Earthquakes, Fracking....who rules?

Nah!     No connection!      Oh????

EARTHWORKS

There have been twenty minor earthquakes in Ft. Worth, TX suburbs in the past month.

Why? Well, it could be the injection of some 290 million barrels of fracking wastewater underground.

Read more about earthquakes and fracking here: http://bit.ly/FrackingEarthquakes

 

 

As North Texas Shakes, Railroad Commission Sits Still

stateimpact.npr.org

State Agency Says No Changes Needed After Latest Earthquake Swarm After twenty minor earthquakes in a month, residents in the small towns of Azle and Springtown outside of Fort Worth are understandably confused about why their usually-stable towns are shaking on a near-daily basis. Teachers in

 

 

Makes you wonder who rules......and when you'll stand up.....

Daily Kos

A big reason our food system is broken.

Thanks to

Eat Local Grown for the image.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Food, Inc

When Big Business controls government, the U.S. consumer loses and so does the food supply.

Great article by Tom Philpott --

→ Food and Ag, International, Regulatory Affairs, Top Stories

7 Dodgy Food Practices Banned in Europe But Just Fine Here

—By Tom Philpott

| Wed May. 8, 2013

 

Eiffel Tower: Iakov Kalinin/Shutterstock, Spray can: Knumina Studios/Shutterstock, Skull: Arcady/Shutterstock, 

 

Last week, the European Commission voted to place a two-year moratorium in most uses of neonicotinoid pesticides, on the suspicion that they're contributing to the global crisis in honeybee health (a topic I've touched on here, here, here, and here). Since then, several people have asked me whether the Europe's move might inspire the US Environmental Protection Agency to make a similar move—currently, neonics are widely used in several of our most prevalent crops, including corn, soy, cotton, and wheat.

The answer is no. As I reported recently, an agency press officer told me the EU move will have no bearing on the EPA's own review of the pesticides, which aren't scheduled for release until 2016 at the earliest.

All of which got me thinking about other food-related substances and practices that are banned in Europe but greenlighted here. Turns out there are lots. Aren't you glad you don't live under the Old World regulatory jackboot, where the authorities deny people's freedom to quaff to atrazine-laced drinking water, etc., etc.? Let me know in comments if I'm missing any.

1) Atrazine
Why it's a problem: A "potent endocrine disruptor," Syngenta's popular corn herbicide has been linked to range of reproductive problems at extremely low doses in both amphibians and humans; and it commonly leaches out of farm fields and into people's drinking water.
What Europe did: Banned it in 2003.
US status: EPA: "Atrazine will begin registration review, EPA’s periodic re-evaluation program for existing pesticides, in mid-2013."

2) Arsenic in chicken, turkey, and pig feed
Why it's a problem: Arsenic is beloved of industrial-scale livestock producers because it makes animals grow faster and turns their meat a rosy pink. It enters feed in organic form, which isn't harmful to humans. Trouble is, in animals guts, it quickly goes inorganic, and thus becomes poisonous. Several studies, including one by the FDA, have found heightened levels of inorganic arsenic in supermarket chicken, and its also ends up in manure, where it can move into tap water. Fertilizing rice fields with arsenic-laced manure may be partially responsible for heightened arsenic levels in US rice.

What Europe did: According to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, arsenic-based compounds "were never approved as safe for animal feed in the European Union, Japan, and many other countries."

US status: The drug giant Pfizer "voluntarily" stopped marketing the arsenical feed additive Roxarsone back in 2011. But there are still several arsenicals on the market. On May 1, a coalition of enviro groups including the Center for Food Safety, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit demanding that the FDA ban them from feed.

3) "Poultry litter" in cow feed
Why it's a problem: You know how arsenic goes inorganic—and thus poisonous—in chickens' guts? Consider that their arsenic-laced manure is then commonly used as a feed for cows. According to Consumers Union, the stuff "consists primarily of manure, feathers, spilled feed, and bedding material that accumulate on the floors of the buildings that house chickens and turkeys." The "spilled feed" part is of special concern, because chickens are often fed "meat and bone meal from dead cattle," CU reports, and that stuff can spill into the litter and be fed back to cows, raising Mad Cow Disease concerns.

What Europe did: Banned all forms of animal protein, including chicken litter, in cow feed in 2001.
US status: The practice remains unrestricted. US cattle consume about 2 billion pounds of it annually, Consumers Union's Michael Hanson told me last year.

