Lots of people think this is a bum deal, including me and my representative - Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D, Connecticut). “At a time when the country is experiencing numerous food-borne illness outbreaks…” says Rep. DeLauro. “it is disappointing that the F.D.A. issues a nonbinding, voluntary guidance document that does nothing and merely tells growers what they already know.” Caroline Smith deWaal, director of food safety at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, agreed, calling the F.D.A.’s announcement “too little, too late.”

The F.D.A’s feeble defense is that couldn’t issue regulations without “complete scientific proof” of what caused the disease outbreaks. That doesn’t cut it with Ms. deWaal. “We don’t need perfect science to tell the industry to enforce many common sense safety precautions, like farm workers washing their hands and testing the wash water to see if a batch of produce is contaminated before combining it with other batches,” she said. Hank Giclas, VP of science and technology for Western Growers, an association representing about half the fresh produce sold in America and almost all Californian produce, agrees that the lack of scientific “proof” shouldn’t stop growers from doing what they can. “We don’t have definitive science in every area, so one of the things we are trying to do is act responsible in the absence of information,” said Giclas.

Most California produce growers are with him. After the recent produce-borne disease outbreaks, California produce growers took a huge beating. They chose to set their own strict rules, in the form of a marketing agreement, to try and prevent more outbreaks, probably realizing they might have to wait years for the F.D.A. to set mandatory safe handling rules. Even though they may not know exactly how the spinach became contaminated with E. Coli, Giclas says they can still “minimize the risk,” by doing simple things like setting guidelines for water quality, and worker sanitation. The president of Western Growers, Tom Nassif, says “Nothing is preventing the F.D.A. from doing what we already have done.”

Nothing except a big ol’ bag of fresh-cut bureaucracy, that is.

1. Keep it simple. Buy food instead of “product:” A bag of actual rice instead of New Orleans-style pilaf mix; steel-cut oatmeal in a cannister instead of individual maple n’ brown sugar packets. Pre-seasoned food products are loaded with salt, additives and colors, besides being more expensive. Why pay extra for that?

2. Eat what’s in season. When you buy strawberries in February (unless you live in the lucky lands where they grow year-round), you’re essentially paying extra for the fuel they put in the plane the berries have to take to get to you. Save yourself money and keep the extra emissions out of the air by eating them in the summer. Eating what’s in season also encourages you to try fruits and vegetables that may be new to you, which will help get more variety in your diet - something experts agree is key to maintaining good overall health.

3. Buy food as close to its natural state as you can - that way, you aren’t paying for the processing. Instead of buying bagged, pre-washed salad blends, buy a head of lettuce. You’ll get twice the lettuce for half the money, and more nutrition too - fresh foods start losing nutritional value as soon as they’re picked, and it only gets worse as time goes on.

4. Buy local if you have the option. Farmers’ markets are a great source of delicious, inexpensive produce in spring, summer and fall. You’re keeping emissions out of the air, getting more nutritious food, and supporting your local economy. Also, pesticides that aren’t legal for use in the United States are legal in many other countries that export produce to the United States. By buying local (or at least domestic) produce, you’re lowering your risk of exposure to pesticides deemed unsafe by the USDA. You can’t beat that!

5. Out of season, or in areas of the country where farming isn’t widespread, frozen fruits and veggies are a great money-saver. Picked at the peak of ripeness and frozen immediately, they retain lots of good nutrients. Plus, frozen stuff is dirt cheap compared to fresh - frozen organic vegetables are often less expensive than fresh conventional produce.

6. Try having a meat free dinner at least once a week. Not only will lowering your consumption of animal protein lower your risk of high cholesterol, heart disease and certain cancers, it’ll also lower your grocery bill. Think about it: chicken breast is around $3.89 a pound at my supermarket, whereas baking potatoes are under a dollar a pound. Growing vegetables and legumes also has less of an impact on the environment than animal agriculture. Black bean burritos, anyone?

7. A potted kitchen herb garden is a lovely way to brighten up your cooking space and save some cash. Buying fresh herbs at the supermarket can really add up, but they give wonderful flavor and phytonutrients to your meals. A small potted herb garden is a great solution, plus, having live plants in your home freshens your air.

