Category: Media Coverage
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Website Helps Officials Spot Foodborne Illness Outbreaks
A website that allows individuals to report food poisoning incidents may help health officials identify outbreaks of foodborne illness, according to NPR. Developed by Patrick Quade, iwaspoisoned.com has reportedly handled more than 75,000 user posts from 46 states and 90 countries since its launch. After a cluster of reports, the website notifies local health officials; the site…
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New York Times Editorial Criticizes Fear of Food Ingredients
Aaron Carroll, a professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine, argues in a New York Times editorial that “panic-du-jour” about unhealthy foods encourages people to unnecessarily live “in terror or struggling to avoid certain foods altogether.” Carroll asserts that the repeated condemnation of various food ingredients—including fat, cholesterol, meat, monosodium glutamate, genetically modified organisms and gluten—“shows…
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NPR Blog Highlights Efforts to Curb Food Label Proliferation
A recent post on NPR’s “The Salt” blog has highlighted a sharp increase in the number of food labels designed to signal a product’s nutritional content and environmental status, raising questions about whether “the proliferation of ‘pick me!’ logos has become somewhat overwhelming.” According to the October 29, 2012, post, the International Ecolabel Index has…
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Washington Post Details Fraudulent Corn and Soybean Imports
A Washington Post report tracking multiple shipments of corn and soybeans imported from Turkey has purportedly found that the food was sold in the U.S. market fraudulently labeled as organic. The article argues that U.S. Department of Agriculture organic standards create loopholes that allow fraud to slip through. Organic corn and soybeans grown outside of…
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Burger King Ad Invoking Google Home Stirs Up Attention
A Burger King advertisement featuring a prompt for Google Home, a voice-powered digital-assistant device, has caught media attention as an interesting but flawed method of incorporating artificial intelligence into a food-marketing campaign. The 15-second ad features a Burger King employee noting the ad is too short to explain the ingredients, stating Google Home’s trigger, “OK,…
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Guardian Author Takes on Nutritional Establishment in “The Sugar Conspiracy”
In this April 7, 2016, article about changing dietary recommendations and rising obesity rates, Ian Leslie resurrects the forgotten work of John Yudkin, a U.K. nutritionist who in 1972 authored a book titled Pure, White, and Deadly about the purported dangers of excess sugar consumption. Drawing parallels between this earlier research and that of contemporary…
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Brockovich Champions GMO Labeling In Time Magazine Editorial
Environmental activist Erin Brockovich uses the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) recent determination that genetically engineered salmon is safe for human consumption and requires no labeling as such to rally consumers into action against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in a December 1, 2015, opinion piece in Time. “The biotech industry and the FDA have…
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Politico Takes President Obama and Congress to Task over Food Safety Reform
By failing to adequately fund and implement the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), the “Obama administration and Congress have all but squandered an opportunity to give the anemic Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for the safety of 80 percent of the nation’s food supply, a level of oversight the public long assumed it…