4) Chlorine washes for poultry carcasses
Why it's a problem: As the US chicken industry has sped up kill lines in recent years, it has resorted to heavier use of chlorine-based washes to "decrease microbial loads on carcasses," The Washington Post recently reported, quoting a previously unreleased USDA document. As I've noted, the USDA is preparing to release new rules that would speed up kill lines still more as well as allow companies to douse every carcasses that comes down the line with antimicrobial sprays, "whether they are contaminated or not." According to the Post, poultry workers and USDA inspectors attribute a "range of ailments" to the practice, including "asthma and other severe respiratory problems, burns, rashes, irritated eyes, and sinus ulcers and other sinus problems."

What Europe did: The EU not only bans the practice, but refuses to accept US poultry that has been treated with antimicrobial sprays.

US status: As stated above, the USDA is preparing to roll out new rules that will increase the practice.

5) Antibiotics as growth promoters on livestock farms
Why they're a problem: Antibiotic use has surged on US animal farms has spiked in recent years—and now accounts for 80 percent of all antibiotic use. Meanwhile, meat sold in US supermarkets is rife with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

What Europe did: In the EU, all antibiotics used in human medicines are banned on farms—and no antibiotics can be used on farms for "non-medical purposes," i.e., growth promotion.

US status: The FDA is floating new rules that would ban on antibiotics as growth promoters—but the regulation would be voluntary.

6) Ractopomine and other pharmaceutical growth enhancers in animal feed

Why it's a problem: Fed to an estimated 60 to 80 percent of US hogs, ractopomine makes animals grow fast whole also staying lean. Unfortunately, it does so by mimicking stress hormones, making animals miserable. The excellent food-safety reporter Helena Bottemiller looked at FDA documents and found that between its introduction in 1998 and 2011, the drug had killed 210,000 pigs—"more than any other animal drug on the market." Pigs treated with it, she found, suffer from ailments ranging from hyperactivity and trembling to broken limbs and the inability to walk. (Beef cows are fed similar drugs, as are turkeys.) Traces of these pharmaceuticals end up in our meat—and according to Bottemiller, their effects on humans are little-studied.

What Europe did: Europe not only bars its own producers from using ractopamine, it also refuses to allow imports of meat treated with it—as do China and Russia.

US status: Rather than trying to rein in ractopamine use, the Obama administration is actively seeking to force Europe and other nations to accept our ractopamine-treated pork.

7) Gestation crates
Why it's a problem: The sows that breed the hogs confined in US factory farms spend nearly their entire lives stuffed into crates so small "so small the animals can't even turn around or take more than a step forward or backward," Humane Society of the US reports. An undercover HSUS investigation of a sow facility run by pork giant Smithfield in 2011 found, among other horrors, this:

The animals engaged in stereotypic behaviors such as biting the bars of crates, indicating poor well-being in the extreme confinement conditions. Some had bitten their bars so incessantly that blood from their mouths coated the fronts of their crates. The breeding pigs also suffered injuries from sharp crate protrusions and open pressure sores that developed from their unyielding confinement.

What Europe did: Banned them, effective this year.
US status: Pork giants Smithfield, Cargill, and Hormel have pledged to phase them out; several fast-food chains including McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, and Subway have promised to stop buying from suppliers who use the crates; and nine states have banned the practice, HSUS reports. But the practice remains widespread, and as industry flack Rick Berman recently put it, a large swath of the pork industry "has no plans to stop using standard sow housing."

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2013/05/7-dodgy-foodag-practices-banned-europe-just-fine-here

Tom Philpott

Food and Ag Blogger

Tom Philpott is the food and ag blogger for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. To follow him on Twitter, click here. RSS | Twitter

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 If you're a big seafood eater, you might consider this --

Today's Seafood Special: Pig Manure, Antibiotics, and Diarrhea Bugs

Imported seafood is full of dirt and chemicals. So why is the FDA inspecting practically none of it?

—By Tom Philpott

| January/February 2013 Issue

 

Illustration: Gary Taxali

Next time you tuck into a Red Lobster "Endless Shrimp" special or score some $7-per-pound salmon at a supermarket, consider this: You're very likely eating imported seafood raised on a factory-style farm in Asia—and it almost certainly was never inspected by the Food and Drug Administration on its way into the country and onto your plate.