8. Watch out for snack foods - many people eat healthfully otherwise, but fool themselves into thinking that snack foods “don’t count.” Not so - packaged chips, snacks and cookies are full of additives, salt, and hydrogenated oils. Try some roasted nuts or dried fruits. They’re less expensive, and much better for you.

9. Make your own coffee or tea. That way you can make sure you’re not getting loads of sugar and additives from flavored syrups, or saturated fat from whole-milk foam. Who can afford $3.61 a day for a grande 2% mocha anyway? That’s $1317.65 a year!

10. Do some of your own baking. Commercially produced pastry, cookies, cakes and breads often conceal trans fats, high fructose corn syrup and other bad guys, besides which, let’s face it, white flour is not the greatest thing for you anyway. If you do just a little baking at home, you can substitute half whole wheat flour, use non-hydrogenated shortening or canola oil. You’ll be saving money - flour costs next to nothing - and the world, by eating cookies that you made yourself instead of cookies that came from a factory and traveled thousands of miles to get to your supermarket. And you’ll give yourself the simple pleasure of a wonderful-smelling kitchen.

Eating foods that are grown nearer to your home cuts down on pollution in many forms. It doesn’t have to fly or drive cross-country in a refrigerated truck, spewing emissions, to reach you. Buying local food supports your local economy, and the food you eat is fresher, cleaner, and probably tastier. For one thing, it hasn’t been knocking around in a dusty crate. For another, foods that have to travel long distances are bred for durability, not taste. Barbara Fisher, an Athens cooking teacher, calls such produce “flavorless,” and “plastic.” She prefers the local kind: “When people bite into ripe strawberries from a local farmer and the sweet juice bursts into their mouths, their eyes roll back into their heads, and they moan.”

Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon of Vancouver were among the first to try a “100-mile diet,” as they called it. Disturbed by the fact that the ingredients in typical North American meals travel an average of 1,500 (!) miles to get on the plate, Smith and MacKinnon vowed to eat only whatever foods came from within the hundred-mile circle around Vancouver for one year, starting in the spring of 2005.

According to Smith and MacKinnon, advance planning is key if you want to do it for real.

“We walked into the diet cold turkey for a full year, and it was hard. For example, we live on the West Coast, so it took us seven months to find a rogue local farmer who actually grows wheat. Meanwhile, we ate an unbelievable number of potatoes. Doing the diet the hard way taught us a lot about the current food system, but it isn’t for everybody. A more realistic approach is to plan a single, totally 100-mile meal with friends or family, and see where you want to go from there.”

In August of 2005, four San Francisco women named their group “the Locavores,” and challenged Bay Area eaters to eat only foods from their “Foodshed,” - the 100-mile region surrounding San Francisco - for a month.”With gas prices spiking, people are concerned about our dependence on petroleum,” said co-founder Jessica Prentice. “Why import apples from New Zealand when we can grow them nearby?”

Many more have followed their lead. In the past two years, locavore groups and challenges have sprouted all over North America. Google the term, and you’ll come up with about 38,700 entries. If you’d like more information, a good place to start is www.100milediet.org.

The heat of pasteurization destroys vitamins and beneficial bacteria, like lactobacillus (think yogurt), enzymes and immune factors. Raw, or unpasteurized milk, still contains these microscopic factors. Some say it can cure asthma, eczema and other chronic diseases - even hepatitis C, according to one New Jersey man, who attributes his consumption of raw milk to the fact that the virus is now undetectable in his system. The Weston A. Price Foundation, a group that touts the health benefits of so-called “traditional” foods, including raw dairy, has 400 chapters around the world, and thousands of people are joining each month. Sally Fallon, nutrition activist, and the group’s founder, says “People are sick and searching for answers - and they’re getting better.”

In fact, raw cow’s milk, just like human milk, is full of active antibacterial factors that may actually kill dangerous germs. Mark McAfee, owner of Organic Pastures dairy, is regularly investigated by the FDA. “They’ve never found a pathogen,” McAfee says. He even sent samples of his milk to a private lab, and had them purposely contaminated with high levels of harmful bacteria including Salmonella and E. Coli. The number of bacteria decreased with time, leading the lab to report that “raw milk [does] not appear to support the growth” of these germs, inhibiting it instead.

