You know something\u2019s wrong when you walk down the aisles in your local supermarket, and you no longer see the food on the shelves as food, <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s going on?\u00a0 First of all, here in the Northeast the growing season is rapidly winding down. \u00a0The last of the homegrown tomatoes have been picked. Farmers\u2019 markets are in their final weeks.\u00a0 Except for some greens and root vegetables and other vegetables grown earlier in the season and put into cold storage, there\u2019s not much local, freshly picked produce left to excite the palate and get the cooking juices going.<\/p>\n

What this means for this part of the country is that we\u2019re forced to go indoors. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Even worse are questions about the safety of our supermarket food supply that scientists seem to be dropping on us almost daily.<\/p>\n

GMOs in almost everything.\u00a0 Arsenic in rice and chicken.\u00a0 Synthetic hormones banned in most first-world countries but fed copiously to American cows that give us nonorganic dairy products. \u00a0Flame retardants (or, as they\u2019re affectionately known, HBCDs) in canned sardines, peanut butter, sliced ham, turkey, and chicken.<\/p>\n

How about that Bisphenol A, a chemical that seeps into foods packaged in plastic that\u2019s been found to promote prostate cancer in animals.\u00a0 Foods marked with \u201cartificial flavor\u201d or \u201cartificial coloring\u201d that the FDA does not require to be broken down into its components for labeling. Doubts about what\u2019s really grown organically or not.\u00a0 Natural or unnatural?\u00a0 Who can trust anything abou<\/a>t the food supply anymore?<\/p>\n

Such uncertainty is a recipe for full-scale food phobia.\u00a0 When you think too much about what\u2019s in the food supply, you start to feel as if you\u2019ve just stepped into the neurotic swirl of a Roz Chast cartoon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Is anyone out there protecting our food supply? It\u2019s supposed to be the FDA. How well are they doing? It depends on who you\u2019re talking to.\u00a0 The FDA is doing just fine, thank you, for big ag and the corporate food industry.\u00a0 Not so good for the consumer and the concerns of the food-safety movement.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0\u00a0 The publication was officially titled \u201cProcedures for the Appraisal of the Toxicity of Chemicals in Food\u201d but became known as the \u201cblack book.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

That requirement has swung wildly back and forth from adequate disclosure to no disclosure at all to something in between.\u00a0 A good example is the checkered history of the artificial sweetener Saccharin (today, Sweet\u2019n 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.<\/p>\n

Six years later the Saccharin Study and Labeling Act was passed by Congress.\u00a0 The 1977 act overturned the ban on the sweetener but required labeling stating that Saccharin had been found to cause cancer in laboratory animals.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Is it any wonder we don\u2019t know what to believe? \u00a0The scientists at the forty-year-old Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI)<\/a> are trying to bring some transparency to what\u2019s in our food, which additives seem to be safe, and which ones we should be concerned about.<\/p>\n

Here are their conclusions.\u00a0 They\u2019ve rated approximately 145 food additives.\u00a0 There are five ratings:\u00a0 safe, cut back, caution, avoid, and certain people should avoid.\u00a0 Their findings indicate that 85 additives are safe.\u00a0 Seventeen should be cut back.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Is your mind boggled yet?\u00a0 If so, the well-intentioned folks at CSPI have a mobile APP for you\u2014called (I kid you not) \u201cChemical Cuisine\u201d<\/a>\u2014that lets you look up additives and their ratings to determine whether you\u2019d like to consume that stuff the food factories call food. I\u2019ll tell you, I can\u2019t 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.\u00a0 As for me, I\u2019ll 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\u2019m missing already.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You know something\u2019s wrong when you walk down the aisles in your local supermarket, and you no longer see the food on the shelves<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":18717,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[994,451,128,172,1528,1555,882],"tags":[1764,1333,1731],"yoast_head":"\n