Is that...safe? Big retailers like Walmart and restaurant chains like Darden (owner of Red Lobster) say yes, in part because some of the seafood they buy bears the Best Aquaculture Practices label.

Who issues that label? The Global Aquaculture Alliance, an industry endeavor—its board consists of representatives from (you guessed it) Darden, as well as Cargill, the Chilean salmon industry, and a large farmed-shrimp importer called Eastern Fish Company. Not surprisingly, BAP standards for farmed fish placed near the bottom (16 of 20) in a 2012 ranking of aquaculture labels by the University of Victoria's Seafood Ecology Research Group. (Darden says it independently tests its shrimp for contaminants but declined to share its results; Walmart did not answer our questions about inspections.)

But the responsibility for ensuring the safety of our food doesn't fall to retailers and restaurants alone.

The oversight authority belongs to the FDA, and the task is massive. In 2011, Americans consumed 4.7 billion pounds of seafood, 91 percent of which was imported. And yet the FDA only inspects a tiny amount of this giant haul: 2 percent at most. (The equivalent agency in Canada inspects 15 percent of imported seafood; in the European Union the figure is 50 percent.)

That's worrisome because imported seafood has a spotty track record. According to a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 44 percent of the 39 foodborne-illness outbreaks caused by imports from 2005 to 2010 involved seafood—more than any other type of food.

And then there's the drug problem. Like US meat farms, Asia's shrimp operations rely heavily on antibiotics to control diseases among creatures packed tightly together, and also to make them grow faster. That creates the risk of antibiotic-resistant pathogens in the final product. In a 2012 study, FDA scientists tested 330 samples of shrimp farmed in Thailand—the No. 1 US shrimp supplier—and bought in Little Rock, Arkansas, supermarkets. Sixty-seven turned up positive for strains of the bacteria klebsiella that are resistant to a range of antibiotics—32 of them showed resistance to no fewer than eight different antibiotics. The researchers concluded that "imported shrimp is a reservoir for multidrug-resistant Klebsiella," which can trigger urinary-tract infections and pneumonia.

And it's not just nasty bugs that can end up in our seafood. Testifying before Congress in 2008, Don Kraemer, then-deputy director of the FDA's Office of Food Safety, warned of "clear scientific evidence" that drug residues make it into the fish we eat. In 2011, the FDA tested just 0.1 percent of imported seafood products for drug traces. In 2008, the agency tested only 34 shrimp samples for residues of nitrofurans—a class of antibiotics banned because they're carcinogenic. Six samples tested positive.

The FDA does inspect processing facilities in exporting countries, the most prolific of which are China, Thailand, Canada, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Ecuador. But here, too, the program is lax.

According to a scathing 2011 report by the Government Accountability Office, the agency had inspected just 1.5 percent of seafood processing facilities in the previous six years in China, the source of nearly a quarter of US seafood imports. Meanwhile, in Vietnam, a Bloomberg Businessweek investigation discovered that some US-bound shrimp are stored in heaps of ice made from water teeming with bacteria. And tilapia in a growing number of China's fish farms literally feed on pig manure—even though it contains salmonella and makes the fish vulnerable to disease.
In an October letter to the FDA, the Southern Shrimp Alliance, a trade group for the US wild-caught shrimp industry, identified three Vietnamese shrimp processors that were ordered to put their products through mandatory testing in Canada after authorities there found traces of fluoroquinolones, a banned antibiotic. Yet all three can still export freely to the United States.

Another major Vietnamese shrimp supplier to the US, Soc Trang Seafood Joint Stock Company (which, incidentally, is BAP-certified), had three different shipments turned back by Japan in 2012 due to the presence of banned chemicals—but the United States routinely welcomed its products.

Since I don't have much faith in either the industry's self-certifying effort or the FDA's porous testing program, I've taken to eating shrimp only as an occasional treat. When I do indulge, I pay up for the wild-caught kind. But it shouldn't be left to each of us to protect ourselves. Just as the government inspects Red Lobster's kitchens, so too should the FDA scrutinize the suppliers that keep them stocked with endless shrimp.

