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What's That?!

The Pink Pearl apple is an apple cultivar developed in 1944 by Albert Etter, a northern California breeder. It is a seedling of "Surprise", another redfleshed apple.

Pink Pearl apples are generally medium sized, with a conical shape. They are named for their bright, pink flesh. They have a translucent, yellow-green skin, and a crisp, juicy flesh with tart to sweet-tart taste. Pink Pearl apples ripen in late August to mid-September.

Top 10 Genetically Modified Foods to Avoid Eating

www.naturalnews.com - January 17th, 2012

There is a conspiracy of selling out happening in America. Politics and personal interest it would seem determine government policies over and above health and safety issues. When President Obama appointed Michael Taylor in 2009 as senior adviser for the FDA, a fierce protest ensued from consumer groups and environmentalists. Why? Taylor used to be vice president for Monsanto, a multinational interested in marketing genetically modified (GM) food. It was during his term that GMO's were approved in the US without undergoing tests to determine if they were safe for human consumption.

The danger of GMO's

The question of whether or not genetically modified foods (GMO's) are safe for human consumption is an ongoing debate that does not seem to see any resolution except in the arena of public opinion. Due to lack of labeling, Americans are still left at a loss as to whether or not what is on the table is genetically modified. This lack of information makes the avoiding and tracking of GM foods an exercise in futility. 

Below are just some of the food products popularly identified to be genetically modified:

1. Corn - Corn has been modified to create its own insecticide. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has declared that tons of genetically modified corn has been introduced for human consumption. Monsanto has revealed that half of the US's sweet corn farms are planted with genetically modified seed. Mice fed with GM corn were discovered to have smaller offspring and fertility problems.

2. Soy - Soy has also been genetically modified to resist herbicides. Soy products include soy flour, tofu, soy beverages, soybean oil and other products that may include pastries, baked products and edible oil. Hamsters fed with GM soy were unable to have offspring and suffered a high mortality rate.

3. Cotton - Like corn and soy, cotton has been designed to resist pesticides. It is considered food because its oil can be consumed. Its introduction in Chinese agriculture has produced a chemical that kills cotton bollworm, reducing the incidences of pests not only in cotton crops but also in neighboring fields of soybeans and corn. Incidentally, thousands of Indian farmers suffered severe rashes upon exposure to BT cotton.

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Beef Investigation Uncovers Fecal Contamination

www.huffingtonpost.com - December 17th, 2012

This is the origin myth of the food safety system in the United States: The beef industry was a mess, led to awful practices by the profit motives of a few major processing companies, until investigative journalist Upton Sinclair exposed many of the atrocities of the packing plants in his 1906 novel "The Jungle," which spurred the establishment of federal meat inspections, improving safety forever. Today, beef and other meat sold in the U.S. is safer than ever.  

This is the true state of affairs, according to a yearlong investigation of the beef industry concluded by the Kansas City Star this week: just four companies process more than 87 percent of the beef packed in the U.S., and take advantage of novel, money-saving techniques that significantly increase the risk of contamination by foodborne pathogens, leading to hundreds of preventable illnesses every year.

The investigation spans dozens of articles, tens of thousands of words and graphic illustrations galore, and is worth browsing around in depth on the Kansas City Star website.

Here are a few of the paper's staggering findings:

The investigators found ample evidence of serious problems with fecal contamination in beef at major plants, despite industry claims that beef was safer than ever. Fecal contamination is obviously the most disgusting kind of contamination on earth -- but it also vastly increases the risk that beef will spread E. coli bacteria, which lives in the intestines of cows.

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Processed Foods are Killing Us

chicagophoenix.com - December 10th, 2012

As American society became more industrialized and modernized, we focused the same innovation to our foods in an effort to make them more affordable and accessible, resulting in processed foods. While this made food cheaper and allowed Americans of all walks access to more calories, it did not lead to better nutrition nor a healthier society. This change to a heavily-processed food supply also can be correlated to the rise in Type 2 diabetes.

So why are processed foods so bad and how is it linked to the rise in Type 2 diabetes? Until the turn of the century, most Americans either produced their own foods or bought them from local producers in an unprocessed state. With advancement in food storage and preservation, foods were altered to have longer shelf lives and foods once produced at home, like bread, could now be mass produced in baking factories. Mass production led to processed foods appearing cheaper by their convenience.

The act of processing a food product breaks down the item to its basic components, often leaving healthy and nutritional things behind, like fiber. While this allows manufacturers to store products, like flour or corn syrup, easier and longer, it’s not necessarily better for your body. I like to use the example of a log and stack of papers. If you were to set a log on fire, it would burn slowly and release energy and smoke over a prolonged period of time. However, take that same log and “process” it into paper then set that pile of paper on fire. It would burn quickly, releasing it’s energy and smoke over a very short period of time. The same happens with food. For example, corn in its whole form takes time to break down and release its energy. Corn syrup, on the other hand, beaks down very quickly once ingested, releasing its energy all at once.

