.

The Court further finds that probable cause exists to believe that the above-described property and things are at the above-described premises.

On June 10 two MDA officials, two city government officials and three plain clothes policemen descended on the family’s residence.  Here is the wife’s account of the seven entering her home to execute the warrant:

A friend of our family’s daughter was married Wednesday night, June 9th.  We got to bed late and decided the boys could sleep in the next morning; we have three boys at home right now, ages 20, 17, and 14.  My husband and I, at about 7:15 a.m., received a call from our 4th son who lives out of town.  At 7:30 a.m., we went down to our sunroom or sanctuary, as we call it, to pray for the events of the day.  I proceeded to go back upstairs about 10 minutes to 8:00 to take a shower.

My husband, I was told later, met the seven unexpected visitors outside.  This woke up our youngest son.  He came into my bathroom to tell me that people were here from the State.  It must have been just a few minutes after 8 a.m. when I heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairway and down the hall.  With hair dripping wet, I threw on some clothes and was met at my bedroom door by my husband and two or three large men (these were plain clothes officers from the city police department.)  They allowed me to towel dry my hair, watching all the while.  The other officers went into my children’s bedrooms, waking them, telling them to get downstairs into the kitchen.

One of my sons asked if he could put on a shirt and one of the police officers responded, “Just get down to the kitchen.”  I walked downstairs and saw four people peering into my refrigerator (three women and one man: all of whom I had never seen before).  My husband explained who they were – the visitors took it from there and quickly introduced themselves.  Two from the Ag department; John gave me his card the girl didn’t have one.  Two from the city–names were rattled off so fast and only Lynn had a card.  I believe one police officer told me his name and that he was the person in charge; but I never received the other officers’ names.  They were in our home for over two hours.

The only thing the family did for the Hartmanns was to let someone from the farm park at their home so friends could conveniently stop by to pick up farm products.  The family neither handled money for the Hartmanns nor distributed any of their products.  Nothing produced by the Hartmanns was kept in the family’s refrigerators or freezers other than products for their own use.  The only other thing the family did for the food pick-up at their house was to buy food products at bulk discounts that they redistributed to their friends.  All products picked up at the residence were pre-ordered.

Before executing the search warrant, MDA had sent an official to interview four neighbors of the family who pick up food at the drop-site.  One neighbor who was interviewed called the wife and said she feared for her.

When the officials were conducting the search, they asked the family to give them product from the Hartmann farm that the department would test for E. coli O157: H7.  The family felt it had no choice and gave them a container of raw milk and a pound of hamburger.  The officials offered to pay for the food but the family refused to accept any money.

While the search was taking place, the wife repeatedly asked the officials if she were doing something wrong.  Their response was that it was wrong to let the Hartmanns use their driveway to distribute their products.  This was the “crime” that convinced a judge to issue a warrant so government officials could violate the sanctity and privacy of a home.

The official who has been the driving force behind these recent enforcement actions is John Mitterholzer, whose title is Food Standards Compliance Officer in the Dairy and Food Inspection Division of MDA.  Mitterholzer was the official who was in charge of the “inspection” at the Traditional Foods Warehouse and the search of the private residence.  He is a long-time nemesis of the Hartmanns.  Mitterholzer led an enforcement action against the Hartmanns that turned into a case that went all the way up to the Minnesota Supreme Court in 2005.

The Minnesota State Constitution has a provision which states, “any person may sell or peddle the products of the farm or garden occupied and cultivated by him without obtaining a license therefor.”  Until the Hartmann case, the MDA had interpreted this provision to cover only the sale of produce.  The Supreme Court disagreed and held that the Hartmanns could sell meat from animals raised on their farm.  Moreover, the Court ruled that “the language of the provision extends its protection to all products; the only limitation is that the farm or garden must be occupied and cultivated by the seller.”  In attempting to crack down on the off-farm distribution of raw milk, MDA is relying on a statute in the state dairy code which provides that raw milk and cream can only be “occasionally secured or purchased for personal use by any consumer at the place or farm where the milk is produced.”  The statute, however, is written from the standpoint of the consumer, not the farmer.  The provision in the state constitution has no limitation on how much can be sold nor on where the sales can take place.

