An Open Letter to the Mayor of NYC

Dear Mr. Bought-His-Third-Term Bloomberg,

This week’s snowstorm, scientifically referred to as a “snowricane,” has proved, yet again, how poorly staffed the NYC Sanitation department really is. No matter how tenaciously the workers slave away, the lack of manpower, trucks, and salt is ultimately the reason for the 274 lawsuits the terrible road conditions will generate over the weekend in Manhattan alone from slips and falls.

Given your very important yet hypocritical (because your diet is worse than most of obese America’s) crusade to lower salt content in restaurants and processed foods, I suggest, for next winter, you follow up that “green” platform you endorse so heavily and dump the extra salt onto NYC sidewalks. Reduce, reuse.. make New Yorkers happy.

Please keep in mind the purpose of this open letter is for entertainment purposes only. Unless you actually heed my advice in which case it was my idea all along.

Sincerely,
Disgruntled New Yorker

Know Where Thyne Food Cometh From

Don’t know where your local farmer’s market is? Check out the USDA’s newest local grown food atlas.

“The Atlas allows you to explore how food environmental factors, such as store/restaurant proximity, food prices, food and nutrition assistance programs, and community characteristics, impact food choices and diet quality in each individual community. By simply selecting an indicator from an extensive list, a user can create an interactive map showing the variation of diets and food choices throughout the country, across a state, or even within a particular county.”

Next step: negotiating entrée costs at restaurants. Just because Che Le Pompous serves you a tuna steak doesn’t mean it’s sushi grade. In fact, it very well could be the finest frozen tuna Costco has to offer. And now we have an interactive tool to prove it.

So.. Is it Bad or What?!

The great salt debate is trucking along and the New York Times would like to paint you a positive yet somehow grim, mostly “we have no idea so let’s throw everything in there” picture of Americans on a less salty diet.

“A) More than 44,000 deaths would be prevented annually (as estimated recently in The New England Journal of Medicine).
B) About 150,000 deaths per year would be prevented annually (as estimated by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene).
C) Hundreds of millions of people would be subjected to an experiment with unpredictable and possibly adverse effects (as argued recently in The Journal of the American Medical Association).
D) Not much one way or the other.
E) Americans would get even fatter than they are today.”

Right off the bat, any weight gain would be attributed to lack of self-control. In fact, cutting a significant portion of added salt from processed foods out of your diet will not only make you feel slimmer, it could also help drop those last few vanity pounds.

At least they threw in some statistics before the painfully generic and doomsday “unpredictable and possibly adverse effects.” Since when is cutting out excess amounts of a product that is a major contributor to hypertension, stroke, heart and kidney disease, among others, a bad thing?

Thank you, NYT, for compiling potential consequences from various credible resources that not only backhandedly compliment the salt reduction efforts of our great mayor and the CSPI but also presenting a dreary and foreboding forecast of the “potentially harmful” effects on society.

Good health and nutrition analysts must be hard to come by these days. Is smoking good or bad for you? Let’s go with both.

America’s Favorite Ketchup Packet Get a Well-Overdue Makeover

Food packaging technology continues to go above and beyond the consumer’s expectations. The Russians can feel right at home with tubes of borscht and caviar that tastes “just like how mama made it back in old country.” Organic milk can have a shelf life of up to 2 months. And we’ve finally used our extensive knowledge to update the most archaic and incredibly frustrating ketchup packet.

“Heinz struggled for years to develop a container that lets diners dip or squeeze, and to produce it at a cost acceptable to its restaurant customers.

‘The packet has long been the bane of our consumers,’ said Dave Ciesinski, vice president of Heinz Ketchup. ‘The biggest complaint is there is no way to dip and eat it on-the-go.’

Heinz is rolling out the new packs this fall at select fast-food restaurants nationwide. It will continue to sell the traditional packets”

This was something they struggled for years with? They should have just called any chain fast food restaurant and taken a look at their barbeque sauce packets.. Viola!

Congrats, Heinz, on making the simplest change, spending a fortune to conduct studies to figure out this simple change, and probably banking 4 fold in the next decade what you did the last one.

What’s In a Serving Size?

Whether shoveling down your favorite cartoon character-revered sugary cereal or rhythmically chomping on an entire bag of Doritos, portion controlling your nosh via the nutrition label is a tedious and sometimes daunting task which leads many consumers to just blindly take a guess. In their crusade to revamp nutritional labeling and make it more understandable, the FDA is moving key ingredients—nothing like a good pun, in this case it refers to the serving size, calories, etc.—to the front of the package:

“The goal is to give people a jolt of reality before they reach for another handful of chips. But the urgency of the message could be muted by a longstanding problem: official serving sizes for many packaged foods are just too small. And that means the calorie counts that go with them are often misleading.

So to get ready for front-of-package nutrition labeling, the F.D.A. is now looking at bringing serving sizes for foods like chips, cookies, breakfast cereals and ice cream into line with how Americans really eat. Combined with more prominent labeling, the result could be a greater sense of public caution about unhealthy foods.”

Serving sizes are smaller than you expect. For example, an ounce of potato chips is the typical serving size and comes in, on average, at about 150 calories. If you’re eating baked chips, that could mean about 14 crisps per serving whereas, if you’re shoveling down Tostitos, how many of us stop at the 6 crisps per serving? Even a 99% Fat-Free can of Progresso soup boasts only 100 calories per serving whereas the entire can will set you back about double that.

We will officially have nobody to blame but ourselves for our gluttonous tendencies and it’s for the better. Not only will we be more mindful of what we eat but this will create an opportunity for consumers to feel more in control of their choices in packaged foods.

Obama Has Spoken

After much campaigning to revamp the FDA and give them the power to actually follow through with the capabilities with all think they have but actually don’t, President Obama has announced he plans to put some moulah behind the initiative as well:

“The Food and Drug Administration would see a 6 percent jump in its budget to $2.51 billion. The agency’s total resources would reach about $4 billion because of user fees it expects to collect from food, tobacco and drug industries.

The agency would hire 1,251 additional full-time employees, bringing the workforce total to 13,586.

A large chunk of the additional funds would be spent on food safety, which has been flagged by Obama as a domestic priority. The FDA is reorganizing the way it monitors the production of food, with plans to step up inspections of domestic and foreign food suppliers, expand its laboratory capacity, and improve its ability to trace the source of an outbreak of food illness, among other things. “

Some are arguing that the budget is too optimistic and depends on $250 million in user fees from companies that haven’t been approved by the FDA yet. Others insist that a 6% increase isn’t nearly enough dough (pun intended) to get the FDA on it’s feet and functional like the American population needs for it to be.

The user fees and stronger legal authority are part of the Food Modernization Act, a bill currently stalled in the House of Representatives that intends, among other things, to give the FDA a lot more power to stop contaminated food before it hits circulation.

Let’s hope passing this bill won’t result in the FDA becoming just as money hungry as every other governmental organization and lead them to approve new food products as swiftly and half-baked as they do drugs. Anything for a fee. That’s what she said.