Food Safety: Caveat Emptor

"Caveat Emptor: is one of the many phrases I remember from my early days of Latin in the esteemed Dr. Larrick's class. (Sidebar: Every student should have been lucky enough to have had Dr. Larrick. He continues to inspire students in ways few can. Teaching is a gift. One that he keeps on giving. And for that we are thankful.) Anyhoo, "Caveat Emptor" is of course the commerce principle that means the buyer assumes the risk. It translates to "Let the buyer beware." We generally think of this in terms of purchasing cars, property, and pretty much anything from eBay, Craigslist, or the classified section (that is, if anyone still lists and buys stuff that way these days).

I never thought Caveat Emptor would apply to the food I buy.

We take leaps of faith everyday. We trust that the drivers among us will stop when the light is red. We trust our children's schools are secure. We trust that the bank protects our money. We trust that our municipality's water reading is accurate. We trust our cribs are tested and our toys lead-free. We trust the food stocked upon market shelves is safe.

Thanks to the likes of Stewart Parnell, the infamous Salmonella Peanut King, consumers can no longer afford to take a leap of faith when it comes to food purchases. The FDA has long been riddled with powerlessness and plagued with inefficiencies. Food safety, and in effect consumer wellness, has been on the back burner. It seems to me that we as a nation have focused more on making a buck and pulling a fast one on consumers than protecting public health. I'm thinking of the policies and attitudes of a certain eight years in the all-too-recent-past. Ahem. The FDA, through years of neglect and failure to modernize itself, has floundered in protecting us.

Well finally, in a bipartisan leap, the food safety bill looks like it's making headway to overhaul the FDA. Despite the fact that the Senate looks like it will wait until next year to address it, the bill is still getting some much deserved attention. It's at least a starting point. Slow but steady, right? The FDA, the government organization upon which we rely to ensure the food we consume is safe, has had puny resources to actually to its job, making us take leaps of faith in the grocery aisle, off restaurant menus, and in school cafeterias without even knowing it.

Spinach. Peanuts. Cookie dough. Ground beef. Chicken. Pet food.

Pretty basic items on any grocery list, right?

E. coli. Salmonella. Listeria.

I bet those aren't on your shopping list.


So where do we go from here?

Until our government gets rolling on passing and implementing this new food safety bill, it behooves us all to exercise Caveat Emptor in every food purchase we make. Even buying local, organically produced food does not guarantee it's safe for consumption.

Note that I write this a mother, a cook, a consumer. I'm not a pundit, a biologist, a lawyer, a lobbyist, or a politician. And my bet is that if you're not either, you too don't care about the in-fighting. We simply want to trust that the food we serve our children is not tainted. Food is sustenance, and should not be suspect.


Check out these resources for more information.
Safe Tables
@SafeTables on Twitter
Sign up for eAlerts about food recalls.
FDA food safety


PS
Thanks to Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, Mike Taylor, advisor to the FDA Commissioner, Safe Tables and the fine bloggers (@GloPan, @punditmom, @morningsidemom, @soapboxmom, @jippert) who joined in on an informative call last week about food safety. Cheers to good health instead of just wealth!

Something's Turniping Me On

We are fortunate to participate in a CSA that showers us with an amazing locally grown, organic bounty of produce every week. Farmer Tom of Double T Farm takes good care of our bodies and our palates. The boys wait at the screen door to see what goodies are in my bag when I get home from Tom's local pick up spot. I empty my hemp bag emblazoned with "I love green!" on the front. I always chuckle, thinking to myself that "I love greens!" would be oh so much more appropriate.

Last week I brought home a veritable feast of green goodness. Every week elicits a culinary orgasm. I've been plowing through new recipes and cooking adventures, none of which involves meat. I'm not opposed to meat mind you. I crave an Inferno burger from MoJoe's time to time and even spice up the cholesterol intake by indulging in onion rings once in a while. Once. In. A. While. Neither my waistline nor my aging heart can handle that lack of nutritional integrity on a regular basis. But dang, my tastebuds need to be coddled every now and then. But I digress... For the last week or so I've been preparing vegetarian meals, not by choice but by happenstance. Our plates are so loaded with goodness that there's no room (and no need) to add anything else.

Believe it or not, turnips are a crowd favorite.

Turnips.

You heard me. I said TURNIPS.

T-U-R-N-I-P-S!

And most nights I don't even cook 'em.


