Donald Trump is making us sick—and I mean that literally. Some food experts are claiming that the recent outbreak of E.Coli contamination in Romaine lettuce may be directly linked to the Trump administration’s disdain for the Food and Drug Administration,  and particularly its health-ensuring regulations.

Specifically, the regulations in play in the Romaine lettuce issue are the ones pertaining to the safety of water used to irrigate and wash crops. Okay, I’m just going to say it: This is about poop, feces, pig shit, horse manure and other animal excreta — the sources of the E. Coli bacteria that have rendered Caesar salad an outcast in American kitchens and restaurants in 2018 and caused hundreds–maybe thousands–of people to vomit, have diarrhea even come close to death. .

It’s all happening, some food-safety experts say, because last year, Trump overturned Obama-era rules to test farm water for E. coli as well as for pesticides and other contaminants.

Let’s review.

According to EcoWatch, in 2006, a major outbreak of E. coli linked to Dole baby spinach was eventually traced back to water contaminated with cattle and wild pig feces. By that year, foodborne illness had become a full-blown epidemic, affecting 1 in 6 Americans. In response to that and many other outbreaks connected to foods such as peanuts, fruit and vegetables, Congress passed the landmark 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). The law includes requirements that the FDA develop rules governing produce safety, including the water quality used to grow, harvest and pack produce.

But the FDA dragged its feet in implementing the rules. After numerous lawsuits from food-safety groups, the FDA decided to allow growers to phase in water quality and testing requirements between 2018 and 2022.

That sounded like progress. But then, Trump came along—Trump and his anti-regulatory business cronies and Big Agriculture political donors. That’s when things started going south for food safety, turning us backward, toward the good old golden, anything-goes days of the unregulated food industry of 100+ years ago.

Ecowatch reports that, “in March 2017, Trump announced billions in dollars of cuts to USDA and FDA, undermining their ability to keep our food safe. In November 2017, the Trump administration proposed a delay in enforcement of urgently needed rules aimed at keeping produce free from fecal contamination. Under the Trump administration’s delay, growers would not have to test water for E. coli contamination until between 2022 and 2014—11 to 13 years after FSMA’s passage.”

The Center for Food Safety says that, based on FDA estimates, delaying enforcement of the rule could lead to more than 730,000 additional cases of foodborne illness and countless deaths.

FDA’s own economic analysis estimates that those illnesses and deaths would cost consumers between $96 million and $822 million more than the industry would save from a delay in enforcing the rule. The groups point to at least seven deadly outbreaks of foodborne illness linked to produce, including cantaloupes, apples, cucumbers, and papayas, since the passage of FSMA in 2011. Some of those outbreaks might have been prevented if the water safety rule had been in effect.

At the Center for Science in the Public Interest, deputy director for legislative affairs Sarah Sorcher said:

“Americans deserve to know that their produce wasn’t grown or rinsed in water contaminated with animal feces. Testing water that is used to grow and harvest produce for E. coli will save both lives and money. Consumers should be outraged that the Trump administration intends to defy Congress by delaying enforcement of these safeguards for many years more.”

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On July 11, 2014, nationwide, gay men contributed to blood banks in the only way they legally can: Instead of men being able to donate blood themselves, they have to bring along allies who are legally eligible to donate.

The National Gay Blood Drive isn’t your everyday charity event, it’s also a protest that gives voice to an important and overlooked issue. The FDA bars gay and bisexual men from donating blood.

Almost unbelievably, this law is still in effect. When donors enter a donation center, they are asked to fill out a form that includes many questions—one example of which is “Have your ears been pierced in the last three months?—to establish whether or not a person is at high risk for diseases transmitted through blood. Most regulations on blood donors are reasonable and necessary to accurately decrease the amount of unusable blood, by assessing their risk for diseases including Hepatitis B & C, syphilis and HIV/AIDS. So it is excessively unfortunate that another question on the form asks if the donor is a man: “Have you had sex with another man since 1977?” Answering yes to this question makes a man ineligible to donate blood for fear it would contain HIV.

So, being gay puts you at higher risk for AIDS? According to science, absolutely not. According to the federal government, apparently—yes.

Not only is this belief as vintage as leg warmers, it’s a throwback to 1980s knowledge of HIV and the all too recent HIV scare targeted at homosexuals. Obviously, the FDA is thirty years behind the times. Why exclude lifesaving blood when someone needs a transfusion approximately every 2 seconds?

Here are just a few reasons why this law is just plain wrong: All donated blood is tested. All donated blood is tested for HIV, Hep B & C, and syphilis. So, why make you answer questions about sexual identity? If the FDA is willing to concede that not just gay men have HIV, why ban them as a group?

Sexual promiscuity and homosexuality are not synonyms. Just because a man is homosexual or bisexual does not mean he is promiscuous. But this law doesn’t determine someone’s number of partners, just his gender. Some heterosexual people are promiscuous, and many gay men are not. Obviously.

More women have HIV than men. The largest population of HIV today is in Africa, and over 70% of people HIV positive there are women. Women are more likely to contract all types of STIs, including HIV, because of their anatomy.

There. Now that we have established that this regulation is as unfounded as it is arbitrary, why is it still happening? Why doesn’t the FDA just change the questionnaire? There are so many ways to assess high risk behavior, regardless of how a person identifies. It’s a simple solution. But instead, the FDA forces gay men to disclose their sexual behavior when all they wanted to do was give a life-saving donation. It targets gay men who may then relive the torments they’ve experienced before being comfortable identifying as gay.

