how to kill off the 99% — part one: garlic, milk... and honey

"We asked Pundit Investigator and Special Projects Editor, Mira Slott, to see if Dr. [Ron] Voss could help us get to the bottom of the controversy over Chinese produce and garlic: [...]
Q: Certain produce commodities are more prone to food safety problems than others. How does garlic weigh on the food safety risk scale?
A: There are three safety issues to consider: Microbial — like we have occasionally here from E. coli and other pathogens. The spinach E. coli outbreak would be an example of this. The second food safety area is pesticide residue; and the third issue is with heavy metals. And I know some garlic grown in that part of the world has heavy metals.
     The way garlic is handled, the risk of microbial residue would be pretty slim, not impossible, but it’s not a fleshy kind of product as some more perishable ones. [...] However, it could be high for pesticide residues or metals.
     These are the three general areas where we can test if food is safe. One of things we can do for consumer protection is to do more checking on food to make sure it is safe. I don’t know what this will involve. But from a consumer standpoint, one way to build trust is to increase testing programs."
— Jim Prevor, Perishable Pundit
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"A third or more of all the honey consumed in the U.S. is likely to have been smuggled in from China and may be tainted with illegal antibiotics and heavy metals. A Food Safety News investigation has documented that millions of pounds of honey banned as unsafe in dozens of countries are being imported and sold here in record quantities.
     And the flow of Chinese honey continues despite assurances from the Food and Drug Administration and other federal officials that the hundreds of millions of pounds reaching store shelves were authentic and safe following the widespread arrests and convictions of major smugglers over the last two years.
     Experts interviewed by Food Safety News say some of the largest and most long-established U.S. honey packers are knowingly buying mislabeled, transshipped or possibly altered honey so they can sell it cheaper than those companies who demand safety, quality and rigorously inspected honey. [...]
     The Chinese have many state-of-the-art processing plants but their beekeepers don't have the sophistication to match. There are tens of thousands of tiny operators spread from the Yangtze River and coastal Guangdong and Changbai to deep inland Qinghai province. The lead contamination in some honey has been attributed to these mom-and-pop vendors who use small, unlined, lead-soldered drums to collect and store the honey before it is collected by the brokers for processing. [...]
     The discovery of lead in the honey presents a more serious health threat. 'The presence of heavy metals is a totally different story, because heavy metals are accumulative, they are absorbed by organs and are retained. This is especially hazardous for children [...]"
— Andrew Schneider, Food Safety News
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"The link between cancer and dietary hormones - estrogen in particular - has been a source of great concern among scientists, said Ganmaa [Davaasambuu], but it has not been widely studied or discussed.
     The potential for risk is large. Natural estrogens are up to 100,000 times more potent than their environmental counterparts, such as the estrogen-like compounds in pesticides.
     'Among the routes of human exposure to estrogens, we are mostly concerned about cow's milk, which contains considerable amounts of female sex hormones,' Ganmaa told her audience. Dairy, she added, accounts for 60 percent to 80 percent of estrogens consumed.
     Part of the problem seems to be milk from modern dairy farms, where cows are milked about 300 days a year. For much of that time, the cows are pregnant. The later in pregnancy a cow is, the more hormones appear in her milk." — Coryndon Ireland, Harvard University Gazette
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"With no notice other than a holiday-eve posting in the Federal Register, the US Food and Drug Administration has reneged on its long-stated intention to compel large-scale agriculture to curb over-use of agricultural antibiotics, which it had planned to do by reversing its approval for putting penicillin and tetracyclines in feed.
     How long-stated? The FDA first announced its intention to withdraw those approvals in 1977."
— Maryn McKenna, Wired
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