As the designated science geek here, I was happy to see an report that a majority of voters of both parties list science as an important issue. Although democrats feel more strongly about it that do republicans, voters across the board support research into science and technology, with emphasis on the three E’s: education, environment, and energy.

Sadly, at least with the candidates, agriculture (one of my other favorite subjects) does not appear to hold nearly as strong a position, according to some ag publications. Given the state of the FDA, rising food costs and biofuels, perhaps it should.

There was a recent NYTimes article about how our brains can lead us to remember false statements as being true, if they are heard often enough. In addition, (as I posted earlier) we are prone to selectively accept and remember statements that reinforce beliefs we already hold. We tend to remember news that accords with our views, and discount statements that contradict it.

Recently, I was disturbed to receive a fwd:fwd:fwd’ed e-mail from a man whose integrity and values I generally respect. In it, we are warned against electing a “Black, male, Muslim extremist between the ages of 17 and 40″; listing that as the profile of a terrorist. Although they named the candidate for whom we would be “stupid” to vote, he is a Christian and he’s 3 years older than me, (and although I’d love to be in that age bracket, I can’t pull it off).

Two of our basic freedoms are freedom of choice and of speech. I enjoy political debate and believe the internet to be a wonderful tool through which we can all have a voice. We’ve certainly got enough pressing national and international issues on which to base our vote. I hate to see fear, hatred, bigotry and falsehoods be used in a country that is supposed to be fighting against such things.

Outside the political arena, the NYT piece hits home with me as the editor of this blog, too. This blog is based on being non-propagandal. Our aim is to sift through the misconceptions, rhetoric and sometimes outright falsehoods regarding food safety, production, agriculture and technology. Some of what is “common knowledge” is not accurate, some of what is written is slanted to prove a point, some is written to attract attention by being sensational. As the NYT says:

“In a replication of the study … researchers found that even when subjects were given a specific instruction to be objective, they were still inclined to reject evidence that disagreed with their beliefs.

In the same study, however, when subjects were asked to imagine their reaction if the evidence had pointed to the opposite conclusion, they were more open-minded to information that contradicted their beliefs. Apparently, it pays for consumers of controversial news to take a moment and consider that the opposite interpretation may be true.“

I again challenge you on this 4th of July (and through the year), to be aware of your information filter, challenge your biases and take a look at the other side, especially when your reactions are strongest. Truth will stand up to the light of investigation.

10 Tips for Homemade Ice Cream Success: From Serious Eats. What would the 4th of July be without icecream? And I staunchly maintain that if you make it yourself, you can consider it a “local food”!

The Small Screen With a Big Impact: from Blogher. Some scary statistics. The average child in the US sees 15,000 commercials annually that promote candy, highly sweetened and processed food and fast food. One more reason to get the kids off their duff and out into the garden!

Best and Safest Sunscreens: Just in time for the long weekend, Environmental Working Group has released a comprehensive review of sunscreens based on UVA and UVB protection, as well as presence or absence of harmful chemicals.

Cow Fat Motor Oil: from EcoGeek. Another cool green-geek find from one of my favorite sites. This motor oil is made from animal fat, biodegrades sufficiently that it can be safely poured on the ground and is non-toxic!

Common livestock production practices coming under fire. from Advocates for Agriculture. Procedures such as castration are coming under fire as being “mutilations”. Being a big proponent of preventing unwanted pregnancies (in any species), this seems like a slippery slope to me.

WIC-ensuring buying power through prohibiting organic: From US Food Policy. There’s no arguing that organic foods are generally higher priced. The Michigan WIC program has placed limits on foods in an effort to increase the nutritive buying power of food stamps. Along with many convenience items, organics are specifically prohibited on many foods.

Nourishing Frugal Food: found via the Nourished Kitchen . The Nourishing Gourmet is having a frugal food festival. July 11th is main dishes and July 18th is sides and salads. Hmm, I’ll have to post a recipe from here to contribute. With two growing boys, I sure know about stretching the grocery dollar!

A recent research study of conventional and outdoor antimicrobial-free (no antibiotics) production systems showed pigs raised outdoors without the use of routine antibiotics carried more bacteria and parasites, according to Feedstuffs newspaper. The research sampled pigs from three states (WI, NC, OH) and compared “niche-market, outdoor and antimicrobial-free (no antibiotics)” to “intensive indoor (conventional)” rearing systems.

