Product Dates and Food Safety

Is your food safe? Can you feed your kids that milk/tofu/bacon/baby food/whatever, without being afraid that you are going to make them sick because the food is bad, because of foodborne infection? How do you decide? Most of us look at the dates on the packaging. If you have looked at those dates, you have probably gotten confused. Expires On, Best By, Use By, Best If Used By, Sell By, Best Before…… would be more reassuring if their meanings were clearer. Even those terms mean different things in different states. Product dates are a mess. This is not a minor problem. Foodborne illness is one of the leading causes of hospitalization in America (128,000/year per the CDC) killing over 3,000. Each year one out of every six of us gets a foodborne illness. Besides not being fun, this is serious. The majority of cases are caused by vegetables, nuts and fruit. However, infections from poultry and meat are the most lethal. American grocery industry representatives came together to make this easier and healthier for us all. There will now be just two different product date options, each with a clearer meaning. USE BY means, well, use the product by a certain date because the food is perishable and risky after the specified date. BEST If Used By means the nutritional value or taste will suffer after the date, but it will still be safe to eat. That one is a little open ended for me as everything eventually rots. Better product date labeling won’t solve all of the problems with food safety, you still have to handle food carefully and use your eyes and nose, but the new labeling is a...

Unsavory News About Honey

Honey - sigh! What to say? Honey has long been the earthy, natural, sorta healthy counterpart to evil high fructose corn syrup, or just-not-so-good refined sugar. Pure like the golden sun, it is produced from flowers in sunny meadows by bees. Unfortunately, even this iconic “hippie-food” has been corrupted. One of the reasons honey has been thought to better than many other sweeteners is its complexity, in particular the pollens it contains collected by bees. Pollens are also a honey fingerprint, in that analyzing the pollens reveals the source of the honey. The process of ultrafiltration removes the pollen from honey. As the pollens are collected by the bees flying around the area where the the honey is made, those pollens are like fingerprints, specifically identifying the source of the honey. Removal of the pollens then also erases all evidence of the honey’s origin. This is a concern because Chinese honey producers have been dumping honey, contaminated with heavy metals and antibiotics, on the world market. Without testing it is impossible to source the honey and stop the problem. The US FDA (the same folks who allow pizza to count as a vegetable in school lunches) says that honey without pollen is not honey. The recent analysis of honey sold in the US by Food Safety News was shocking. http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/11/tests-show-most-store-honey-isnt-honey/ All samples of honey from fast food stores and pharmacy chains were entirely pollen-free, as were 76% of honey samples sold in grocery stores. Nearly 30% of honey labeled as organic at major chain grocery stores contained absolutely no pollen whatsoever. The only honey that consistently contained pollen was purchased at local farmer’s markets and, perhaps surprisingly given their use of Chinese imports, Trader Joe’s. Once again, this is a reminder that supporting your local farmer and local economy is healthy for many...