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Kenya Bans GMO Foods

www.nature.com - December 4th, 2012

Scientists fear that Kenya's recent banning of the import of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) may be a significant blow to progress on biotechnology research and development in the country.

A cabinet meeting chaired by Kenya's president, Mwai Kibaki, this month (8 November), directed the public health minister to ban GMO imports until the country is able to certify that they have no negative impact on people's health.

In a statement to the press, the cabinet said there was a "lack of sufficient information on the public health impact of such foods".

"The ban will remain in effect until there is sufficient information, data and knowledge demonstrating that GMO foods are not a danger to public health," it added.

The directive comes three years after the government's establishment of the National Biosafety Authority (NBA), tasked with exercising general supervision and control of the transfer, handling and use of GMOs.

The NBA board chair, Miriam Kinyua, tells SciDev.Net that for now, the government directive will stand. However, she added that researchers will continue to provide the government with information arising from research into GMO safety, so that a possible review of the directive can be undertaken.

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Just What is 'Natural' Food?

www.latimes.com - November 30th, 2012

The word is included on many products despite meaning almost nothing.

Until a couple of years ago, Ben & Jerry's ice cream was labeled as natural. Then the company came under pressure from the Center for Science in the Public Interest because the ice cream contained, among other things, partially hydrogenated soybean oil. Unlike genetically engineered foods, for which there is little if any evidence of harm to human health, partially hydrogenated oil has been implicated as an artery-clogging ingredient to be avoided. And you can bet the soybean oil didn't hydrogenate itself. The company agreed to drop the "natural" label in 2010.

The real issue here isn't whether GMO Inside believes that different methods of human tinkering make some foods less natural than others, but that the reassuring word "natural" is included on many a product's label while meaning almost nothing. A 2009 study found that shoppers thought "natural" indicated a purer, more regulated substance than "organic." It's the other way around. But the whole point of rules for labeling is to allow people to make informed decisions about their food.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has considered defining the term a couple of times, and most recently gave up the effort in 2008. (Perhaps it should have started by trying to figure out what consumers consider natural to mean.) As the examples above show, attempts to regulate use of the word would be complicated, fraught with politics and would almost certainly involve multiple lawsuits by the food industry. (The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the less-complicated arena of meat and poultry, defines natural as "minimally processed," but that doesn't mean the animals were raised without antibiotics or hormones.)

The only times the FDA generally objects to the word "natural" is when it's used to describe products containing artificial coloring, flavoring or "synthetic substances." Could bioengineered DNA be considered a synthetic substance? Possibly.

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Phase Out Pesticides

www.huffingtonpost.com - November 26th, 2012

I worked for two years on Capitol Hill and 25 for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. During that tumultuous era, from the administration of Jimmy Carter to the first administration of George W. Bush, I saw and experienced the decline and near extinction of America's policies for the protection of public health and the environment.

The government in most instances kept the people in the dark but catered to private interests, which even drafted the government's policy.

In the case of pesticides, for example, the result of the "regulated" industry-government complex has been deleterious.

By the time EPA came into being in December 1970, America was hooked on petrochemical sprays of staggering amounts, 70 percent of which went to drench the farms and the rest to millions of homes, lawns, schools, golf courses and industrial facilities.

Pesticides are by design killers of life. They are biocides. They are the only hazardous pollutant willfully put into the environment. Some of them are associated with higher rates of cancer; others poison the nervous system; others act like hormones, disrupting the endocrine system, causing sex and developmental abnormalities.

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Butterball Turkey Abuse Caught On Undercover Camera -- Again

www.huffingtonpost.com - November 15th, 2012

In December of 2011, animal welfare advocacy group Mercy for Animals released a gruesome undercover video of turkey abuse at a plant that raises poultry for Butterball. That footage led to a raid of the plant being videotaped, as well as several arrests and criminal charges for employees who were involved.

But it seems Butterball -- which raises a full 20 percent of the total turkey sold in the country every year, and 30 percent of the turkey eaten on Thanksgiving -- hasn't learned its lesson. Because today, Mercy for Animals released another horrifying video detailing 

turkey abuse at several Butterball plants in North Carolina.

The disturbing video is embedded above. It's not the most graphic animal abuse video we've seen, but you should still exercise caution before deciding to watch it. It's quite grainy and is in black and white, but you can clearly see workers kicking and throwing birds around the plant. At one point, an employee callously notes that he's seen maggots crawling all over the birds.

Mercy for Animals is encouraging people moved by the video to consider eating a vegetarian turkey substitute instead of a bird on Thanksgiving next Thursday. Another option is to opt for a turkey raised more humanely, on a smaller farm. Many of the latter have added benefits in terms of flavor, compared to the Broad-Breasted Whites raised by producers like Butterball. Click through the slideshow below to see several heritage breeds:

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