ZombieBread, Part 2: Still 'Fresh'!

You may remember about a month ago I told you about the Bread That Wouldn't Die. This miraculous loaf was purchased some time around December 30th in Daytona, Florida, largely because it advertised itself to have "No Artificial Preservatives, Colors or Flavors" and "No High Fructose Corn Syrup".



Today is exactly two months and six days after the expiry date marked on the bag, so I decided to pull it out of the bread box again and examine it for signs of mould, decay or even staleness.

Nope. It's just as fresh and mould-free as it was the day it was purchased.



This is really starting to scare me. But what is truly terrifying is the knowledge that if I ever contacted the "Nature's Own" company to complain that their bread lasts too long, they would think I was out of my mind.

The Bread That Wouldn't Die

I was in Florida over the holidays, camping with my family. During the course of the trip we learned more than we ever wanted to know about Southern American cuisine (here's a tip: never order the Sweet Tea - get the Unsweet Tea instead and add your own sugar).

At one point towards the end of our trip - it would have been a day or two before New Year's - we bought a loaf of bread. I wanted to avoid anything resembling Wonderbread, but I found something called "Nature's Own Butterbread" which claimed to have "No Artificial Preservatives, Colors or Flavors" and "No High Fructose Corn Syrup".

Excellent! I thought. So I bought a loaf, we used a few slices, and brought the rest home with us.

As of today, that loaf was exactly one month past it's best before date. And yet...



... it's as fresh and spongy and mould-free as the day it was baked. My husband just made a sandwich out of it the other day.

That is just so wrong in so many ways.

The company's website claims that the only preservatives they use are natural ones including vinegar and "cultured wheat flour", whatever that means. I suspect they are talking about the four lines of chemical-sounding ingredients on the label that are categorized under "dough conditioners" - one of which is something called azodicarbonamide. Go read the Wikipedia article. I dare you. I couldn't bring myself to look up the rest of the list.

So now this is an experiment: how long can a loaf of bread possibly continue to exist before going mouldy?

I'll keep you updated.

Death By TV Dinner

There's a great article from the NY Times (via MSNBC) about the perils of processed foods. Not just the trans fat or the chemical preservatives or the high fructose corn syrup - it's the salmonella and the E. coli that'll kill ya.

The story focuses on a salmonella outbreak about two years ago from a specific brand of pot pie that sickened some 15,000 people, using it as an example to point out much larger issues in the food industry.

In this case, ConAgra could not pinpoint which of the more than 25 ingredients in its pies was carrying salmonella. Other companies do not even know who is supplying their ingredients, let alone if those suppliers are screening the items for microbes and other potential dangers, interviews and documents show.

Yet the supply chain for ingredients in processed foods — from flavorings to flour to fruits and vegetables — is becoming more complex and global as the drive to keep food costs down intensifies. As a result, almost every element, not just red meat and poultry, is now a potential carrier of pathogens, government and industry officials concede.

In addition to ConAgra, other food giants like General Mills, Nestlé and the Blackstone Group, a New York firm that acquired the Swanson and Hungry-Man brands two years ago, concede that they cannot ensure the safety of items — from frozen vegetables to pizzas — and that they are shifting the burden to the consumer. General Mills, which recalled about five million frozen pizzas in 2007 after an E. coli outbreak, now advises consumers to avoid microwaves and cook only with conventional ovens. ConAgra has also added food safety instructions to its other frozen meals, including the Healthy Choice brand.

Remember the salmonella in the peanuts last year that was traced back to that sleezy company in Georgia that was supplying dozens of companies making hundreds of products? Remember the tainted salsa fiasco where they thought it was the tomatoes at first, and then maybe the peppers, or perhaps the onions - and meanwhile millions of tomatoes rotted in the fields?

It's a HUGE problem, but no one is doing anything about it because (you guessed it) it's too expensive.

Ensuring the safety of ingredients has been further complicated as food companies subcontract processing work to save money: smaller companies prepare flavor mixes and dough that a big manufacturer then assembles. “There is talk of having passports for ingredients,” said Jamie Rice, the marketing director of RTS Resource, a research firm based in England. “At each stage they are signed off on for quality and safety. That would help companies, if there is a scare, in tracing back.”

But government efforts to impose tougher trace-back requirements for ingredients have met with resistance from food industry groups including the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which complained to the Food and Drug Administration: “This information is not reasonably needed and it is often not practical or possible to provide it.”

I wonder - does all this make food safety an externality, even if they're externalizing the costs and risks to their own customers?

The article came with this entertaining video showing two people trying desperately to follow the four-part cooking instructions on a microwavable pot pie, but still failing to bring the thing up to sterile temperature.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

My recommendation: LEARN TO COOK REAL FOOD!!

Paranoia

I am usually amused when someone from the PMO, or the House of Commons (hi, Garth!), or the Ministry of Natural Resources, or even AECL pays a visit to my blog. Since I frequently write about topics related to these organizations, it's understandable and even flattering that they should check in from time to time.

However, when the Sergeant at Arms of the U.S. Senate pops by to check out my piece on the dubious hazards of incinerator bottom ash - not once, but twice in the past 24 hours - you'll forgive me if I start getting a little paranoid.



There's no indication of how he found my blog or what he was looking for. What's the interest here? Has someone threatened the U.S. Senate with a terrorist attack involving bottom ash? Or fluoride? Did I inadvertently use a keyword on a list somewhere? Is this interest official, or is it just some guy on his break who has relatives in Halton or a deep personal interest in public water treatment policy?

So, Mr. Sergeant at Arms: if you are reading this, please drop me a line and let me know that I can stop freaking out about this.

Thank you very much.

Local Environmentalists Ban Dirt

Here we go again.

Region committee has turned down a proposal to accept bottom ash from Peel's energy-from-waste facility in Halton's landfill.

