Category Archives: Food

NYC Tuna Toxicity

The NYT reports that the fish being served in their fair city has toxic levels of mercury:

Sushi from 5 of the 20 places had mercury levels so high that the Food and Drug Administration could take legal action to remove the fish from the market. The sushi was bought by The New York Times in October.

“No one should eat a meal of tuna with mercury levels like those found in the restaurant samples more than about once every three weeks,” said Dr. Michael Gochfeld, professor of environmental and occupational medicine at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, N.J.

Yikes. Perhaps most notable is that the restaurant owners had no idea they were serving toxic fish. Will they test at the market? Will fish markets test before selling? Where will the controls emerge? What if restaurant guides like Zagat started to include toxicity tests in their reviews and award cleanliness? Or will consumers be expected to carry a toxicity test when they eat out or even shop at the grocery?

Will someone please market a sushi preparedness kit? A pair of organic-based chopsticks, chemical free soy sauce, natural wasabi, and a box that you can drop your food into to assess mercury levels before you put it into your mouth. Ok, just kidding. But you get the idea.

Update: Apparently Greenpeace offers a $25 mercury do-it-yourself test kit.

The results are in, and the findings are worse than we anticipated: one in five women of childbearing age that were tested have mercury levels exceeding the EPA’s recommended limit.

“In the samples we analyzed, the greatest single factor influencing mercury exposure was the frequency of fish consumption,” said Dr. Steve Patch, Co-director of EQI and co-author of the report. “We saw a direct relationship between people’s mercury levels and the amount of store-bought fish, canned tuna fish or locally caught fish people consumed.”

Yikes again. Is this Department of Homeland Security material? Or will this be left up to the EPA to sort out?

Absinthe legal in the US again

I have a bottle sitting on my shelf. It was a novelty gift from Prague. My favorite part is the label. Now I hear that a local distiller will be selling bottles and offering authentic samples in their tasting room.

The SF Gate has written a fascinating story that touches on why this relates to hype versus reality in public safety:

Now it seems that no one can remember exactly why it was prohibited. Some say it was the chemical thujone found in the herb wormwood, used to make absinthe, that affects the brain. Others say it was a plot by the wine industry to put the popular spirit out of business. And there are those who believe it was a case of baseless hysteria, not unlike “Reefer Madness,” the 1936 propaganda film about marijuana.

Perhaps because there is nothing exact to remember in these issues of human behavior? Hysteria is the right word. Fear is another one.

Earlier this year, a lone Washington, D.C., lawyer took on the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau in an attempt to lift the ban. After some legal wrangling, the agency agreed – with some limits.

Lone? Personal mission? I am surprised they do not say lawyer and poet, or lawyer and aspiring artist? Alas, even though a lawyer is to blame for the legalization of the drink I am sure it will continue to be associated with those least involved in its production and distribution. I just can not see absinthe being associated with holiday parties at big law firms. Consumption would appear to be most conspicuous among those who are least controlled/contrived in their daily expressions.

Last week, St. George Spirits of Alameda received the news that, after seven applications, the federal agency had approved its label, the final obstacle before going to market. On Monday, the small artisan distillery sold its token first bottle, becoming the only American company since 1912 to sell absinthe in the United States.

Approval of the label is a big deal because there is little to object to in the substance itself if made properly. Might as well have a team of legal and risk experts debate the merits of marketing it safely while this substance has no more risk that the millions of bottles it will sit by on the shelf. Will they use something like Cigarette pack warnings? Those vary by culture and country, but they are the hallmark of regulated marketing.

Overall, I found the article highly entertaining. It puts to light much of the controversy about causality:

“Look, absinthe is bad the way Jack Daniels is bad, the way Skyy Vodka is bad,” says Lehrman. “The worst component is the alcohol. If you drink too much, something bad will happen.”

I guess you could expect a distiller to say that about alcohol. Moderation, and self-control right? Might as well ask someone from Colt if guns kills people. Sorry, I digress…

But in 1905 the Swiss government was convinced that it was absinthe alone that turned a law-abiding citizen into a homicidal maniac. After Jean Lanfray, a 31-year-old laborer, killed his pregnant wife and two children, the Swiss government banned the spirit. Although Lanfray had sampled a bottle of absinthe before breakfast that morning, officials failed to take into consideration that he had also consumed Creme de Menthe, cognac and soda, more than six glasses of wine and a cup of coffee laced with brandy, says Barnaby Conrad III, the San Francisco author of “Absinthe: History in a Bottle” (Chronicle Books, 1988; the publisher is not affiliated with this newspaper).

Nice try, but the Swiss should have banned cups, glasses and bottles. Homicide would have ended with the demise of drinking vessels. Or maybe they should have banned labor.

I’m kidding.

With that in mind, here’s my favorite part:

…the drink became synonymous with the degeneration of the world’s most famous bohemians, from Van Gogh’s infamous ear cutting to Verlaine’s debaucherous sprees of sex and rage.

Even Oscar Wilde was quoted as saying “After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, which is the most horrible thing in the world.”

Clarity…or degeneration. It is all about perspective, I suppose.

Ironic when you think about all the work for a label to avoid confusion about something that is said to bring clarity.

Perhaps when you drink it, you become clear on why it should be banned.