Here's what I like to call my CSA Salad:

Quarter and thinly slice one large turnip into bite size pieces (by all means, save the greens to stir fry!). Peel and seed a cucumber. Slice into little bite size half moons. Now here comes my one cheater ingredient. Add one sliced avocado, cut into pieces that are uniform with the turnip and cuke. Add the zest of one lemon (stop grating at the yellow lest you get that bitter white pith!). Now add the juice of that lemon. Grate some fresh black pepper on top, give it all a gentle stir, and refrigerate for 30 minutes or so. Serve cold.

No salt. No oil. No Hidden Valley ranch.

I'm telling you, this crunchy goodness is a fine palate cleanser and compliments any meal. In fact, we just served it alongside an Indian feast of dal, palak paneer, and whole wheat naan. I added some chopped fresh cilantro to make it better suit the Indian flavors.

And no one missed the meat.



Cross posted at Foodie Mama.

When Social Media Becomes a Social Cause: Twestival 09

This is no Twestivus for the Rest of Us kind of faux affair. A group of dedicated, savvy volunteers have leveraged Twitter's microblogging power to host Raleigh's own Twestival on Thursday, February 12. Here are the deets. This a the grand dame of Tweetups, with charity at its heart. Our goal is to raise money to provide access to clean drinking water to people around the world.

H2O. The same stuff we flush away without a care. The same stuff we waste down the drain as we let hoses run amok and taps drip to their own deafening cadence. The same stuff we mindlessly guzzle from bottles, fountains (or bubblers as they say in Wisconsin), refrigerators, Brita pitchers, faucets. Charity: Water.

Thursday's soiree promises to be fun and above all, uplifting. Food, cocktails, Wii, networking, and best of all, meet your favorite tweeple face to face. Tickets are only $11.40 if you purchase tickets online in advance, or $14 on day of, $20 at door. Did I mention the awesome chow and cocktails that are included in that ticket price? Did you catch what I said about the cause we're supporting? Clean dirnking water, people. The stuff we take for granted every. single. day.

On Thursday 12 February 2009, Twestival is going global. The flagship event will be
rocking out in London, with simultaneous events happening in major Twitter cities around the
world. Look at us, little ole Raleigh. A major Twitter city!

Here's some more information from Twestival's official website:

charity: water - Everyone in the world deserves safe, clean drinking water.
Right now 1.1 billion people on the planet don’t have access to safe, clean drinking water. That’s one in six of us. Unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation cause 80% of all sickness and disease, and kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Many people in the developing world, usually women and children, walk more than three hours everyday to fetch water that is likely to make them sick. Those hours are crucial, preventing many from working or attending school. Additionally, collecting water puts them at a greater risk of sexual harassment and assault. Children are especially vulnerable to the consequences of unsafe drinking water. Of the 42,000 deaths that occur every week from unsafe water and a lack of basic sanitation, 90% are children under 5 years old. The same as my Bird and Deal.

charity: water and how they work:
charity: water is a non profit organization bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations. 100% of the money raised goes to direct project costs, funding sustainable clean water solutions in areas of greatest need. They also work to raise awareness of the water crisis through events, fundraising exhibitions and other public awareness campaigns.

Since it’s foundation in 2006, charity: water has funded the construction of more than 600 wells that, when completed, will provide clean drinking water to 250,000 people. And they are just getting started.


I have seen firsthand the effects of lack of clean water. Scratch that. Make that the effects of polluted, foul, smelly, diseased water. Images of those villagers haunt me still. It is heartbreaking to see people, fellow mothers and fathers and children, succumb to desperation and illness just because they lack the one basic thing our bodies need, the very thing that comprises 75% of our very being.

Can't snag a sitter or sneak away from work to join us at Raleigh's Twestival? Fret not, my friends. You can simply click here to make a difference. Imagine if it were your child dying from a simple lack of water. Imagine not doing anything at all.

Tweet. Meet. Give. We're going to change the world one tweet at a time.

