Limited Edition Foods

Today we have a guest post from Karen Lynch, a great writer and a two time breast cancer survivor.  Karen writes for DiscussingBreastCancer.com where she frequently blogs about the limited edition products that are introduced to promote breast cancer awareness.  Today she contemplates why other worthy causes are not honored with limited editions, and wishes that major corporations would share their wealth and creativity with a rainbow of causes.

I’ve been suffering from withdrawal. Pink product withdrawal. There’s nothing philanthropic on the shelves at my local grocery store anymore. There’s no mention of a portion of any proceeds going to anyone. Whatever happened to all those charitable intentions?

When October comes around, good comes with a vengeance. Everyone gets in on the pink ribbon bandwagon. In fact, I’m hard pressed to find a company doesn’t put a pink ribbon on their products during the tenth month of the year.

But once the calendar page turns and the holidays descend upon us … pink is replaced with silver and blue or red and green. Come January, the shelves have lost all color.

It’s sad, really. As a two-time breast cancer survivor, I love seeing all those ribbons and learning about all those proceeds being shared with various breast cancer related charities.

But there are other causes … there are other ribbons … and other reasons to give.

November was lung and pancreatic cancer awareness month – where were all the clear and purple ribbons?

January is National Cervical Cancer Screening Month – that’s a teal and silver ribbon. Did you see any of those?

March is Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month … I saw no dark blue ribbons.

Melanoma Monday is in May (black ribbon).

September is ovarian cancer (teal), prostate cancer (light blue), leukemia (orange) and lymphoma (lime) and childhood cancer (gold) awareness month.

No ribbons. None.

There are other causes, too. Domestic violence (where are all the purple products?). Child abuse (blue). AIDS (red). There’s a cause for every color under the rainbow.

But we only get pink ribbons in October.

The main reason I like the pink ribbons I see in October is obvious – I’m a breast cancer survivor and the more money raised for the cause, the more research dollars there will be, the more likely it will be that there will one day be a cure. That matters to me, greatly.

But the other reason I like to see the pink products? They prove to me that most major corporations share their wealth at least a little bit. Sure, I wish they kicked up their charitable contributions all year round, not just in October. Heck, maybe some do and they don’t publicize that fact.

But it makes me feel a whole lot better when I see proof of their philanthropic acts on the shelves of my grocery store.   Besides … women are diagnosed with breast cancer all 12 months of the year. It would help them to know they have year ‘round support."

While the previews for Bee Movie make it seem like a flick about goofy bee being hit by a tennis ball and the other large objects, apparently the central plot is really all about food law and food policy. After dodging tennis balls and meeting Renee Zellweger, Jerry Seinfeld’s bee discovers that honey is sold in grocery stores and sues the human race for stealing all of the bee’s honey. Now this is a movie I have to see!

Tossing aside the obvious jurisdictional and venue problems, and the concerns about someone without a law degree serving as counsel in a class action lawsuit, the really interesting thing will “bee” what message the movie conveys.

SPOILER ALERT: Based on the reviews, Jerry’s bee wins his lawsuit. But as a result the bee’s economy is decimated and every flower in America dies. The third act consists of Jerry’s bee and Renee’s human rescuing the last roses in America from the Rose Bowl celebration so they can be use the pollen to revive the world.

In terms of food policy, this is an extremely interesting premise for a kids movie. Most consumers still think of biotech foods as a debate that is on the horizon, not realizing the debate was over years ago when biotech foods were slipped into our food supply without our knowledge or consent. That’s right, the tortilla you ate last night and the soy milk you drank today probably come from biotech seeds. You may not have realized it because the labels that would inform you about the biotech seeds have been blocked by biotech companies, who convinced government regulators that consumers did not need to be worried about what they ate.

We know that Bt corn and other biotech grains effect butterflies and insects, but we are illogically assured that the effects stop there and expected to believe that seeds implanted with artificial insecticide have no ill effects on the ecosystem or human physiology. That pollen from these plants does not drift, and everything is contained in a nice tidy scientific box.

Our entire modern food system works on faith, and that faith only works if consumers do not think too hard about what they are eating and where it comes from. So a movie about how everything in the environment is connected at the source of our food is fairly radical. Once you start asking questions, the grocery story becomes a scary place to be … for humans and for crusading bees.