It is crucial that the constitutional provision be upheld.  The farms of most raw milk producers are fifty to a hundred miles away from the Twin Cities.  Their sales would suffer significantly if raw milk could not be delivered in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.  MDA should respect the right of farmers and consumers to enter into agreements on the distribution and delivery of raw milk and other farm products.  The agency has used the E. coli outbreak blamed on the Hartmann farm as a pretext to carry out heavy-handed enforcement tactics that have created a climate of fear among raw milk producers and consumers.  MDA has been treating people who are upstanding citizens in their community like common criminals.  Even as this article was being written, another farm was raided.  MDA’s inquisition needs to end.

Source: farmtoconsumer.org

On June 9, 2010 the Environmental Law Foundation (“ELF”) filed Notices of Violation of California Proposition 65 Toxics Right to Know law, alleging the toxic chemical lead was found in a variety of children’s and baby foods. The specific food categories included apple juice, grape juice, packaged pears andpeaches (including baby food), and fruit cocktail. A complete list of the companies and products named appears with the notice and is located on the ELF website.

The notices claim that the children’s foods contain enough lead in a single serving that they require a warning under California’s Safe Drinking Water and Toxic
Enforcement Act of 1986 (aka “Proposition 65” or “Prop 65”). Toxicologist Barbara G. Callahan, PhD, DABT, of the University of Massachusetts Amherst,
who has spent two decades performing public health and environmental risk assessments, called the lead concentrations in the ELF test results “alarming.”
Under Prop 65, the Governor publishes a list of chemicals “known to the State to cause cancer or reproductive harm.” Lead is listed as both and was among the first chemicals listed in 1987. If any consumer product contains a listed chemical at a level that presents a “significant risk” the manufacturer and retailer must give a “clear and reasonable warning” about the exposure.

ELF pinpointed categories of food and beverages for testing by examining publicly available government-sponsored testing and published studies—focusing on food product categories that children like and eat often and which the data showed had widespread presence of lead. ELF collected and tested as many brands in each category as it could locate in California.

Scientists agree that there is no safe level of exposure to lead. Lead accumulates in the body from multiple exposures over time and from multiple sources. According to Dr. Callahan, “Lead exposure among children is a particular concern because their developing bodies absorb lead at a higher rate and because children are particularly sensitive to lead’s toxic effects, including decreased I.Q.” Lead exposure also represents a heightened risk among pregnant and nursing women because lead passes from the mother to the developing fetus or infant. “Lead already stored in the mother’s bone tissue is mobilized along with calcium,”
explains Dr. Callahan, “and additional lead exposure to the mother can further compromise the health of the most vulnerable among us.”

Lead has been and continues to be released into the environment from decades of lead-based pesticide application, use of leaded gasoline and lead paint, and burning of coal in power plants. The lead in the environment then can make its way into the food supply. But not every category or even foods within categories contains lead. There are things that consumers can do if they are concerned about their families’ exposure to lead.

• Make informed choices.
• Demand information before you buy.
• Advocate for cleaner food and more comprehensive environmental health policies.

ELF’s Notices were sent to law enforcement officials, including the California Attorney General and 58 county District Attorneys, and to the affected
manufacturers, retailers and distributors, notifying them that particular food products frequently consumed by children contain lead at levels high enough to
require a warning under Proposition 65. These notices start a clock for the companies to bring themselves into compliance with Proposition 65 by either (a)
reducing or eliminating the lead or (b) placing “clear and reasonable warnings” on the food packages. If, at the end of 60 days, no law enforcement agency is
prosecuting the violation, ELF will file suit to enforce the law.
The notices were based on testing performed on 398 samples of 146 different branded products in the five categories. Samples were purchased throughout
California. A list of all products tested and whether they did or did not exceed Prop 65’s warning threshold is also found on ELF’s website.

“ELF has fought to protect families from lead exposures for two decades,” said Jim Wheaton, President of the Environmental Law Foundation. “We know the risk
these exposures pose for children, and we know that our efforts can help keep children safer.”

More information about lead and Prop 65 can be found in a Frequently Asked Questions document, also on ELF’s website.

Claiming that millions of young Americans age 17 to 24 – prime candidates for military recruitment – are “too fat to fight” and would be rejected for military service due to weight problems, a group of 130 retired generals, admirals, and other senior military leaders has endorsed a sizeable increase in funding for school meal programs to assist in strengthening our military.  “When that many young adults can’t fight because of their weight, it affects our national preparedness and national security,” said retired rear admiral Jamie Barnett, representing the group, titled “Mission:  Readiness, Military Leaders for Kids.”