The FDA and the American Medical Association are dead set against the practice of drinking raw milk, officially. John Sheehan, the director of dairy and egg saftey at the FDA, likens drinking raw milk to “playing Russian roulette.” Surprisingly, raw milk activist Rahman Dalrymple agrees - sort of. “Raw milk is dangerous,” he says, “if you get it from one of these industrial dairies that have fecal matter and pus and blood in their milk.”

According to Dalrymple, the difference between raw milk from a dirty industrial farm, and raw milk from a spotless organic farm, is lost on the hopelessly bureacratic FDA. He maintains that pasteurization actually increases the likelihood that milk will be dirty - it does nothing to stop milk from becoming contaminated to begin with. The legally acceptable level of bacteria in pasteurized milk is almost five times that for raw, some 50,000 CFU per millileter. Sally Fallon agrees, noting that because pasteurization destroys the immune factors normally present in milk, widespread contamination actually becomes more likely with pasteurized milk, as it lacks those protective factors.

Ok, FDA. We got it. Cloned food = safe. Raw milk = dangerous. Regardless of whether you believe in raw milk’s magical powers, it’s not going to be showing up at your local megamart anytime soon. It’s been illegal to sell it across state lines since 1987. If you’re interested, you’ll have to drive to one of the 22 states where it is legal to buy, unless, of course, you have your own cow. What a world.

The FDA cautiously announced last Thursday that meat and milk from cloned animals is safe for human consumption. Some farmers, like rancher and vet Donald Coover of Kansas, see this as a boon: they’ll be able to produce a fairly standard, high-quality “product,” demonstrating the very best characteristics their stock has to offer, without depending on the chancy genetics of sexual reproduction. We wouldn’t even be eating the cloned animals themselves, say advocates. At close to $20,000 a pop, they’re too pricey to just get ground into burgers. Instead, cloned animals would be used mostly for breeding, to ensure a certain uniformity throughout a farmer’s stock.

On the surface, this seems like a sound, consumer-savvy business practice: Americans love a predictable, high-quality, standardized product experience - chains from Starbucks to Denny’s can attest to that. According to the FDA, numerous studies have also shown no real differences exist between meat and milk from healthy cloned animals, and those from their more traditionally born counterparts. Stephen F. Sundlof, chief of veterinary medicine for the FDA says they “have looked very, very closely,” at the results, and nothing indicates cloned food “is conceivably hazardous to the public health.”

Unfortunately for farmers like Coover and other advocates of cloning animals for food, it’s unclear whether anyone would eat the stuff, given the chance. A September poll by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology found that 64 percent of Americans polled were “uncomfortable” with food from cloned sources. Oh, and by the way, the jury is still out on not only the safety of such food, but the ethics surrounding its production.

Michael Pollan, author of the bestselling book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is against the practice, because of the very uniformity of quality cloning advocates are after. He calls such uniformity a “monoculture,” explaining in a recent San Francisco Chronicle piece, “wherever you have a monoculture, it’s exquisitely vulnerable to all kinds of shocks, in this case disease. To keep a paddock full of genetically identical animals healthy would take more drugs.” More antibiotics that would trickle their way into our own bodies, reducing their antibiotic effectiveness for treating human disease, and increasing antibiotic resistance in common germs already omnipresent in our food supply (anybody remember the Taco Bell debacle of ‘06?) 

The Humane Society of the United States believes the FDA should ban sales of food from a supply chain containing cloned farm animals, citing “serious concerns about the health and welfare of cloned animals.” Carol Tucker Foreman, Food Policy Director of the Consumer Federation of America, agrees. She says the FDA has ignored outright studies that show more cloned animals die or are deformed than those conceived more traditionally. Foreman also thinks cloning doesn’t make economic sense. Take the hypothetical example of a cow, cloned because of a superior ability to produce milk in quantity. According to Foreman, the U.S. government is already buying surplus milk from American dairy farmers, because U.S. farmers are producing more milk than Americans can drink. “Since 1999, dairy support programs have cost taxpayers over $5 billion,” said Foreman. Andrew Kimbrell at the Center for Food Safety puts it more strongly, saying “this administration has not been paying attention to food safety. So this is like a Katrina on your plate.”

