Ignorance is bliss

This cartoon, which attempts irony, explains a lot about the Teapublican view of ignorance as no big deal. How ironic.

Click image for full Rob Smith Jr./Glenn Beck cartoon.

Escargot cult

I only eat slugs well salted.

“We hope this will help to remind others to avoid eating raw slugs,” the moderator, Eskild Petersen, said.

Cigarettes or eggs

Journalists like to think they write the first draft of history. More often, they write the first draft of "As the World Turns" (which in its time was my grandmother's favorite story - no wonder journalists are losing audience). All dialog, no resolution.

The New York Times had a long story yesterday about the possible regulation of salt in prepared foods. Mostly, it's a history of attempts to justify or forestall regulation of the amount of salt that food businesses use.

The article seems sympathetic to regulation, but it never provides its readers with a way to sort out the truth of one claim from another, even provisionally, as empirical claims of this type have to be sorted out. Instead, it spends vast arid salt flats (heh) on what a publisher might call news you can use - dissertations on Cheez-Its and chicken noodle soup and how good salt tastes.

This is really news you can relate to. It's not intended to edify but to draw you into a commonplace domestic narrative and make you feel you have expertise on the subject. Without helping you gain that expertise...

Not that there weren't glaring opportunities:

In 1982, [soup company] Campbell sponsored an American Heart Association symposium that included a study on calcium, which is now seen as having only a small role in reducing hypertension, and another that asserted that only some people were susceptible to hypertension from salt.

Thirty years later, I explain my own excellent blood pressure despite significant salt intake by guessing that I'm merely not susceptible. Still, I would expect something new from the intervening three decades. If there's a genetic link, I'd expect it to be confirmed by subsequent research and probably even available as a blood test by now. Instead, reporter Michael Moss simply drops the ball. Maybe scientists have too, but Moss owes readers the follow-up.

The Times story ran in the Science section. Is it too much to ask that it sort out the state of the science on the connection between salt and hypertension? If that connection really only affects a segment of the population, how can we tell whether we're in that segment? That would be news we could really use.

There are further hints at facts in the story:

Making deep cuts in salt can require more expensive ingredients that can hurt sales. Companies that make low-salt pasta sauces improve the taste with vine-ripened tomatoes and fresh herbs that cost more than dried spices and lower grade tomatoes.

Also dropped. It could be that my b.p. is good because so little of what I eat comes out of a box, highly processed. But you'd have to be a hippie or something equally dismissable to expect Americans to eat real fresh food.

American media consistently fail even to try to distinguish fact from self-interested argument. Is the prepared food industry fighting a fight like the cigarette industry, defending its merchandise of death, or like the egg producers, whose product contains cholesterol but has been shown to be healthy, leading the Heart Association to withdraw its advice to avoid eggs?

The methods that corporations use to defend their income are the same, whether they're scientifically justified or not. Media can't get to the bottom of them by reporting about how the industry is lobbying.

Somewhere, some reporter has to remember - or reinvent - getting to the bottom of the story. Finding out what's actually true...

Missing link

Whenever I read about food-borne disease outbreaks from plants, I look for the reporter to state plainly that E. coli, salmonella, and listeria all come from animals and that a plant merely acts as a vector for them out of industrial agriculture onto our plates.

Again this time, no such statement.

No, I'm not a vegetarian. I just think people should know important facts.

Animal source

All the reporting on salmonella in tomatoes omits the salient fact that the source the FDA is looking for is an animal source, probably either people or livestock. There is a vanishingly small chance of a wild source with reptiles the chief suspect in that case.

The media also failed to note from the beginning that last summer's fresh spinach, contaminated by E. coli, was tainted by an animal source. Of course, once the finding was confirmed, they did report it, but it was obvious before.

I suspect that the FDA scientists soft-pedal this knowledge out of deference to the industries they regulate. Especially under Republicans, the inmates are running the asylum.

Cultural blindness

... or is that blindness to the cultures.

Click image to see full Tom Toles cartoon in the Washington Post.

Agriculture is an industry

How many Americans know this? I didn't.

In the United States, where almost all crops are now genetically modified, the debate is largely closed.

For that matter, what does this sentence actually mean? Are nearly all harvested individual plants GMO? Or merely some individual plants in each commercial species?

The Times is correct that the debate is largely closed here, but they neglect to recall that the debate was largely closed even when it was nominally open. Agribusiness and its lobbying checkbook were by far the dominant voice.

I do know this about corn: Not long after Monsanto sold one of its GM corn varieties (Roundup-resistant, IIRC) to the world, even ancestral corn stocks high in the Sierra Madre had been cross-pollinated with it, whether by butterfly migration or wind or a combination.

Sauce for the goose

When the Chinese sent us cheap but lead-filled toys and cheap but antifreeze contaminated wheat gluten and toothpaste, we were outraged. We should have been. There appears to be little effective product safety regulation by the Chinese government, though dip into the wrong till and the same government will bill your family for your bullet.

Will we be equally outraged at General Mills in Ohio for filling our freezers and our stomachs with E. coli? 'Cause I have to tell you, food safety regulation in this country is pretty weak even when Democrats or responsible Republicans (oxymoron!) are in charge, and right now we have a bunch of caveat emptor advocates sleeping at the switch. Like the Chinese government, the Bushist lackeys take as their overwhelming interest the protection of money and those who already have it.

One step toward greater food safety would be to outlaw subtherapeutic doses of antibiotics in farm animals. At least, that would help retain antibiotic effectiveness for humans who become acutely ill from mishandling of meat. But I suspect it would also reduce the frequency of virulent strains such as E. coli O157:H7. (Of course, outbreaks, even vegetable contaminations, are about mishandling of cow shit, mostly.)

I find this parallel to the wheat gluten scandal to be sickly funny:

It said the pepperoni came from a separate supplier, not produced at the plant itself, but it declined to release the name of the pepperoni distributor.

Remember how outrageous it was that the Chinese companies wouldn't provide any information and their government wouldn't force them to? Now they have company.