“Our national security in 2030 is absolutely dependent on reversing the alarming rates of childhood obesity,” claimed Barnett, who called on Congress to pass legislation reauthorizing the Child Nutrition Act, including the Obama Administration’s  recommendation to increase funding by $10 billion over ten years.  Mission:  Readiness also endorsed adoption of nutrition standards for food sold in schools as recommended by the Institute of Medicine.

School meal programs owe their existence to defense policy; the National School Lunch Act was passed in 1946 in response to large numbers of draftees failing to qualify for military service in World War II due to diet-related health problems.  Back then, the main concern was not obesity but malnutrition.

The more traditional child nutrition supporters welcomed the show of military muscle. “Schools have already made tremendous strides in offering children healthy food options, but it will take the support of the entire community from parents, to our military leaders to Members of Congress, voting to fund these critical efforts, to turn around the childhood obesity crisis,” said Dora Rivas, director of food services for the Dallas, TX school district and president of the School Nutrition Association.  “The fact that so many youngsters are not fit for military service is, indeed, a wake-up call for this country,” echoed Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack at the Mission:  Readiness news conference.

Military recruitment efforts have been more successful of late, as the recession makes military service a more attractive alternative to unemployment.  And it is recruiters who work with young people to help them get into shape so they are ready for boot camp, Barnett said.  “But given the fact that so many more kids are carrying so many more pounds, asking recruiters to fix the problem is like asking for a safety pin after the seams have burst,” he commented.

Source: TEFAP Alliance

Even as the idea of buying local finds eager audiences at the area’s many farmers markets, few might imagine that “local” means anything closer than a swath of farmland somewhere in Carnation, Mount Vernon or Monroe. That’s where produce comes from, right?

But in Seattle’s North Beach neighborhood, the radishes already are appearing for Noelani Alexander, who spent a recent morning planning an irrigation system for her 1,200-square-foot plot behind a home on Northwest 91st Street.

By summer’s end, on the five Seattle plots that comprise the urban farm operation she calls City Grown, she expects to see carrots, leeks, lettuce, spinach, squash and cucumbers and more — all destined for local sale, mostly online.

While many more people are growing their food, either to go green or save money, the notion of growing for profit — a Depression-era activity briefly revived in the 1960s — is another, more challenging matter.

“It’s kind of new for America to be going back to urban farming on a commercial scale,” said Josh Parkinson, of similarly minded Magic Bean Farm in West Seattle. “This is about as local as you can get.”

The practice has been rapidly resurrected over the past few years in cities such as San Francisco, Austin, Texas, and Boulder, Colo., seeded by economic need, the sustainability movement and national groups such as SPIN-Farming (Small Plot Intensive Farming), which works with farms in the United States and Canada.

In recession-ravaged Detroit, for example, efforts are under way to convert 40 acres of the Michigan State Fairgrounds into what organizers say would be the world’s largest commercial urban farm.

“Productive space”

Alexander, a 32-year-old former farm employee who had gone into landscaping, figured she eventually would leave her Wallingford home for a rural spread where she could return to food production, “but things weren’t going that way,” she said. Now, “getting food into the city is more important to me.”

While some of City Grown’s produce is grown at her Wallingford home, the bulk of the operation’s nearly 4,000 square feet of growing space — about one-tenth of an acre — is divided among four other residential properties in North Beach, Ballard, Wallingford and the Central District.

Those homeowners will receive weekly produce, and besides, “they get their yard developed. Most are lawns they weren’t using — and now it’s productive space.”

Commercial urban farming “makes the most of underused urban natural resources, and provides fresh food to people right where they can see it growing from seed to harvest,” Nicole Jain Capizzi, former director of a for-profit urban farm in Milwaukee, wrote on the Seattle-based website UrbanFarmHub.org.

But Capizzi, who since has moved to the Seattle area, noted challenges — untested business models, unpredictable weather and the difficulty of cultivating non-arable land. Throw in pests and the cost of real estate, and one wonders: Are urban farms really possible?

Seattle already has Seattle Market Gardens, a year-old program in which consumers can purchase carrots, peas and other produce grown by immigrant farmers throughout the city’s South End. Proceeds from the program, sponsored by nonprofit P-Patch Trust and Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods, go mostly to the farmers.

While it’s still tough going, people like Alexander and Parkinson hope to show that, despite the challenges, they can handle everything from the ground up — including production, marketing and managing. Both hope their efforts ultimately will reap long-term benefits, an experiment driven more by principles than profits.