One thing that is clear is that this debate is far from resolved. Food from cloned animals may or may not be safe, ethical, or economically viable. Fortunately for us, the FDA is still accepting public comment until April. Look into the matter and then go and let them know what you decide.

One of the reasons trans fats are so bad for human consumption is because they last a really, really long time without breaking down. Products made with trans fat are more “shelf-stable,” meaning they can sit on supermarket shelves for months and not go bad. This is also what they do in your arteries. Natural, healthy oils, like peanut oil or flaxseed oil, have an unfortunate tendency to go rancid more quickly, shrinking food manufacturers’ profit margins. So what do they do? Consumers know trans fat is bad, so they have to use less shelf-stable oils. The solution: add something questionable to make them last longer.

Food manufacturers, forced to give up trans fat, have started adding an additive called tBHQ to the oils they’re using to replace their old partially hydrogenated standbys. tBHQ, or tertiary butylhydroquinone, is an “antioxidant” - but not the good kind. It’s a petroleum-based food additive that keeps oils from going rancid. This means companies can buy big, cheap batches of oil, and let them sit around unrefrigerated - another money saver. The problem is, multiple studies have linked tBHQ to bladder and kidney cancers  - in fact, it’s used to predictably induce tumors in test animals (It’s in the same family as BHA and BHT, both of which have been banned in England, both of which have been proven carcinogenic, and both of which you should also avoid).

So the next time you’re in the supermarket, and you see a beautiful, shiny box of crackers (or whatever) proudly proclaiming “Zero Grams Trans Fat,” I suggest you do two things. First, check the ingredients for the words “hydrogenated” or “partially hydrogenated” (they’re used interchangeably) anyway, because if there’s less than .5 grams trans fat per serving, they’re allowed to say “Zero,” for reasons which are clearly not in the best interests of the American “consumer.” Then, check around where the oils are listed for tBHQ - sometimes they will say “to protect freshness,” - and if you see it, ditch the box.

Protect yourself, and protect your health. Check the nutrition facts label on everything you buy - a good guideline is, if the ingredients list is longer than your thumbnail, look for an alternative. Happy reading!

For more information on food additives and their relative safety, go to www.feingold.org.   

Fast forward 100 years, to the present day. The year of lethal spinach, killer green onions, disease-ridden tomatoes. It’s happening again, and two contemporary American authors are trying to carry Sinclair’s torch, encouraging a news-blasted and terror-fatigued public to get interested in its own safety. Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) each recently spoke up about the politics of food in America, and why people are getting sick.

Both agree that our food supply-chain has become disastrously centralized and industrialized. To give a few scary examples: 13 slaughterhouses process most of the beef for 300 million Americans. Beef “factories” process 400 cattle an hour, a speed which makes it “impossible to keep manure off carcasses.” Meat and veggies interact at “distribution centers,” like the Taco Bell one under investigation now - the one that supplies more than a thousand restaurants with food.

And the proverbial wolf is guarding the henhouse, and spreading salmonella in the process. According to Schlosser, the government agencies that are supposed to regulate food safety are headed by powerful members of the industry they are supposed to be regulating. The current head of the Agriculture Department used to be a lobbyist for the beef industry, and the most recent head of the FDA was a top exec at the National Food Processors Association. Since the year 2000, the biggest food-safety offenders, the fast-food and meat-packing industries, have given 80% of political donations to Republicans, who in turn basically gave them control of their own regulatory agencies. Budget cuts have brought down the number of FDA inspections from 35,000 a year in the 1970’s to just 3,400 a year today.