Tom Philpott

Food and Ag Blogger

Tom Philpott is the food and ag blogger for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. To follow him on Twitter, click here. RSS | Twitter

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http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/imported-seafood-shrimp-fda

'unfit for food'

Maybe we rallied around the mantra of removing inspections and regulations that inhibited corporations, but after the Peanut catastrophe that killed people, wisdom might force a re-consideration. This bears watching because it isn't at its end ---

Scheme admitted to distribute 'unfit for food' tomato paste

A former employee of one of the nation's largest growers and processors of tomato products admitted Wednesday in Sacramento federal court she engaged in the years-long distribution and mislabeling of tomato paste that contained unlawful levels of mold and was "unfit for food."

Jennifer Lou Dahlman, who was dismissed this week as a reports and business analyst at California-based SK Foods, L.P., pleaded guilty to one count of the "introduction of adulterated and misbranded food into interstate commerce with the intent to defraud and mislead."

She admitted that for more than three years - from Nov. 23, 2004 to Jan. 21, 2008 - she caused the shipment of tomato paste with legally excessive mold content from SK Foods to customers in Wisconsin, Utah, Pennsylvania, New York, Kentucky, Maryland and Ohio.

She also admitted attaching false labels to the paste showing mold counts far below the actual levels and percentages of "natural tomato soluble solids" materially higher than the actual percentages.

Dahlman, 48, admitted these practices were carried out "at the direction of senior leaders and directors of SK Foods.

Her plea introduces a new element in the government's ongoing investigation of SK Foods. Before Wednesday, there were no public charges pertaining to adulterated food.

The plea belies a primary plank in the company's previous public statements: that the investigation has nothing to do with the quality of its products.

SK immediately issued a prepared statement through its attorney, Malcolm Segal.

"There was no problem with the commercial products Dahlman reviewed and no need for any recalls," the company insisted. "The ultimate products were all appropriately labeled and of excellent quality.

"The guilty plea ... is disappointing news. She was previously suspended and now has been terminated."

Segal, who was in the courtroom Wednesday observing the plea hearings, said, "Tomatoes come from Mother Nature, not from Barbie dolls. They are not all perfect. Commercial labeling is often the subject administrative disputes with the government, but it is important to appreciate that the government itself has said there were no health hazards with these products."

A prepared statement issued by Dahlman attorney Robert Wilkinson, says his client "apologizes to her family and the public for here involvement in the wrongs set forth in the plea and cooperation agreement."

"She is saddened that the leadership of SK Foods set a course for the company that was unlawful and that she was compliant in that course," Wilkinson's statement says.

SK Foods is headquartered in Monterey and has plants in Williams, 50 miles north of Sacramento, and Lemoore, south of Fresno. It is one target in an ongoing nationwide federal investigation of bribery and price-fixing that could be jacking up the cost of groceries.

In the matter just before Dahlman's on U. S. District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton's Wednesday calendar, a former Frito-Lay Inc. employee pleaded guilty and admitted taking bribes from a former SK Foods broker to rig bidding and hike prices in connection with SK Foods' sales to Frito-Lay.

James Richard Wahl Jr. admitted receiving $160,000 "on behalf of SK Foods" from former SK broker and director Randall Lee Rahal between 1998 and April of last year.

In return, Wahl admitted, he ensured that Frito-Lay purchased SK's products and he provided SK with information that allowed it to sell certain products to Frito-Lay at inflated prices.

Wahl, 58, is the second senior purchasing manager for a national company who has admitted receiving bribes to steer contracts to SK Foods and to buy its processed tomato and other food products at inflated prices.

Robert L. Watson, 59, of White Plains, N. Y., once a senior purchasing manger at Kraft Foods, pleaded guilty last month to receiving $158,000 in bribes from Rahal.

Kraft and Frito-Lay were unaware of the scheme.

Rahal, 59, of Ramsey, N. J., pleaded guilty in December to racketeering, price fixing, bid rigging and contract allocation conspiracies, all allegedly on behalf of SK.

Anthony Ray Manuel, 57, of Turlock also pleaded guilty last month to embezzling $975,000 from Morning Star Packing Co., where he was a sales representative and packaging manager before going to work for SK Foods in 2005. He was terminated at SK the day before his guilty plea.

Morning Star is a manufacturer and marketer of bulk tomato products with facilities in Williams and Los Banos, in western Merced County. The company is one of SK's competitors.

Rahal, Dahlman, Wahl, Watson and Manuel have all agreed to cooperate with prosecutors and agents in the ever-widening probe.