These local markets are the revival tents of fresh food seekers, part of the “buy-local-eat-healthy” movement, offering personal interactions between growers and consumers. But this dirt-to-dinner arrangement presents food safety issues and handling challenges for growers, small food businesses, and consumers.
food safety
When you have a baby on the way, everybody has "helpful" advice that isn't all that helpful. Most of it, in fact, is downright useless, and some of it is potentially very harmful. We'll start with the latter and revisit the useless in part two of this series.
Pop Quiz: You open the refrigerator and pull out a tasty treat. It’s May 6 and the label says: “Use By” May 4. Do you eat or toss? And what if it said: “Best if Used By”? Although you think you know the correct answer, most of us don’t.
The alternative health advocates at Natural News recommend you spend an additional $83,000 on organic food to avoid cancer and the cost of expensive treatments for the disease. You should save your money because eating conventional food, even if it's genetically modified, won't up your cancer risk.
With our first baby on the way, my wife and I were tempted to buy into common activist tropes about pesticides and food safety. Here's how we checked our fears as parents-to-be.
If junk science were a competition, the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) annual reported “Dirty Dozen” would routinely make the finals. As expected, in 2021, EWG has again demonized conventional agriculture practices with their Dirty Dozen list, and there are no shortages of naïve reporters in the media willing to accommodate their nonsense.
In the United States, we live in an affluent culture whose standard of living is high compared to other nations. Yet, we fail to be grateful for the advances in food science and biotechnology we benefit from, which frees us from the day-to-day task of our food production. One of the major phobias consumers struggle with is related to pesticides.
The anti-chemical Environmental Defense Fund claims that there are 10,000 chemicals in food that should be tested and regulated. It's a silly idea. Here's why.
There's currently no way to tell whether frozen food has stayed frozen during the journey from its original source to your local supermarket freezer. But a group of chemists from India has used chemistry and nanotechnology to come up with an environmentally friendly biosensor. The device may be useful in determining the integrity of frozen food by a simple color change.
E. coli. Salmonella. Campylobacter. Norovirus. When somebody gets sick eating at a restaurant, these are often the culprits. But McDonald's has been hit by an outbreak of Cyclospora. Our PhD microbiologist – who has taken two classes in medical microbiology – had never heard of that. So what is it?
UV light is dangerous to humans. That's part of the reason why there's widespread interest in discovering light sources that can kill unwanted organisms – while leaving humans unscathed.
"Use by" and "sell by" labels are not about food safety, although it's easy to be confused by them. In fact, they're only pointers about when a food's quality might not be at its peak.