Consumer reports released a study last week saying 83% of grocery-store chickens were contaminated with bacteria - salmonella, campylobacter, or both at once. Pollan, in a recent interview with Salon, warned that strains of the bacteria contaminating our food are antibiotic resistant, making them deadly. “Salmonella was not as serious a problem a few years ago; it was very common…most of us could fight it with antibiotics, but once you get an antibiotic-resistant strain, it’s a big problem…”

Centralization means these deadlier bacteria can spread much more easily, and it also makes our nation’s food system vulnerable to deliberate threats, like bioterrorism. “Most of the nation’s chickens are coming out of a handful of plants where they’ve all been in the same water bath,” says Pollan. “This is a petri dish.” Because of the many conflicts of interest between the regulatory agencies and the food industry, the USDA doesn’t even have the power to order a recall of tainted meat - any recall would have to be voluntary.

Scared yet? So am I. Now here’s what you can do. Whenever possible, buy locally grown and processed food. Believe it or not, there are still actual butcher shops and vegetable markets in many American cities and towns. If that’s not possible, or if the cost is prohibitive, buy food that comes from a smaller (non-industrial) supplier - grocery chains like Whole Foods and Wild Oats are trustworthy on this count and source their food very carefully. Vote with your wallet; don’t buy food from giant corporations that have made the supply chain less safe. Wash all your fruits and vegetables thoroughly. Rinse your meat before you cook it, and make sure it comes to a safe internal temperature - this will kill off many dangerous bacteria. And pester, pester, pester your elected officials about this issue. No matter what your political beliefs are, you and your family - and mine - need safe food to eat.

Everybody knows that vitamin C is your friend, but what everybody doesn’t know is that the massive doses you get in a vitamin C supplement are less bioavailable - that is, less useful to your body - than vitamin C that you absorb from actual food. So instead of taking a pill, stock up on C-rich frozen strawberries or papaya, or eat half a grapefruit for breakfast.

Bioflavenoids help protect the body from environmental pollutants, and carotenoids boost your numbers of infection-fighting cells. Make sure you get at least six servings of a rainbow of fruits and vegetables, and you’ll be all set for both. Avocados, seeds and nuts are packed with vitamin E, which ups the body’s production of B-cells, or bacteria-fighting cells. Pick up a handful of mixed nuts each time you pass the hors d’oeuvres table.

Skip the sweets though, if you can (sorry!). I know - gingerbread houses, cakes, cookies and pies are lurking around every corner this time of year. Unfortunately, not only will they go straight to your hips, they’ll also knock out your resistance to germs. According to Dr. William Sears, an expert in family nutrition, “Eating or drinking 100 grams (8 tbsp.) of sugar, the equivalent of one 12-ounce can of soda, can reduce the ability of white blood cells to kill germs by forty percent. The immune-suppressing effect of sugar starts less than thirty minutes after ingestion and may last for five hours.” Alcohol is a proven immunosuppresant too, so pass on that third glass of eggnog, or at least hold the brandy.

Garlic has proven immune boosting and antiviral properties, and selenium helps increase germ-killing and anti-cancer cells. Hit your local Italian restaurant when you’re too tuckered out to cook, and try some nice garlicky shrimp scampi or roasted garlic lamb chops for a one-two punch. Omega-3 fatty acids, which are abundant in fatty, cold-water fish, rev up your white blood cells. Marinate some salmon steaks in garlic and lemon for a germ-busting triple threat.

If you do succumb to the germs and come down with the sniffles, a nice dose of spices might be just what the doctor ordered. Chili peppers, spicy mustard, onions and radishes all contain “mucolytics,” which thin out secretions in your breathing passages just like expectorants from the drugstore. My Russian husband introduced me to tea made with honey, lemon and a little red pepper flake - about an eighth of a teaspoon will do you. I know, it sounds crazy, but it’s worked wonders for me.

Let your common sense guide you this holiday season. Load up on fruits and veggies, and leave the brandy and cookies for Santa. You’ll thank me when the kids wake you up at five in the morning hollering for presents.

Turns out what I thought was a small health food company is actually owned by Kellogg’s, proud agri-business manufacturer of the Pop Tart. While their corporate website espouses the virtues of “integrity,” “nutritious products,” and “healthy lifestyles,” this particular frozen “health” food product is chock full of goodies like hydrogenated soybean oil (not even just partially hydrogenated!) unspecified artifical flavors, and TBHQ, a harmful preservative “antioxidant” (not the good kind of antioxidant).

