With the Chinese milk products-melamine scandal generating fresh headlines, U.S. health officials on Friday unveiled what they consider acceptable levels of contamination with the industrial chemical.

The bottom line: No amount of melamine is safe in infant formula.

For all other foods, only amounts less than 2.5 parts per million are risk free, U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials said.

I personally prefer my food to be… food.

Bonus reason: She named her children Bristol, Willow, Piper, Track, and Trig

BTW, Governor Palin, don’t patronize me by equating yourself to Senator Clinton. You don’t even come close.

While I scraped out holes with a wire hanger from the back of the car, little ants and beetles kept crawling up and down my legs. I was very gentle in removing them from me, for, after all, aren’t they my brothers and sisters, nourished on my mother’s flesh and bones?

Later, driving home, one little ant came crawling up my arm. Reacting without thinking, I brushed her off roughly. I’m sorry, my little sister! I hope you found a stray pretzel or goldfish on the floor to make up for it.

Maybe it’s an idea whose time has come. The question is, who can build it?

“For the first time, the new rule allows the government to publicly release the names of the stores that have sold recalled meat and poultry posing the most severe risks to peoples’ health.”

Note that it’s a “rule” not a law.

“..the changes announced today would not have applied to the February recall, which was categorized as a slightly lesser risk to public health.”

Not a “most severe risk” although it was the largest recall ever in the U.S.

Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer stood by the new rule, pointing out that consumers are a bunch of idiots and can’t handle too much information: “‘We don’t want to unnecessarily scare the public,’ he said asserting that releasing information during recalls that have less serious health risks might confuse consumers.”

This must have left more people than just me scratching their heads in disbelief.

Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch’s executive director said (and I heartily agree), “If a problem is serious enough to spark a recall, it is serious enough to give consumers all the information they need to avoid potentially dangerous products.”

The Consumers Union suggested (wisely) that the rule should include to Class II recalls and that the lists of places receiving tainted meat and poultry should also include schools and nursing homes.

Well, duh.

My personal theory is that the USDA doesn’t want us to know how many recalls there actually are. Sign up for recall notices by email.

Pollan talks about the connections between, well, everything: what we eat and how it’s grown or raised and how those things are related to skyrocketing oil prices, food shortages, obesity and the increase in food prices. He outlines three things we need to do… I won’t spoil it for you but let’s just say it has to do with fewer subsidies and more solar-based agriculture.

Here’s a taste:

You can compare conventional beef production to a grass-based system of beef production, which is how we used to produce beef. Cattle are evolved to eat grass — they have rumens so they can digest it. So when they [cows] are getting grass, you have a really exquisite and sustainable food chain — where the sun feeds the grass, and the grass feeds the ruminant, and the ruminant feeds us. They are not competing with us for food, and it doesn’t take vast amounts of fossil-fuel fertilizer to produce that food. It takes none, until you start trucking the animal off of the ranch.

The problem with that system for the marketplace was that it’s a slower way to produce beef, and it takes more skill. It’s a lot easier just to put them on a feedlot, give them lots of corn, give them antibiotics so they can survive the corn, give them hormones to speed up their growth. Suddenly you take a two-year process and get it down to 13-14 months. Time is money, so we moved that way.

Wow. I think I have a little geek-environmentalist crush on Michael Pollan.

Yogurt is, according to Merriam Webster, is “a fermented slightly acid often flavored semisolid food made of milk and milk solids to which cultures of two bacteria (Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus) have been added.”

However, Dannon is allowed to label its Fruit on the Bottom strawberry as yogurt even though the ingredients are:
- Cultured grade A lowfat milk
- strawberries
- sugar
- fructose syrup
- high fructose corn syrup
- pectin
- modified corn starch
- natural flavor
- kosher gelatin
- purple carrot juice concentrate
- carmine and turmeric (for color)
- malic acid
- calcium phosphate
- active yogurt cultures including L. acidophilus

Compare to Stonyfield Farms Strawberries and Cream ingredients:
- Cultured Pasteurized Organic Whole Milk
- Organic Strawberries
- Naturally Milled Organic Sugar
- Pectin
- Organic Beet Juice Concentrate (For Color)
- Natural Flavor
- Six Live Active Cultures Including L. Acidophilus, Bifidus, L. Casei And L. Rhamnosus.

Even better, take a gander at Sky Top Farms maple yogurt:
- Organic Whole Milk
- Pure Organic Maple Syrup
- Active Yogurt Cultures (S. thermophilus, L. bulgaricus, L. acidophilus, bifidobacterium longum, bifidobacterium infantis)

So, which one sounds the most like yogurt, as opposed to “yogurt”?

I find it ironic — or maybe just sickening — that to get a Dannon “yogurt” that is actually closer (yes, just closer) to yogurt, you have to buy the one that says “All Natural”. What? That seems just crazy to me.

Oh, and another Dannon note: the ingredients of Danimals (Dannon’s smoothies for kids) aren’t even listed on the web site. Hum… I wonder why. Not really.

Kinda makes you wonder: Is your yogurt really yogurt? How about your bread? Your peanut butter?

“That would meet current U.S. consumption for about 2-1/2 years, but it would likely take a decade or more to find the oil and produce it.”

<sarcasm>Brilliant.</sarcasm>

Meanwhile, here in NJ lawmakers are considering a different question:
“The bill would allow the owners of preserved farmland to construct, operate and install solar or wind energy facilities or equipment on their farms. The generated power could be used to operate the farm or be sold to a utility company.”

Why not? Solar panels are unobtrusive and don’t take up extra space. Even windmills are soothing to look at (at least I think so.) Seems like a win-win.