The planning and public works committee endorsed a motion to that effect Wednesday. Region staff had recommended the bottom ash -- an inert byproduct from the incineration process that's collected from the bottom of the furnace -- be trucked to the Halton Waste Management Site to use as a daily cover, which is a material placed over the garbage in the landfill each day to control things like blowing litter.

And who exactly is responsible for this? Why none other than the same group who nixed the construction of a low-emissions gas-fired power plant in Milton, resulting in a different and possibly worse-polluting gas-fired power plant being built just north of the Milton town line.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you P.O.W.E.R.:

Before passing the motion, the committee first heard from two local residents' groups -- Protect Our Water and Environmental Resources (POWER) and Oakvillegreen. Both are strongly opposed to using the bottom ash at the local landfill.

"It makes no sense to choose cover that contains toxic material," said POWER past president Barbara Halsall. "Vote no on this report."

Liz Benneian of Oakvillegreen shared similar sentiments.

"Bottom ash is not adequately tested and may pose health and environmental hazards," she argued. "There doesn't appear to be any benefit to Halton citizens."

A brief reality check here:

1) Bottom ash from incinerators has been tested and re-tested for decades by every country that uses waste incinerators. The most hazardous thing about bottom ash is the presence of metals like zinc and lead, but these are tested for regularly and are well below the levels that could pose any risk to the environment even if they did manage to leach into the soil. Which they probably couldn't because...

2) This is a LANDFILL. It is full of GARBAGE. In fact, it is full of exactly the same kind of garbage that is being burned to produce the bottom ash - except that in an incinerator all the really toxic crap is either burned off or removed with the fly ash.

In other words, bottom ash is considerably less toxic than the garbage it is being used to cover. If you dared me to I would probably eat it. Saying it ‘may be’ hazardous is like saying is like saying the earth ‘may be’ hollow or the moon landing ‘may have been’ a hoax - just because someone said so on a website doesn't make it true.

Yet despite all evidence and rational analysis, those who believe these things can simply point to ‘studies’ by the one or two people who agree with them, and dismiss the overwhelming scientific consensus to the contrary as part of a vast government and corporate conspiracy to poison them and their children. And they always manage to talk the local politicians into going along with them because face it - would you vote for a guy who wants to poison your children?

This sort of thing is particularly endemic to Milton for some reason. Over the years, various factions of the local ‘That Shit’ll Kill You’ Coalition^TM have come out against lawn pesticides and cell phone towers, and for decades have managed to preserve Milton as one of the last remaining municipalities in Canada without water fluoridation - thus guaranteeing it’s perpetual dominance as the Dental Decay Capital of Halton. Hell, when I first moved here 14 years ago they didn’t even chlorinate the water. Just ask the people of Walkerton how dangerous they think chlorine is.

(And please - do NOT just run out and Google up a bunch of links to send me proving that this shit really will kill you. I've seen it. It's rubbish.)

Now, I should mention here that POWER is not nearly as irrational as some of the other citizens groups which have formed themselves around such imaginary threats. In fact, POWER does some good work on escarpment water quality and pushing back on local quarry expansion, which makes their bizarre obsession with marginal issues like this so frustrating. Not only does it damage their credibility by making them look like a bunch of ‘nimby’ crackpots, but the best they can hope to achieve is to banish these projects to neighbouring jurisdictions, making them someone else’s problem while still affecting us here in Milton.

Worse, they may well be damaging the environment by actively discouraging potentially beneficial technologies like energy-from-waste incineration.

In trying to figure out just what motivates an otherwise rational person to suddenly decide that cell phone towers cause brain cancer or that public water fluoridation is a chemical industry plot, I thought I’d Google the words ‘environmental’ and ‘hypochondria’ and see what popped up.

Looks like I’m not the only one to make this connection.

Unfortunately, the perceived line between legitimate and imaginary or exaggerated environmental hazards can be pretty thin unless you actually examine all that complicated sciencey stuff, so the term ‘environmental hypochondria’ is used pretty freely by anti-environmentalists to bash any and all environmental legislation. However, I did run across a fascinating article in ‘The Environmental Practitioner’ that takes a serious look at the problem from an environmentalist’s standpoint (emphasis mine).

As a general environmental practitioner, I have encountered many environmental hypochondriacs over the years, most of whom fall into one of the following categories:

1. Clients, generally promoting major projects, who have a limited appreciation of environmental issues, are concerned about threats to the project caused by bureaucratic delays or legal challenges, and are prepared to pay the necessary price to eliminate such threats.

2. Members of the community opposing a development for environmental reasons. In some cases the environmental hypochondria reflects genuine concern based on ignorance and sometimes fuelled by provocative or imaginative media reports. In other cases, it is contrived as an excuse to mask the real reasons for such opposition, which may relate to real estate prices or basic ‘nimbyism’. Such contrived concerns can be compared with the child who feigns illness to avoid having to go to school.

3. Staff of consent or advisory authorities who either lack the professional experience to make confident decisions in relation to environmental issues or, like the community- based malingerers, deliberately play up their concerns to support a hidden agenda of personal or institutional opposition to a proposal.

…As a consultant, I find that about one third of my time is devoted to addressing issues arising from environmental hypochondria, and that the results of this work contribute nothing towards better environmental outcomes. In some cases the net effect is negative, as human resources and funding are diverted away from discretionary projects which would enhance the environment or the state of environmental knowledge (e.g. rehabilitation projects, monitoring or research). This is one of the tragic aspects of environmental hypochondria

(‘Environmental Hypochondria’ by David Hogg, from ‘The Environmental Practitioner’, journal of The Environment Institute of Australia and New Zealand, Issue 1, June 2006)

I may just run off a few copies of that article and hand them out at the next Halton Regional Council meeting.