If not, you are in good company; just ask the Wormwood Society. They point out that absinthe was actually never illegal…just restricted:

There is no law which prohibits absinthe by name, but any drink which contains in excess of 10ppm of thujone is prohibited from being imported into, or produced for sale and consumption in, the United States.

Good to know. Consumers will benefit from safe absinthe, although modern science apparently has found thujone as relatively safe (“0% mortality rate at 30 mg/kg”).

Stolen laptop worth lifetime of beer?

Here is an interesting new take on the value of information:

Owners were desperate to retrieve the [stolen] computer containing designs, contact details and financial information, the Rotorua Daily Post said.

They have offered free beer to anyone giving clues leading to its recovery.

Co-owner Paul Croucher said the company would provide a lifetime supply of about 12 bottles a month to anyone who could name the thief.

The company has back-up copies of the material stored on the laptop but these are not up to date, the newspaper said.

What are the chances this will work? And if it does, should security start trying to recover all laptops with beer? Makes a perfectly good excuse for storing large amounts of the beverage at the office, no?

Updated to add:

Cost of 12 beer from the company in question = $36

$36 X 12 months = $432/yr

Average lifetime of a kiwi male = 78.2

78.2 – 18 (kiwi drinking age) = 60.2

60.2 years X $432/yr = $26,006.40

The problem with this reward system, obviously, is that the type of person who might be motivated by beer as a reward is going to want more than 12 bottles a month. And the person not motivated by beer is going to want more than $432/yr. In fact, $432 is not much of a reward for a laptop and, given the questionable information security practices of the company (e.g. no current backups), is there any real guarantee that they would be around to deliver bottles for years two and three let alone in perpetuity?

Totalitarian Lawns and Johnny Appleseed

“A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.”

Michael Pollan apparently wrote that in Second Nature. Someone I work with pointed me to another book of his that is a study of Johnny Appleseed. I found it very compelling, especially in the sense that he looked for root-cause (pun not intended) rather than settle with the pulp of commercial drivel also known as Disney. PBS did an interview with him where he summarizes:

GWEN IFILL: So as a gardener, which you admit to being, a backyard gardener of sorts in Connecticut, how did you make these connections between human impulse and the plant world?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, it all started with the bumblebee. I mean, the premise of the book is very, very simple. I… One day in the garden I was watching a bumblebee alongside me while I was sewing [sic] seeds and thought, “well, what do I have in common with a bee as a gardener?” and realized more than I realized. Like the bumblebee, I was disseminating the genes of one species, a potato instead of a leek, say, rather than another. And like the bumblebee, I thought these plants were here for my benefit, you know, all the plants in the garden I was growing. But in fact, I realized maybe they had induced me to help them, because, you know, the bumblebee breaks into the flower, finds the nectar, thinks he’s making off with the goods and thinks he’s getting the better of the deal with the flower. But, in fact, it’s the flower that has tricked the bumblebee into doing the work for him, to take his pollen from flower to flower to flower. And then I realized well, what if… So from the flower’s point of view, the bumblebee is this credulous gullible animal, and how would we look to our plants… from our plant’s point of view? And I realize we’re much the same; we’re more like the bumblebee than we think.

I love that analysis. We are gullible if we think that we are totally in control of how we choose the food we eat. People love to be led, and those that seem to want the least regulations also appear to be the ones easiest to lead. I think this is explored best in the book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Anyway, back to the Appleseed story:

GWEN IFILL: Well, you tell… You talk about sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control. And sweetness you talk about the apple.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah.

GWEN IFILL: How does Johnny Appleseed figure into this?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, Johnny Appleseed, in a way, he’s kind of a pagan patron saint of the book. I didn’t even know when I started this that he was a real historical figure, by John Chapman. I thought he was one of those kindergarten folk heroes, you know, like Paul Bunyon, that’s made up. It turns out Johnny Appleseed, John Chapman, was a real historical figure who played a very important role in the frontier in the Northwest territory. And I also found out that the version of Johnny Appleseed I learned in kindergarten was completely wrong, had been Disney-fied, cleaned up and made very benign. He’s a much more interesting character. The way figured this out was I learned this one botanical fact about apples, which is, if you plant the seeds of an apple, like a red delicious or a golden delicious, the offspring will look nothing like the parent, will be a completely different variety and will be inedible. You cannot eat apples planted from seeds. They must be grafted, cloned.

GWEN IFILL: And they’re not American fruit.

MICHAEL POLLAN: They’re not, no. I learned it comes from Kazakhstan and has made its way here and changed a lot along the way. And so the fact that Johnny Appleseed was planting apples from seed, which he insisted on– he though grafting was wicked– meant they were not edible apples, and it meant they were for hard cider because you can use any kind of apple for making cider. Really, what Johnny Appleseed was doing and the reason he was welcome in every cabin in Ohio and Indiana was he was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier. He was our American Dionysus.

The fundamentalists who sought prohibition threated to destroy the story of Mr. Appleseed. Thus the story was somehow adapted to leave out the grain of alcohol. It also seems to leave out some of the more obvious motivation of “homesteading” land. He is portrayed as someone who was a friend of native inhabitants because he was not afraid to speak with them, while he actually was probably negotiating with them to let him “enhance” property (grow trees) in order to legally claim it as his own under nascent laws and profit from sale to a settler.