00. The new 0.

So there are apparently enough women out there who are 5 feet tall (like I am) and 88 pounds (definitely not me) to warrant the fashion industry creating a size 00. Now this is not new, though it is newsworthy. I'm not mathy, in fact, I like to say that I'm the only Indian in the world who is bad at math and science. OK, so that schtick is old for those who know me. Nonetheless, while I was no Mathlete, I don't recall learning about a double 00 unless there was a 7 at the end. The integer preceding 0 is -1, right? So why don't we size those doll clothes made for hideously skinny women a -1? Oh, pardon me. I meant those women who are naturally petite. Wink. Wink. I suppose a size denoted by a negative number would carry a negative perception. Because we all know that the introduction of a size 00 is completely positive. I mean, now those skeletons have a place to shop aside from the little girls' department! Oh yeah! But let's face it, even the girls' department is looking more and more hoochie everyday.

Are women really skinny enough to warrant a size 00 or are clothing designers pulling a fast one on us, creating vanity sizing to boost our egos? Either way you look at it, the practice perpetuates unhealthy, unrealistic expectations. Thin does not equal beautiful. Let's get that straight.

I am 5 feet tall. 105 pounds, give or take that time of the month when I consume more chocolate than anything else in the food pyramid. I am naturally petite. Anything smaller is plain unsightly. Unhealthy. Unnatural. Yes, I have my mushy parts, my thighs are practically Siamese twins, my arms jiggle. I can't complain...well, not too much anyway.

The fashion industry has a long history of creating unreasonable physical "norms" in our society. Girls and women of all ages fall into the trap. Present company included. I lived in a sorority house in college that had a designated puking bathroom. There was a silver spoon on the back of the toilet that the girls used to gag themselves. They'd clean up the spoon and lay it back down for the next bulimic victim. It was a secret sisterhood within a sisterhood. Gross on so many levels. I was horrified when I learned of this practice, and the house mother and sorority president turned the other way. I later found out that the sorority president was a frequent spooner. No wonder her figure looked like that of a 10-year old boy.

My childhood friend Lisa died at age 16. She was always taller than the rest of us, though being a grown woman of 5 feet tall, you can imagine that everyone was taller than me my whole life. She was chunky, but in that baby fat way that you knew she'd outgrow. I moved away and lost touch with Lisa. We were living in different cities during those gawky, confusing, teenage years when we were learning to understand our new bodies and struggling to get to know and like ourselves. Apparently Lisa's baby fat wasn't melting away with puberty so she took control of the situation. That's when she became anorexic. Severely so. After a long battle that left her body weak, decrepit, and unrecognizable, Lisa's heart gave out.

This, my friends, is what anorexia looks like. It is not sexy. Or pretty. Or desirable.

That was my first brush with death. And my first brush with eating disorders and the battle to be thin. Granted, I have been naturally thin my whole life, even being force fed protein shakes for a while to try to keep weight on my tiny frame. Ironically, I was downing calorie laden shakes at the same time Lisa was starving herself 200 miles away. One in the name of health, the other in the name of vanity.

Lisa's ideals of pretty and thin were from 1978.

Fast forward 30 years to what our little girls (and grown women) see now. Bratz dolls, Victoria's Secret Pink ads, Britney, Lindsay, Lauren, Miley, the list goes on. Even DQ has gotten into the act. An entire generation of girls worships celebrities and tries to emulate their outrageous diet fads and styles. Seriously, we're subjecting our children to unrealistic ideals from such a young, tender age. A 5-year old girl should not be worrying about her big belly, as a friend's daughter does. Such influences are coming from the flippant ways we degrade our own bodies, the flurry of inescapable marketing messages, the Disney princesses with waists the size of my upper arm, and those damn celebrity rags.

Look in any catalog, magazine, billboard, movie. You'll see women who don't relish the pure joy of butter oozing on hot bread or giggles over strawberries and homemade vanilla ice cream. What's worse is those women likely smoke to keep the weight off. And we pay them TOP DOLLAR for it. Be thin, be pretty, make a shitload of money. Be smart, be healthy, eek out a living. The pretty girl visions our children conjure up are detrimental to them both physically and emotionally. Lisa starved herself to be thin, simply a manifestation of larger, deeper self-esteem issues. It's our responsibility to arm our children with confidence, self-worth, and dignity.

What messages are we sending to girls these days? Are we encouraging them to be smart, assertive, passionate, powerful? Or pretty, demure, silent, passive? Isn't it our responsibility to society, to our girls and boys, to reinvent the definition of beauty and femininity? To establish the difference between "fit" and "skinny?" Sure, there's a severe problem with obesity in our country. The focus should be on FIT, regardless which side of the weight coin you land on.

