Month: January 2004

Dean Cliver, a professor of food safety at the University of California, Davis, found that microwaving sponges — cellulose ones, not the natural kind — wipes out harmful bacteria. “We did soak sponges in some pretty bad things,” he said, “and one minute in the nuke and that pretty much did it.”

Dishcloths also become saturated with bacteria, although since they dry more quickly than sponges, bacteria are less likely to breed. They can be microwaved, too, or simply laundered regularly.

Professor Cliver’s other notable discovery involved cutting boards. “Somewhere along the line, wood got a bad name,” Professor Cliver said. Part of the blame, he said, must go to the rubber industry, which assailed wood cutting boards in order to promote hard rubber and plastic. In recent years, it has become conventional wisdom that plastic cutting boards are safer and easier to clean than wood cutting boards. Even the Food and Drug Administration says that plastic is less likely to harbor bacteria and easier to clean.

But in a study Professor Cliver conducted, he found that cellulose in wood absorbs bacteria but will not release it. “We’ve never been able to get the bacteria down in the wood back up on the knife to contaminate food later,” he said.

Plastic absorbs bacteria in a different way. “When a knife cuts into the plastic surface, little cracks radiate out from the cut,” Professor Cliver said. The bacteria, he said, “seem to get down in those knife cuts and they hang out. They go dormant. Drying will kill, say, 90 percent of them, but the rest could hang around for weeks.”

In one test he did, raw chicken juices were spread on samples of used wood and plastic cutting boards. Both boards were washed in hot soapy water and dried, then knives were used to simulate cutting vegetables for a salad. No bacteria appeared on the knives cut on wood, but there were plenty on the knives used on a plastic board.

Professor Cliver found that running plastic boards through the dishwasher only spread the bacteria around. The bacteria in the cracks remained. He said that the water in dishwashers must get hotter than 140 degrees or all sorts of bacteria can survive.

Wood cutting boards may be microwaved for five minutes, but Professor Cliver warned that some wood cutting boards contain metal pieces within. He added, “Some people who tried their boards in the microwave had some spectacular fireworks.” [NYTimes]

“The basic reality is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very different,” said Dr. Peter M. Sandman, a risk communication consultant in Princeton, N.J. “Risks that you control,” Dr. Sandman said, “are much less a source of outrage than risks that are out of your control. In the case of mad cow, it feels like it’s beyond my control. I can’t tell if my meat has prions in it or not. I can’t see it, I can’t smell it. Whereas dirt in my own kitchen is very much in my own control. I can clean my sponges. I can clean the floor.”

Dread is another factor, Dr. Sandman said. People can deal with sick stomachs, but they absolutely dread the idea of rotting brains. [NYTimes]

No kitchen is sterile, but certain steps can help cut back on bacteria.

• Microwave sponges and dishcloths on high for at least one minute.
• Regularly launder dish towels.
• Make sure tap water (and thus, the dishwasher) can exceed 140 degrees.
• Prepare raw meats and vegetables on separate work surfaces.
• Wash your hands before cooking, and as often as you can while cooking — especially if you pet the dog.
• Wash the meat thermometer after each use.
• Wash refrigerator door handles, cabinet knobs and work surfaces.
• Fill the sink with hot soapy water and drop in utensils after using them. Change the water often.
• Fully disassemble your blender before putting it in the dishwasher.
• Use a pipe brush and hot soapy water to clean under processor blades, even if you put them in the dishwasher.
• Wash the sink’s drain plug and scrub the sink before washing produce in it. [NYTimes]

As recommended by Bruce Cole over at Saute Wednesday, I went and read the LA Times article I have quoted here:

It seems like a ghastly conspiracy. Yet factory farming isn’t someone else’s fault. It’s not only of our making, but it also made us. More than any other factor, cheap food accounts for American prosperity. We spend less of our annual incomes on food than any other nation. Our first case of mad cow disease isn’t the result of some evil plot. It’s the price of our way of life and it may be telling us that it’s time to change.