“This is a question I ask myself quite frequently: Is this something I expect to make a livable wage from?” Alexander said. “At this point, it seems difficult.”

“It’s not something you’re going to get rich on,” Parkinson said. “… You have to be able to suffer through the mundanity of a lot of repetitive tasks. You have to look at the big picture.

“… It’s not like I’m just tired of a desk job and want to be in the garden all day.”

Early last year, urban-farming enthusiast Ryan Hawkes pitched the idea of a worker-owned farm cooperative to others in the local agriculture community. By last summer, nearly a dozen people — including Alexander — had coordinated efforts, lending each other equipment, helping develop each other’s land and sharing the fruits of their labor.

“We ate really well last summer,” Alexander said.

This year, the seven who remain are re-creating themselves as a producers’ cooperative called Harvest Collective, aiming to sell their produce online and through their individual farm operations, which comprise about 7,000 square feet in all.

“Together, we can make more of a complete-sized farm,” Alexander said.

The collective’s vision, pushed by Hawkes, is to see a farm in every neighborhood — not only for the sake of production but as a source of empowerment as residents learn new skills and self-reliance.

The group takes its inspiration from others like it, such as Milwaukee-based Growing Power, which promotes the notion of community food systems.

Social benefits

Urban farming, Alexander said, also promotes green space, which benefits communities socially and psychologically. Both the collective and Magic Bean are hoping to recruit additional homeowners and urban farmers to the cause.

Parkinson’s Magic Bean Farm is about half an acre in all, or some 20,000 square feet, spread out among seven homes mostly clustered near his home near South Seattle Community College. As with City Grown, the homeowners will receive a portion of the harvest in exchange.

Parkinson, 29, who had tinkered with ecological gardening methods for some time, finally decided to put research into practice. He aims to create a robust, interconnected ecosystem of plants, rich soil and nutrient-rich food. “There’s a lot of biology going on,” he said.

He’s purchased so many seed types that they fill four pages of an Excel spreadsheet, and he is hoping to pair with local chefs to create recipes built around his often-unusual varieties, things such as dragon’s tongue beans and purple asparagus. He plans to sell mostly at farmers markets.

In Seattle, anyone can grow and sell food on site or at a farmers market as long as no plot exceeds 4,000 square feet, said Bryan Stevens of the city’s Department of Planning and Development. The seller requires a business license if the food is turned into a product — for example, syrups or prepared salads.

Proposed legislation would create more opportunities for farmers markets, urban gardens and farms; it also would raise the per-lot limit on urban chickens to eight rather than three.

Urban-farming advocates say they’re glad to see the city encourage such efforts.

“We would love to see sustainable agriculture in the city be something people could make a living off,” Alexander said.

Source: Seattle Times

Could playing in the dirt make you smarter? Studies in mice suggest that it could.

Mice given peanut butter laced with a common, harmless soil bacterium ran through mazes twice as fast and enjoyed doing so. So says Dorothy Matthews of the Sage Colleges in Troy, New York state, who presented her results at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego, California, this week.

In a classic test of learning ability, Matthews gave mice a treat – white bread with peanut butter – as a reward to encourage them to learn to run through a maze. When she laced the treat with a tiny bit of Mycobacterium vaccae, she found that the mice ran through the maze twice as fast as mice that were given plain peanut butter. This suggests that they had learned to navigate the maze faster, Matthews says.

Moreover, the mice given the bacteria continued to run the maze faster than those without it for 18 more trials over the next six weeks, showing they weren’t just made more alert by a surprise change to their treat. This effect lasted for four weeks after the last piece of doctored peanut butter was given to the mice.

Speedy solvers

Matthews believes this was caused by the effect M. vaccae has on the immune system, something that was investigated in 2007 by Chris Lowry, now at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Lowry was trying to explain why sick people – who have activated immune systems – often become depressed and sluggish, which could be an adaptation that speeds recovery.

His team found that exposing mice to the bacteria, and hence activating their immune system, activated clusters of neurons in their brainstem called the dorsal Raphe nuclei. These neurons connect to the forebrain and other brain structures that regulate mood and behaviour.

This result led Matthews to investigate whether the bacteria’s effect on the brain extended to a more general difference in cognitive function – and she found that it did.

Focus on that maze

The bacteria may speed up learning because the Raphe nuclei stimulate a brain region called the hippocampus, which handles spatial memory, she says.

But the bacteria also changed the mice’s mood – they showed less behaviour that indicates anxiety, such as grooming and searching, perhaps analogous to the calmer behaviour immune activation triggers in people.