Even though you have to bake them in the oven (check minus for the convenience factor, on top of everything else), I decided to make some and eat them anyway. I’m the kind of woman that sees things through. After all, the nuggets listed less than .5 grams of trans fat per serving, so if I only ate three, I’d be limiting my intake of nasty fake fats and artificial flavors to “acceptable” FDA limits.

They tasted exactly like the chicken nuggets we used to get in my school cafeteria - and these were meatless broccoli and cheddar nuggets. Delicious, oily, and very, very fake, with a slight artificial aftertaste I never would have noticed at the age of 11. At the risk of enraging a global food manufacturing concern, I advise you not to buy these nuggets. Not only are they not healthy, they’re addictive - I had to eat the whole tray of them to protect my family from trans fat consumption.

Yeah, that’s it.

It can be very scary going to the grocery store when you have young children. Danger seems to lurk in every aisle - sugary cartoon breakfast cereals and “juice” drinks with no real juice in them are just mild offenders compared to the killer hydrogenated oils lurking in the pastry case and pesticide-laden everything. Fortunately, parents have a formidable ally in the fight against bad-for-you foods: the nutrition facts label.

Red Flags:

First of all, you should pretty much completely ignore claims made on the front of the package. Most of the terms they use, even “all-natural,” aren’t regulated by law and are essentially meaningless. The only term you should be on the lookout for is “USDA Certified Organic.”

Eating organic is more important for young children, because pesticides reach higher concentrations in smaller bodies. The effects of the multiplicity of chemicals used in large-scale food production on small children haven’t been studied very well, but little kids consume more pesticides for their weight than grownups, because they eat more fruits and veggies - little kids who go on applesauce binges, for example. Only certified organic foods are guaranteed to be grown without harmful pesticides and chemicals, although the USDA recently relaxed the rules for foods to be labeled organic (call your senator about it).

Now, down to the meat of the matter. The nutrition facts label on the back of the package is required by law to be factual, and to list ingredients in order of most to least. So, if a product bills itself as having “whole grains,” and whole wheat is listed near the bottom of a long ingredients list, skip it.

Pay close attention to the serving size. Serving size is set by the FDA to be the same for all similar products (for example, potato chips), but it might surprise you how many servings of a food are in a package compared to how much you usually feel like eating. Many soups and beverages, for example, are 2 servings to a can or bottle. Do the math to see how much fat, sugar, and sodium you and your kids are really getting.

Avoid at all costs hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils. In a recent article for Fit Fare, I went into the global negative impact these man-made fats have on the body. They’re so bad, many cities have considered banning them altogether. Hydrogenated oils often hide disguised as “vegetable shortening,” and while some shortening isn’t hydrogenated, most of it is. Avoid it.

Another red flag is high-fructose corn syrup, which is just refined sugar in a bad suit. Most food producers know that the public is trying to avoid sugar, so they dress it up as “crystalline fructose,” or even “organic evaporated cane juice.” You have to look at the Total Carb. line of the nutrition facts label, to see how many grams of sugars are in the food.

Vitamin-fortified foods are often fortified with vitamins because they’re missing something else - sugary breakfast cereals are a big offender here. Naturally occurring vitamins and minerals are more bioavailable and better for the body than vitamins artificially added to a food. Use your common sense here. Reconstituted orange drink fortified with vitamin C isn’t as healthy as fresh-squeezed.

A good rule of thumb is, the closer the food is to its natural state, the more nutritious it is. More processed foods are not as good for you as foods that are minimally processed. This is reflected in the nutrition facts label. If the ingredients list is long and full of weird words you can’t pronounce, look for a substitute food with an ingredients list you can actually understand. Cookies made with unbleached flour, sugar and butter are much better for a kid than cookies made with partially hydrogenated and/or hydrogenated corn and/or cottonseed oil, natural and artificial chocolate and other flavors, yellow # 72, and pyridoxine hydrochloride.

So when your toddler screams “ME WANT COOKIE!” in aisle five, keep a cool head and scan the back of the pack before you tear open the box in the middle of the store. Your grandkids will thank you.

For more information about food labels, visit Dr Sears’ website.