Read beyond the headlines and one finds that the practice that wrought the disease, recycling ruminant slaughter waste back into cattle feed, was the work of social idealists. Meat and bone meal, which in 1988 was revealed as the source of the disease, was put in the dairy feed in ever greater proportions after World War II to boost the protein content. Feeding cows protein, it was believed, would increase output and enrich milk. The dairy technologists behind it were not out to kill people, just to nourish them.

What’s more, it worked…

It worked so well, we ourselves grew bigger. We outgrew our kitchen counters, doorways and beds. How could our grandparents have been so short? [LATimes]

The author goes on to examine one of the unexpected consequences — mad cow disease — of these good intentions. She ends with this sagacity:

Great food has always been a matter of quality, not quantity. Organic meat is far more expensive than conventional — often twice and three times the cost of conventional. That gap will surely narrow as more farmers convert to organic, but organic will always cost more. It has to by definition. It costs more to produce. That does not necessarily mean we must double what we pay.

Imagine how much longer we would live, and live to eat well, if instead of gorging on 16-ounce factory-farmed steaks we ate 8-ounce organic ones?

Cheap food made us wealthy. Now is the time to be wise. In the past, conventional producers dismissed organics as a niche market and credited themselves with feeding a hungry nation. That argument has become obsolete. The environment, public health and safe food are no longer niche concerns. If we heed the lesson of our first case of mad cow disease, it may just prove our salvation. [LATimes]

Over the past week, concerns about the arrival of the Seattle java giant filtered their way through the media. The usual French suspects talked about Simone and Jean-Paul and their smart set spinning in their graves at the sight of the latest American cultural invasion. And just how do we know Starbucks won’t feed us American Frankenfood?

Yet the English-speaking denizens were even more exercised. “Is this the final fall of French civilization?” asked Theodore Dalrymple, a recent exile to France, only half in jest in The Times (of London)…

No self-respecting Hemingway wannabe would be caught dead near Starbucks. Tales of a misspent Parisian youth can’t be built around a 7,000-strong food chain from back home. The mythology of Paris — above all, it’s not America — is why we come…

The steady decline of French cafe culture predates Starbucks by about five decades. The number of cafes — which, for the record, serve more wine than coffee — topped out at about a half-million before World War II, before television and bigger apartments gave the French something else to do. Today the dirty secret is that the coffee often resembles “sock juice” — the old French slur against the American variety — and establishments are uniformly drab. At the Starbucks opening, co-founder Howard Schultz told me the old cafe just isn’t “as relevant” to French life as before. [WSJ]

Breakfast was a glass of orange juice. I weighed 157 pounds.

I walked over to the HUB and had a salad and a half of a pita bread at Piccalilli’s. After I walked back, I had an orange.

Dinner was another salad with turkey with a slice of Italian bread. The difference tonight was that — and here we see once again that I lied about having finished all of the Christmas gift food — the salad was topped with Village Eating House Sweet & Sour Italian Dressing & Marinade (No Oil). This is an extremely low calorie, but still very tasty, dressing with a very slightly sweet, very slightly tart flavor. Very good. Oh, and it is made locally. Yep, the stuff is from nearby Boalsburg, PA. Hey, I have an idea, why not support my community and buy some today? If you do not want to buy it online, why not see if one of the 81 locations selling it around the U.S. is near you?

In the interest of improving page loading times and increasing useability, I am in the process of a make-over of my site. I will try to keep it up in the process, but the look-and-feel may change radically in the mean time.

Thank you for your patience in this matter.

Breakfast was a bowl of steel cut Irish oats with maple syrup and pecan halves. I weighed 156 pounds.

I walked over to the Big Onion — maybe a mile, round trip — and had two slices of plain cheese pizza, a Big Grab® Lays KC Masterpiece Barbecue Flavor Potato Chips (Now even crisper!), and a SoBe Tsunami. Oink, oink.

Dinner was a salad with turkey and a slice of Italian bread.

