Posts tagged with ‘food’
Fifty years after we figured out how to keep astronauts’ food from making them sick, the time has come to commit to keeping the rest of us as safe.
Agricultural innovations through modern biotechnology have delivered significant economic, environmental, health and consumer benefits in recent years, but the full potential is even greater.
In order to feed a growing, hungry world amidst a warming climate, we have to produce more food. Solutions to the problem of how to increase crop yields include both ecology-based farming and biotechnology approaches. But how do we define biotechnology? And can it support progressive approaches to improving prospects for the poor farmers of [...]
Salmonella. Downer cows. More salmonella. The past year has seen several unpleasant and dangerous incidents of widespread food contamination. Today, Lyndsey Layton reports in the Washington Post that newly introduced Congressional legislation offers a slate of remedies to ramp up Food and Drug Agency capabilities for protecting the food supply. The draft legislation introduced in [...]
Shortly after being sworn in as the Commissioner of the Federal Drug Administration last Friday, Margaret A. Hamburg and her principal deputy commissioner, Joshua Sharfstein, described their plans to run the FDA as a public health agency in New England Journal of Medicine. The agency, charged with regulating much of the U.S. food supply, is [...]
The answer is a mix of politics and profits, two things that should not get in the way of national standards for school nutrition to help better educate our youngsters.
The Associated Press reports that drug makers are quietly hopeful that recent appointments signal an agency-level bifurcation between food safety and drug safety responsibilities:
Drug industry advocates are quietly allying with some of their longtime critics pushing to split the Food and Drug Administration into two agencies, one for food safety and one for medical products.
President [...]
The peanut product recalls continue, revealing more cracks up and down the food safety system. And people keep getting sick.
In the Dining & Wine section yesterday, a story on the fractures in the food safety system that led to contaminated peanut products in organic brands. Kim Severson and Andrew Martin note:
Organics has grown from an $11 billion business in the United States in 2001 to one that now generates more than $20 billion in [...]
As Nancy Scola explains, it has taken many people by surprise to learn that several of the foodstuffs involved in the peanut product recall are in fact organic brands. “Organic” means safe, right? Well, her investigation reveals, it’s not as simple as that.
Over the course of the current Salmonella Typhimurium outbreak, the Centers for Disease [...]
The salmonella-contaminated peanut outbreak is raising alarm over the U.S.’s fractured food system—a system “organics” and conventional mass-market foods often travel through side-by-side.
The Food and Drug Administration gave a thumbs up today for ATryn, a blood-thinning drug produced in the milk of genetically engineered goats. As we’ve previously described, it’s the first drug made in the milk of a farm animal to get U.S. marketing approval. (Most meds are made in chemistry labs or inside genetically engineered [...]
Members of Congress and others are calling for independent investigations into the federal oversight system for food production facilities in light of new revelations about chronic problems at the Peanut Corp. of America peanut-processing plant in Blakely, Georgia. Those calls are on target, and the matter deserves the attention of both the Justice Department and [...]
Okay, so according to the Lyndsey Layton in today’s Washington Post, the FDA has issued clear information that major brands of jarred peanut butter on grocery shelves are not subject to the recall. But there are hundreds of products affected–so many that the FDA has set up a database to track them all. If you [...]
Part of the problem behind the recent spread of
Salmonella-infected peanut paste products is a disastrously underfunded FDA.
Whether by DNA manipulation or old-fashioned selective breeding, we engineer our food. Is it time to get over it?
Nutritious Rice for the World runs out of the University of Washington, but pieces of the research work could be unfolding on a desktop near you. That’s because the research is one of five projects currently part of IBM’s World Community Grid. The grid allows volunteer computer users to run a small program that takes advantage of unused processing power to predict the structure of desirable rice proteins.
Milk and meat from cloned animals could be in the U.S. food supply, and the Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture can’t detect it, says an FDA official, despite a USDA “voluntary moratorium.” But products from cloned animals may have been in the food supply for a while.
Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed a rule that cattle too sick to stand should not be turned into hamburgers. The move raises the opportunity to consider broader issues regarding federal food safety structures, which have been under scrutiny since this summer’s outbreak of
salmonella St. Paul, which was eventually traced to imported serrano peppers.
Recent reports indicate that Europeans seem to be moving towards acceptance of genetically modified foods, as long as they are properly labeled. Conflict surrounds discussions on GM crops, but there are many facets of the debate over these seeds.
Part 3 of coverage of Tuesday’s House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on the Renewable Fuel Standard, with the perspectives of witnesses on biofuel production and rising food prices.
Tuesday’s House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing pitted environmentalists, corn producers, oil refiners, grocery manufacturers, and renewable fuel advocates against one another in a contentious debate over the future of the Renewable Fuel Standard.
Science Progress tries to make sense of it all. First up, what’s right with the RFS and ways to make it better.
A hearing reviewed a recent scandal over beef safety and raised questions about the ability of the Department of Agriculture to keep food-borne pathogens out of the food supply.
The DOE Basic Energy Sciences program is forced to cut grants after a meager budget increase. Are iPS cells ready to replace embryonic stem cells? A new report in
Science on climate change and reduced global food production.
Three stories focusing on innovation and on the impact of climate change demonstrate the difficulty of fairly distributing the costs, risks, and benefits of technologies.
Engineering corn to fight blindness; “Science 2.0″ and participatory journalism; Google gives back, and not just to non-profits.