Blood tests showed the outdoor pigs had significantly more exposure to Salmonella and Toxoplasma. Two pigs from different outdoor farms had antibodies to Trichinella. Trichinella is the parasite that infests muscles, and is the primary reason we have all been conditioned to cook pork thoroughly. The parasite has been virtually eliminated from conventional rearing systems.

I admit to being a little surprised by the research. In keeping with my science-geek image, I tracked down the authors, who very kindly sent me a copy of the original research paper. The research seems solid, and the stats are supported by other research in this country and in Europe.

So why the higher infection rate in outdoor pigs? The reasons given by the authors include exposure to wild and domestic animals (i.e. cats can carry trichinella), and access to soil and moisture which are viable environments for pathogens.

The skeptic in me can’t help wondering exactly what the outdoor systems studied were? Were they just raised in outdoor pens, or were they “pasture-raised” where they were foraging for a significant part of their diet? It is common in the chicken industry, where “free-range, vegetarian-fed” chicken and eggs abound, for such chickens to have access to the outdoors, but be no more pasture-raised than if they were confined indoors.

It is important to remember that many production practices that come under fire, such as indoor rearing and antibiotics, were put into place to increase food safety and/or animal welfare in response to increasingly intensive animal production. Merely removing these practices without addressing the reasons they were implemented in the first place does not necessarily bring about the benefits to humans or animals envisioned by consumers who purchase based on a “free-range” label.

Would you like some fish oil with your yogurt? Yoplait and other yogurts now contain added omega-3 oil. Just 29 servings gets your child his/her daily dose of this heart-healthy nutrient. Omega-3 yogurt will dent your wallet more than it will grow their brains. Maybe it’s best to just eat some fish.

Food Prices and Land Use: Via Food Law Prof Blog. Ross Clark maintains our food shortage could be cured by better use of the world’s land.

Living Green: A great article in the Austin-American Statesperson. Are you up to the challenge of buying less, buying used and environmentally friendly cleaners, cosmetics and other products?

The Price of Food: A comparison of retail and farm gate prices for fruit, vegetable, grain and livestock products between May 2007 and May 2008. Looks like peanut butter will be a bargain protein source!

Take a Green Roof Safari. From Ecogeeks. Going to Europe this fall? Take a tour of green roof projects in Germany or Switzerland. More information on green roofs can be found at greenroof.com

I think that it is important, amidst all the brouhaha over genetically modified food, to remember that even if a child is eating homegrown vegetables and all natural meats, eating habits are what will really make a difference in the child’s life. In today’s world, where childhood obesity is, to use the popular vernacular, an epidemic, parents need to stop worrying so much about the pros and cons of cloned cattle and start questioning that second serving of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia that little Jimmy is having after dinner.

The blame for childhood obesity, of course, cannot be place completely on the shoulders of the parents of obese children; society is at fault to some extent here. If a child is brought up to be skewed away from looking at the long term benefits of eating a serving of broccoli with dinner, he will be driven in the opposite direction: to seek and crave sugar. It is here that parents needs to come in and help “un-skew” the judgment of their child. While childhood obesity may be genetic to some extent, healthy eating and exercise habits can make all the difference.

A recent article in TIME magazine poses the questions:

How do you effectively control another person’s eating behavior? How do you motivate someone–especially a young, impulsive, pleasure-driven someone–to make smart food choices, to get up off the couch, to turn off the television? And how do you accomplish that without making that young person feel deprived, coerced or–worse yet–judged and found wanting?

Lead by example. (More on the importance of this in the blog Life in Your Years.) Eat healthy, home-cooked meals, and if that isn’t a possibility then do your best to avoid fast food. Take your child out to play in a park or a pool. If your child is a teenager, get Dad to work up an excercise routine with him. For mothers and daughters, the all-female gym, Curves, is instituting a bring-your-daughter-to-the-gym policy. Above all, please don’t let your child adopt the TV as an older sibling/added parent. If you lay down ground rules on food and activity, they will listen.

And why not make it fun? Christine at Our Bodies Our Blog took a stab at it, and found some suggestions for us too.

If you have something special that you do with/for your kids to keep them moving or eating healthy, please comment and share!

Since April, there have been 613 people identified as infected with Salmonella St. Paul in this country. For the most part, consumers have embraced the warnings and precautions put out by the FDA. (btw, Barfblog has an excellent collection of posts on this subject, including suggestions for ensuring safety of farmer’s market tomatoes).

From 1998-2005 there were 831 illnesses reported from unpasturized (raw) milk and cheese. Considering the number of people eating tomatoes vs. consuming raw milk, the per-consumer illness rate has got to be much higher for milk. Yet, government intervention in raw milk sales is not met with nearly the same attitude as seen in the case of tomatoes. Why?