A size 00 is an outrage. And that's coming from a girl who wore a 0 until she bore two healthy children. I've come to grips with never wearing a 0 again. I donated all those clothes, with no remorse, tears, or regrets for not having done more crunches or time on the elliptical machine. And I'm cool with that. My body carried and delivered two healthy children. Nothing defines beautiful more perfectly.

Channel your childhood yogi.

I don't remember high school and college boys being as buff, rugged, and sculpted as they seem to be these days. I guess I'm talking about boys in the heyday of their teenage years. Teenagers! On the flip side, I don't recall children being the chubby little roly polys they are today. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that I've met little kids with a bigger waist than mine. I'm referring to the under 10 set. The definition of irony, no?

When Bird was a baby he was so fat that his wrists looked like someone wrapped rubber bands around them. Deal's cheeks were so chubby that we were seriously thinking he secured an acorn self storage gig with the squirrels shacking up in the attic. Oh, how I loved to nestle into that baby fat and just relish the kinetic energy it held.

That same baby fat ain't so cute when the kid is conjugating verbs. The obesity epidemic in America is startling. Ditto to the crap our kids are eating, rather the crap we are feeding them. And how long til our sons and daughters need physical therapy to manage the Wii thumb they've developed. Seriously, is playing tennis with a new fangled joystick thingamabob better than hitting topspins outside on some real clay? I can see the benefits of the Wii for the elderly, but come on, kids should be playing for real. Screw this virtual crap.

And don't get me started on the demented body image issues that we as a society are inflicting upon young girls. Apparently a local kindergarten teacher even bestowed an award for "Best Dressed" to one little beribboned girl. Shame. Shame. Shame. Is this what we call education these days?

What happened to the age of the naturally active kid? Neighborhood? Preponderance of over scheduled activities (like the 5-year old kid who took tennis lessons wearing his baseball uniform only to leave the lesson early to play in a baseball game)? Busy parents? No friends? What the hell has changed from the "Be home before dinner" mentality from my youth? Don't you remember running amok in the neighborhood, stopping to pee at whomever's house was closest?

In steps my friend Jen. For the record, she is one of the smartest, most grounded, generous spirits I have crossed paths with in a long, long time. I'm lucky to now count her among my friends. She, with a friend of hers, is trying to affect childhood obesity and overall health awareness in our little neck of the proverbial woods. I think their approach to overall health, self discipline, and mindfulness is a refreshing change of pace for which our children are hungry.

In Jen's words:

"I recently went to New York and went to training to teach children's yoga. This whole process has kind of been my "aha" moment if you will. Most of you have heard my tirades about the state of the health of America's children....from the food they eat to their lack of exercise. I have been trying to figure out a way I could do something about it instead of just complaining about it.

I began doing yoga when my mother was very sick with cancer years ago. It has been such an amazing change in my life. I find clarity and calm, balance and stress release. Can you imagine what it would be like to have these skills to just calm down during your middle school and high school years? Especially in today's world of computers, text messages and video games! I had fourteen 4 and 5 year olds playing a game where no one spoke because they were focusing so hard on what they were doing. They didn't even realize it! They also were champs at relaxation at the end of class. It was truly amazing."

Jen and her business partner will initially be starting a children's yoga program at a local school, Learning Together. The ultimate goal is to bring yoga to Wake County Public Schools. Their efforts and passion have been rewarded with an awesome grant opportunity from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Million Step March grant campaign. The winner is chosen by total number of votes: this is where you come in.

If Jen can get the most votes, the winner, her kids' yoga program, will win $75,000 to start up a yoga program for school children. More information is available here. Bird and Deal have a couple of kid yoga DVDs that they love. Both boys can do a mean down dog.

You can help Jen out by going to Blue Cross Blue Shield's website and voting for the grant. Also, if you know of anyone whom you think might be interested in helping out by taking a minute or two to vote, please forward this to them! You can vote everyday (unrealistic, I know, but whenever you can remember to would be great!). Here are the instructions...

1. Click here.

2. Scroll down to the Learning Together proposal and select vote now (they are in alphabetical order). You will need to enter your email address and confirm the vote when you get a return email.

Each email address is allowed one vote per day. The voting ends May 16th.

Think of the shame, anxiety, and self esteem issues you'll be sparing an overweight, unhealthy youth. Or the confidence you just might impart to a young girl.

Do it for my friend Lori. She was a chubby, taunted kid when we were too young to read Judy Blume or wear training bras. She died of heart failure due to anorexia when we were 16.