The Food and Drug Administration imposed new rules yesterday to prevent the spread of mad cow disease, including a ban on feeding cow blood and chicken wastes to cattle. The agency also banned using dead or disabled cows to make products for people like dietary supplements, cosmetics or soups and other foods with traces of meat…

Contaminated feed is widely believed to have started the mad cow epidemic in animals in Britain in the 1980’s. Scientists suspect that feed can transmit the disease if it includes bone meal or other material rendered from the carcasses of sick cows, particularly the brain and spinal cord. The United States banned the use of cow parts in cattle feed in the 1990’s but let producers feed cow blood to calves as a milk substitute.

Blood can no longer be used, because studies have suggested that it may also be infectious.

Also banned is the use of composted “poultry litter” as a feed ingredient for cows. The litter consists of bedding, spilled feed, feathers and fecal matter swept from the floors of chicken coops. The ingredient that worries health officials is the spilled feed, because chicken feed can legally contain meat and bone meal rendered from beef.

Animals can no longer be fed “plate waste,” the agency said, meaning the meat and other scraps that diners leave on their plates in restaurants and that is rendered into the meat and bone meal added to feed. That material interferes with tests for prohibited proteins in the animal feed, the agency said.

Finally, the new rules say equipment that makes feed with meat or bone meal can no longer be used to make cattle feed…

A remaining loophole, Dr. Hansen said, is allowing rendered matter from cows to be fed to pigs and chickens and rendered pigs and chickens to be fed back to cows. In theory, that sequence could bring the disease full circle, back to cows. In Europe, cows cannot be fed any animal matter…

With regard to products meant for people, the new rules say that from now on material from animals that die on the farm or from “downer” cows, which cannot walk, will be banned from use in cosmetics and dietary supplements. The ban will also apply to foods with traces of meat, items that the food and drug agency rather than the Agriculture Department regulates.

Also banned from products for humans will be the tissues most likely to carry the infectious agent like the brain, skull, eyes and spinal cord of animals 30 months or older and the tonsils and part of the small intestine of all cattle. Because a product called mechanically separated meat may carry infectious tissue, it will also be banned. [NYTimes]

There’s a constant flow of new studies touting the benefits of tea for everything from lowering bad cholesterol levels and reducing the risk of heart disease to preventing cancer and cavities. Meanwhile, grocery-store tea aisles are starting to resemble medicine cabinets, with tea boxes boosting the presence of chemicals called antioxidants (Lipton says its black or green tea has 190 milligrams per serving), and a number of special “healthy” teas.

But although tea has been associated with improving health since it was discovered more than 4,000 years ago, studies so far are far from conclusive. Scientists are still trying to figure out how tea works in the body, and while research relating to certain medical conditions is further along than it is for others, a large-scale human clinical trial has yet to be done…

The modern quest to discover the effect of tea on health began about a decade ago. In the early 1990s, the tea industry “primed the pump” and funded research in various areas such as cancer, cardiovascular health, oral health and metabolism, says Joe Simrany, president of the Tea Council of the USA, a U.S. trade association that promotes January as “National Hot Tea Month.”

Now, Mr. Simrany says, hundreds of studies are done on tea each year, some funded by the National Institutes of Health and the American Cancer Society, among other organizations. Meanwhile, sales of tea in the U.S. grew to about $5 billion in 2002 from $1.84 billion in 1990. About 90% of tea consumed in the U.S. today is black and 10% green.

Real tea, and the type researchers are focusing on, comes from the Camellia sinensis, a white-flowered evergreen shrub. But the shade of the tea depends on the picking and processing of the leaves and buds and their contact with oxygen.

Black teas such as darjeeling and ceylon result when the leaves are fully fermented, while oolong comes from partially fermenting leaves. Green tea results from withering, and then heating, dried leaves at a very high temperature, while white tea arises when the plant’s silver-haired buds are plucked by hand in late March before blooming, air-dried and steamed. (Herbal teas, which don’t share the same health claims as those from Camellia sinensis, bear the name of the plants they come from.)

All colors of tea contain chemicals called flavonoids, which are also found in beverages such as grape juice and beer. Tea flavonoids, or polyhenols, have been shown in the lab to neutralize free radicals — the unstable atoms or molecules that can damage elements in the body and lead to diseases such as cancer. There is little evidence so far, however, that the tea polyphenols act the same way in the human body. [WSJ]