And this law works on a bizarre honors system. If you don’t disclose this information, no legal action can be taken against you. Why make gay men hide their identity to give blood?

All these questions deserve answers. But what is really striking is how little awareness there is for this issue. While gay marriage garners the main stage of the LGBT rights platform, blatant discrimination and defamation that still exist in government bureaucracy are ignored.

Why is this issue on the back burner of the fast moving LGBT rights movement? Especially when these kinds of misunderstandings about gay men has caused so much animosity in the past, both during the AIDS epidemic and before.

Most people, even in the healthcare industry, have no idea that this law still exists. It’s archaic, a violation of our rights, and totally fixable.

If you’re like me and want to do something to change this law, here is a link to the National Gay Blood Drive website, where you can sign a petition to repeal the ban on gay blood.

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You know something’s wrong when you walk down the aisles in your local supermarket, and you no longer see the food on the shelves as food, but see something that looks like food and smells like food but is something so adulterated with questionable additives that you imagine it might be best if the food company had stamped the packaging with a skull and crossbones.

What’s going on?  First of all, here in the Northeast the growing season is rapidly winding down.  The last of the homegrown tomatoes have been picked. Farmers’ markets are in their final weeks.  Except for some greens and root vegetables and other vegetables grown earlier in the season and put into cold storage, there’s not much local, freshly picked produce left to excite the palate and get the cooking juices going.

What this means for this part of the country is that we’re forced to go indoors. It’s the season of the dreaded return to the supermarket with its sprayed, waxed, and travel-tired produce section. Falling back on inferior-quality supermarket produce is a major disappointment after the fresh bounty of the summer.

Even worse are questions about the safety of our supermarket food supply that scientists seem to be dropping on us almost daily.

GMOs in almost everything.  Arsenic in rice and chicken.  Synthetic hormones banned in most first-world countries but fed copiously to American cows that give us nonorganic dairy products.  Flame retardants (or, as they’re affectionately known, HBCDs) in canned sardines, peanut butter, sliced ham, turkey, and chicken.

How about that Bisphenol A, a chemical that seeps into foods packaged in plastic that’s been found to promote prostate cancer in animals.  Foods marked with “artificial flavor” or “artificial coloring” that the FDA does not require to be broken down into its components for labeling. Doubts about what’s really grown organically or not.  Natural or unnatural?  Who can trust anything about the food supply anymore?

Such uncertainty is a recipe for full-scale food phobia.  When you think too much about what’s in the food supply, you start to feel as if you’ve just stepped into the neurotic swirl of a Roz Chast cartoon.

Is anyone out there protecting our food supply? It’s supposed to be the FDA. How well are they doing? It depends on who you’re talking to.  The FDA is doing just fine, thank you, for big ag and the corporate food industry.  Not so good for the consumer and the concerns of the food-safety movement.

A little history might serve to reveal the confusion and pervasive influence of industry and their lobbyists over the FDA. It was 1949 when the FDA published the first guidelines for the food industry.   The publication was officially titled “Procedures for the Appraisal of the Toxicity of Chemicals in Food” but became known as the “black book.” It took nine more years before manufacturers of new food additives were required to formally establish the safety of their products. At the time, food producers were required to declare all additives contained in their products.

That requirement has swung wildly back and forth from adequate disclosure to no disclosure at all to something in between.  A good example is the checkered history of the artificial sweetener Saccharin (today, Sweet’n Low or Sugar Twin). Prior to 1971 Saccharin was listed as GRAS (generally recognized as safe), but in 1971 it was removed from that list and transferred into a group of additives requiring new scientific study, which effectively banned its use.

Six years later the Saccharin Study and Labeling Act was passed by Congress.  The 1977 act overturned the ban on the sweetener but required labeling stating that Saccharin had been found to cause cancer in laboratory animals.  Than came another turnaround, even though the health concerns were not fully disproved. The Saccharin Notice Repeal Act of 1995 struck down the labeling requirements of 1977.  Evidently, by 1995 the FDA believed that consumers no longer needed to be informed about the potential health hazards (still in question today) of Saccharin, which is now contained in hundreds of food products.

Is it any wonder we don’t know what to believe?  The scientists at the forty-year-old Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) are trying to bring some transparency to what’s in our food, which additives seem to be safe, and which ones we should be concerned about.

Here are their conclusions.  They’ve rated approximately 145 food additives.  There are five ratings:  safe, cut back, caution, avoid, and certain people should avoid.  Their findings indicate that 85 additives are safe.  Seventeen should be cut back.  Nine earned a caution because the additives could pose a risk and need further testing. Twelve have enough scientific evidence of possible harm to be avoided or are unsafe in amounts consumed by the typical consumer or have been poorly tested. Eighteen are potentially harmful to individuals with certain health risks and should be avoided by them.

Is your mind boggled yet?  If so, the well-intentioned folks at CSPI have a mobile APP for you—called (I kid you not) “Chemical Cuisine”—that lets you look up additives and their ratings to determine whether you’d like to consume that stuff the food factories call food. I’ll tell you, I can’t wait to step over the crowds of concerned food buyers spending hours in the food aisles keying in ingredients on their mobile devices and trying to make sense of the labels.  As for me, I’ll just be trying as best I can to skip the produce section and to get through the winter until next spring when my local farmers set out the unadulterated, real food that I’m missing already.

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