A little housecleaning

I keep accumulating these links for interesting food-related tidbits I've read or heard on the interweb lately. Here they are:

Just this morning I listened to my first episode of Spilled Milk, a food podcast by Matthew Amster-Burton and Molly Wizenberg. This one is all about peas, from mushy to crisp, snow to snap. They're a funny pair - lots of witty banter - and there's some good information in there too. Worth a listen.

I also happened by the debate about the dirty dozen: twelve fresh produce items that, according to some, absorb too much pesticides and thus should be purchased organic whenever possible. They say you can reduce your pesticide intake by as much as 80 percent by avoiding conventionally farmed (using chemical pesticides and fertilizers) thin skinned fruits such as berries, pears and peaches, as well as water filled veggies like celery and spinach. Now, I'm no scientist and I'm both lazy and skeptical. I eat way too much celery to go tromping all over town to find organic variety that doesn't feel like I'm eating tree bark. I think I'll continue my old standby rule that if the produce looks, smells and tastes healthy, it probably is, and is still way better for me than living on chips and beer.

Still at Salon Magazine, check out food editor (and former contributing editor to Gourmet Magazine, RIP) Francis Lam's weekly column The Eyewitness Cook for great recipes and food debates.

Finally, this recent article in the New York Times goes a long way to clarify the difference between food allergy and food sensitivity, or intolerance. While 30 percent of the population believes they have food allergies, the true incidence is only about 8 percent for children and less than 5 percent for adults. This is a big discrepancy, and the article explains that everything from inaccurate testing to confusing an allergy for an intolerance is to blame. For the record, an allergy is an immune system response to food, producing anything from hives, itchy mouth, runny nose, sneezing and difficulty breathing, to full-blown anaphylaxis. If eating a certain food gives you a stomach ache, or gas, etc., it's an intolerance, not an allergy. I learned this only after avoiding foods I thought I was allergic to for years, until finally seeing an allergist and having her explain the truth.

Made in Canada... I mean, Kerplackistan

In light of last week’s recall of several President’s Choice beef products for e-coli contamination, I realized that my sporadic reading of local news may prove one day to be detrimental to my health. Were it not for my father telling me about the recall before biting into his hamburger at our backyard barbecue, I would have never known about the recall at all. (Fortunately, our food was among the items not on the recall list.)

I have since discovered, however, that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has an RSS feed for all food recalls and allergy alerts. Once you subscribe, you will be notified via email or through your RSS reader of any items that are contaminated. Isn’t technology great?

While we’re on the subject of information about what we eat, I also found this article in last week’s Globe and Mail. It references the PC beef recall to inform us that as consumers, we never really know where our food comes from. Items that say “Made in Canada” may mean that the food is only packaged in Canada but the raw materials are produced or grown in another country altogether. For those of us who want to eat Canadian beef to support our local industries may have to look further than the product packaging to find out if a box of frozen burgers fits the bill. I am again reminded of Paul Robert’s The End of Food and the economics of modern food production: companies now search for the lowest price on raw materials from around the globe, awarding supplier contracts to the lowest bidder, whether they be from Red Deer or the Red Sea.

The sky is still falling, right?

Agribusiness is in the news. Perhaps my attentions are tuned in after having read Paul Roberts’ The End of Food and I’m noticing articles that were previously off my radar.

We have this article in today’s Globe and Mail about engineering tastier vegetables to meet consumer demands. Initially, I can’t help agreeing with Jamie Reaume, executive director of the Holland Marsh Growers' Association: “The overriding concern that always pops up when you start to deal with vegetables is what was wrong with the original taste and why are people trying to improve it?” Then I remember that we are human, always striving to create something better, whether it be to sell or to savour.

I’m certainly not as gloomsday centered as the target Star reader, given the tone of this article on the California über-strawberry. Those big red strawberries we see in grocery stores, available nine months of the year for as low as $2 a pint are obviously bad news, given that they’re grown 5,000 km away and are engineered in every possible way. Packed within a tiny paragraph, however, is the truth of food production on a large scale: high volumes and crop specialization yields fruit that is more efficient and produces fewer greenhouse gases per pound than fruit I would grown in my backyard. But forget about that. They’ve got to be bad in other ways, so keep feeling guilty that we’re all ruining life as we know it.

Speaking of California strawberries, I’ve got some in my fridge that I bought on sale for a couple bucks the other day. Time for a smoothie.