This is likely to have been caused by changes to the higher mental functions in the forebrain, which perhaps allowed them to focus better on the maze.

Matthews says that exposure to soil bacteria may affect human brains too. “It just shows that we evolved with dirt as hunter-gatherers,” she says. “So turn off your TV and go work in your garden, or walk in the woods.”

Journal Reference: Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2007.01.067

If you’re eating non-organic celery today, you may be ingesting 67 pesticides with it, according to a new report from the Environmental Working Group.

The group, a nonprofit focused on public health, scoured nearly 100,000 produce pesticide reports from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to determine what fruits and vegetables we eat have the highest, and lowest, amounts of chemical residue.

Most alarming are the fruits and vegetables dubbed the “Dirty Dozen,” which contain 47 to 67 pesticides per serving. These foods are believed to be most susceptible because they have soft skin that tends to absorb more pesticides.

“It’s critical people know what they are consuming,” the Environmental Working Group’s Amy Rosenthal said. “The list is based on pesticide tests conducted after the produce was washed with USDA high-power pressure water system. The numbers reflect the closest thing to what consumers are buying at the store.”

Special report: Toxic America

The group suggests limiting consumption of pesticides by purchasing organic for the 12 fruits and vegetables.

“You can reduce your exposure to pesticides by up to 80 percent by buying the organic version of the Dirty Dozen,” Rosenthal said.

The Dirty Dozen

Celery

Peaches

Strawberries

Apples

Domestic blueberries

Nectarines

Sweet bell peppers

Spinach, kale and collard greens

Cherries

Potatoes

Imported grapes

Lettuce

Not all non-organic fruits and vegetables have a high pesticide level. Some produce has a strong outer layer that provides a defense against pesticide contamination. The group found a number of non-organic fruits and vegetables dubbed the “Clean 15″ that contained little to no pesticides.

The Clean 15

Onions

Avocados

Sweet corn

Pineapples

Mango

Sweet peas

Asparagus

Kiwi fruit

Cabbage

Eggplant

Cantaloupe

Watermelon

Grapefruit

Sweet potatoes

Sweet onions

What is a pesticide?

A pesticide is a mixture of chemical substances used on farms to destroy or prevent pests, diseases and weeds from affecting crops. According to the USDA, 45 percent of the world’s crops are lost to damage or spoilage, so many farmers count on pesticides.

The Environmental Protection Agency, the FDA and the USDA work together to monitor and set limits as to how much pesticide can be used on farms and how much is safe to remain on the produce once it hits grocery store shelves.

“In setting the tolerance amount, the EPA must make a safety finding that the pesticide can be used with ‘reasonable certainty of no harm.’ The EPA ensures that the tolerance selected will be safe,” according the EPA’s website.

Although the President’s Cancer Panel recently recommended that consumers eat produce without pesticides to reduce their risk of getting cancer and other diseases, the low levels of pesticides found on even the Dirty Dozen are government-approved amounts.

Can small amounts of pesticides hurt you?

The government says that consuming pesticides in low amounts doesn’t harm you, but some studies show an association between pesticides and health problems such as cancer, attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder and nervous system disorders and say exposure could weaken immune systems.

The Environmental Working Group acknowledges that data from long-term studies aren’t available but warns consumers of the potential dangers.

“Pesticides are designed to kill things. Why wait for 20 years to discover they are bad for us?” Rosenthal said.

Some doctors warn that children’s growing brains are the most vulnerable to pesticides in food.

“A kid’s brain goes through extraordinary development, and if pesticides get into the brain, it can cause damage,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

Can pesticides be washed away?

Not necessarily. The pesticide tests mentioned above were conducted after the food had been power-washed by the USDA. Also, although some pesticides are found on the surface of foods, other pesticides may be taken up through the roots and into the plant and cannot be removed.

“We’ve found that washing doesn’t do much,” Rosenthal said. “Peeling can help, although you have to take into account that the pesticides are in the water, so they can be inside the fruit because of the soil.”

All fresh produce, whether it’s grown with or without pesticides, should be washed with water to remove dirt and potentially harmful bacteria. And health experts agree that when it comes to the Dirty Dozen list, choose organic if it’s available.

“To the extent you can afford to do so, [parents] should simply buy organic, because there have been some very good studies that shows people who eat mostly organic food reduce 95 percent of pesticides [in their body] in two weeks,” Landrigan said

Source: CNN