For one thing, milk is probably the most emotion-charged food there is. It is so closely associated with children and wholesomeness that is it literally a “sacred cow” when it comes to safety, adulteration, regulation, hormones, antibiotics…. I’ve seen more conflicting statistics quoted about raw milk than almost any other food topic I’ve researched. (What’s that saying about lies, damned lies and statistics?). It’s hard to find a balanced piece of reporting on this topic, but there was one in the Seattle PI recently.

Raw milk advocates abound, and have some valid, or at least interesting points. For one thing, it DOES taste better (IMHO). There are claims of it being less of an allergen, easier to digest, and more healthful in a number of ways. There are a number of sites promoting raw milk. Sadly, most of them seem so fanatical, that I find it hard have faith in their statements and facts. If any of you know of good, sound, science-based raw milk sites or references, please let me know!

So, I’m not going to give you a pat yes or no answer on raw milk. If you choose to go raw, I will advise you to at least be sure of the following:

• purchase from a state-certified dairy (this is one reason I hate to see states outlaw raw milk-it turns it into an unregulated black-market item)
• be absolutely certain the milk is chilled immediately (this is not just stuck in the refrigerator, it is chilled in the equivalent of a circulating ice bath)
• drink your raw milk before it is a week old (the sooner the better). This means a week from when it was milked, NOT purchased!
• Be sure your dairy is testing routinely for coliform and other bacterial contaminants
• visit the dairy, if possible, before you trust their product. i.e. know your producer

I grew up on the raw milk produced by my family’s traditional dairy farm. We drank the milk from our bulk milk tank; it was not pasteurized until it got to the processing plant. BUT, I’m not even tempted to buy raw milk now. The primary reason is that without pasteurization, I am completely reliant on the producer to ensure that my milk is safe. In addition, the raw milk I grew up on was consumed within 24-48 hours of milking. I find it extremely difficult to trust raw milk from a dairy shelf in the health food store. I do know some local, certified raw milk dairies from which I would be comfortable purchasing. They all have waiting lists for customers.

Hello readers…yesterday amidst the parties, networking, and actually working for clients, I had a chance to attend an educational session. And I’m so glad I did for two reasons: I learned something, which one always hopes to, but rarely does at these conferences; but more importantly, had a reminder of how blessed I am to live the life I have. The panel, “Biotech Crops in Center of Origin: The Case of Corn and Mexico” was organized by Monsanto (please suspend your cynicism and keep reading) and the Mexican Confederation of Corn Peasants (CNPAMM).

A little background. Mexico is the center of origin for corn, which most of the world refers to as maize. Over thousands of years it has evolved from teosinte shown at the left in this photo (thank you John Doebley, Univ. of Wisconsin), to the familiar corn on the right. This was done by plant breeding, or crop “manipulation” by man. The point being that had farmers not “interfered with” mother nature, this food staple for Mexico, where one billion corn tortillas are consumed each day (that’s an average of 10 per person) we’d be noshing on something other than nachos during the Super Bowl. Because Mexico is the center of origin for this crop that has cultural and religious associations for the populace, there has been tension about the introduction of biotech corn to the region, particularly in the state of Oaxaca. Corn, in case you didn’t know, is a very promiscuous plant whose pollen is prone to mix with other corns, whether they’re interested or not. For those who want to preserve the many different land races (or varieties) of native corn, this is a problem.

OK, history lesson over and back to the present. The session opened with a presentation in Spanish, by Carlos Salazar, Secretary General of CNPAMM. CNPAMM is part of CNC, the National Confederation of Mexican Peasants, with more than 2 million members. Fortunately, a translator was at hand. He shared with the audience a video that interviewed the peasant farmers and showed them planting and growing their crops. It was a poignant illustration that despite the profound advancements that have been made in agriculture, many have been left behind. These smallholder farmers are using the same “technology” that their ancestors used to grow teosinte. They (or their children) plant the corn by hand, one seed at a time. They use yoked animals to pull a plow to work the fields. Everything is done by hand, including harvest where each corn is pulled from the stalk one at a time, and placed in a basket on the back of the worker as he or she walks the field. They then sell the corn for a peso, but it costs them two pesos to buy the corn if they need more. Their stories were moving, telling of the difficulty of raising a family, the disruption of the community as their children leave for the greener pastures of the north (the U.S.), and the desire to have a better life and more education for their children. These are the people that outside interests are trying to “protect” from the incursion of the fruits of today’s modern plant breeding: genetically modified corn varieties that have been improved to resist insects, survive drought, and yield more corn per acre. As I looked at the earnest expressions on sun ravaged faces, sharing smiles that reflected a lack of the dental care we take for granted, I was counting my blessings.

The video set the stage for the purpose of the panel which was to tell the international gathering about a project to both conserve native species, as well as find opportunities to support the farmers and find value opportunities for the native germplasms. I’ve been watching the evolution and acceptance of biotech crops since 2000, and to me, this program is a reflection of the growing maturity of an industry. When the biotech crops were first introduced, it was all speed ahead and touting of the tremendous benefits the crops offer to farmers. Developed by scientists, to whom it was incomprehensible that anyone could object to crops that could be grown with less labor, fewer pesticides, improved yield, less fuel use, and built-in insect resistance, industry was stunned when groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth launched massive campaigns to stop the introduction of these crops. Industry has slowly and painfully come to understand that societal concerns must be addressed to help the ultimate user of the crops, the consumer, better understand this radical transformation of crop production. The maize program, discussed at great detail and in earnest by the panel members, shows the evolution of corporate seed developers to recognize this learning and develop socially responsible programs to address the needs of two different kinds of farmers, the smallholder who wants to both preserve a culturally important crop, but still find a way to benefit from newer seeds, and what the group called professional farmers, who have access to modern machinery, the best seeds, and who grow on the large scale necessary to feed a country that is required to import substantial amounts of corn from other countries to feed its people.

It was a wonderful, but sparsely attended session. The program could be a model for others to study as they work to introduce other crop varieties that have important cultural associations that merit preserving, balanced with a need to continue as man has done for centuries, to improve the crop making it more sustainable to meet changing needs.

A full description of the panel and participants can be found here.

Here I am (second from left) at last night’s international food and ag reception.  My new friends are from Argentina, Mexico and Brazil. Click for the full size!

In honor of our blogger-on-the-road, Lisa, we’re going geeky with this week’s Earthlinks.

Should Biotech companies Blog? Are blogs by biotech companies a good idea from a corporate standpoint? Maybe if more companies had open blogs, there might actually be some real communication.

Animal Research, Giving the Gift of Life: a guest post on noted Ethicist Terry Etherton’s blog, by Barb Glenn, (a wonderful woman and friend from the Bio Industry Organization) .

Guaranteed Tender Steak: from Feedstuffs Foodlink. Technology to the rescue–University of Nebraska scientists have developed a method of identifying tender beef while it is in the processing plant.

Plants have Social Lives: also from Feedstuffs Foodlink. Plant behavior is more complex than you think. If plants are sentient, does that affect how we should grow, harvest and eat them?

Kudzu-A Potential Biofuel: from Ecogeek. The “plant that ate the South” may be the answer to Suzanne’s biofuel headache.

And as always, one slightly less serious link to end:

Make your own icecream drumsticks:  Does this make icecream count as “local food”?

When BIO has a party, BIO has a party! Last night at the conference here in San Diego, the state of Georgia hosted a fabulous welcome reception for thousands of us lucky conventioneers. It was on the U.S.S. Midway, “the longest-serving carrier in the history of the U.S. Navy,” and now a museum. This was my first visit to an actual aircraft carrier — it is enormous! 

We arrived at dusk and ascended stairs to enter the cavernous body of the ship — food and beverage stations everywhere, people trying out the flight simulators and admiring the historic aircraft on display. But it was such a beautiful night I headed up to the flight deck where you really encounter the stunning size of this ship. There were at least a half dozen different full size planes sitting around to admire. I ran in to a friend who gave me an informal tour, and our walk to the front of the ship took forever, since it is 1001 feet long, which I think is close to 2/3 of a mile; and it’s 248 feet wide.

The party seemed to have a Polynesian theme with 20 foot tall colorfully lit “heads” and figures interspersed along the deck. And there were also hula dancers. Not sure their connection is to the ship and its history (maybe it was mainly based in the Pacific?) but it certainly made for a festive evening. And midwaythrough the evening (get it?) the city skyline was illuminated with a fireworks display. They were a small distraction from the beautiful full moon. I love fireworks, and my ship guide who happens to be a member of the pyrotechnics society, was positively giddy and we both were snapping photos of the spectacle. The evening drew to a close and this very tired girl with sore feet gladly hopped on the shuttle bus to head back to the hotel to close out another day at BIO2008. Tomorrow I hope to tell you about some of the advances in ag I’m learning about here, and how researchers are working to develop better and more nutritious foods.