If you have seen Bee Movie, I would love to hear from you. Do they talk about food policy in the movie at all, and what is the final moral of the story? Don’t rock the boat? Don’t file big lawsuits? Don’t ask too many questions about where the money goes, or you will put your friends and family out of work? This seems rather worrisome, especially as a message to kids. On the other hand, the message could be … don’t jump to conclusions? Be sure to investigate and ask questions before you take a stand on an issue? That could be a positive message, especially as a message to kids.

So if you have seen Bee Movie tell us what you know and what you think!

Please forgive me if I interrupt our regularly scheduled programming today to talk about an issue that is near and dear to my heart: that people should be paid for the work they do, especially when other people are profiting off of that work.

Being paid for work done is an issue I feel passionate about personally and one that I have written about professionally, as that link indicates (it cites to a law review article I wrote about payment issues in the construction industry). So I appreciate your bearing with me as I depart from talking about food for the day.

Which brings me to the writer’s strike that is currently taking place in Hollywood, or more accurately on sets across America. Please do not buy in to the misrepresentations of those who would have you believe that these writers are selfish elitists, marching for rich paydays at the expense of hardworking Americans who just want to come home after a long day of work and watch Lost.

In fact, the opposite is true. These are folks are simply trying to get paid for the work that they do. Period. And the studios are expecting them to work for free. It’s that simple.

Right now the writer’s are caught in a bizarre contractual loophole that states that everything that ends up on the internet is a mere “promo.” This means Writer’s Guild of America members are currently not being paid for anything that ends up on the Internet … even while ads are sold around those episodes (an advertisement in the middle of a “promo” - how strange), even while studios are building business models around the recognition that more and more people are watching television on the internet, even while everyone recognizes that it will be the portable internet and not the heavy and unportable television that delivers our entertainment in the decades to come.

As one writer put it, they are not marching for more rights … they are really just trying to maintain the status quo and the basic concept that an honest day’s work leads to an honest day’s pay. Don’t believe the hype that this is about greed, folks. We are talking about simple compensation for work well done, and companies trying to profit off of that work without paying for it.

To understand a bit more about the issues, take four minutes and watch the very well done You Tube video “Why We Fight” which explains the issues much better than I can. Or watch the very funny clip of the writers from The Office below, which explains the bizarre conundrum of studios labeling an entire episode of a show “a promo.”

Poisoned food can kill you, so most consumers are surprised to learn that the United States Government does not have the authority to force food companies to recall tainted food products.

That’s right, all recalls for food infected with e.coli, salmonella, parasites, or other harmful agents may stay on the grocery store shelves unless the company that released them in the first place decides to recall it back to the factory.

While the United States Department of Agriculture or the Food & Drug Administration can pressure companies to recall food that is known to be tainted, it is ultimately the company’s choice whether to issue the recall or release information to the public about the problem. Not surprisingly, this often means food is in the marketplace for days if not weeks longer than necessary.

The past few months have seen stories about tainted meat, poultry, soups, salads, peanut butter, and even cocktail mixes. As the graphic from ABC News above indicates, these stories can get big headlines and leave consumers feeling panicked about the safety of their food and worried about what to eat. This hurts industry players as well as consumers, but in the age of quarterly earnings reports long term concerns usually take a back seat to short term profit margins.

The good news is that increased publicity for this issue means that legislators are finally introducing bills that propose to grant the government mandatory recall authority, however we have been here before. Mandatory recall is an issue that comes up every time there is a large food safety crisis in the headlines, however it usually fades away from the public mind with the next big story. If you are interested in keeping the momentum going on this issue, contact your legislator, raise awareness with friends and family members about the issues involved, or get involved with a food safety advocate organization.

Last week I was in Iowa and spotted these slightly shocking boxes nestled amongst the candies and snack foods in a gift store. Given the national war on smoking, I was surprised to see they made these candies, much less see them placed them at eye level for kids. Apparently my impression that these candies were no longer on the market is a common misconception, as the government has left it up to individual retailers to decide whether they will carry these controversial confections. Given the nature of these novelty items, it seemed natural to choose them as today’s feature for Classic Food Friday.

So the debate about candy cigarettes continues, as a study was published as recently as April of this year trying to add weight to the seemingly obvious truth that candy cigarettes glamorize smoking to kids, which in turn makes them more likely to grow up to be smokers. For anecdotal evidence on this theory, head over to Old Time Candy which has some interesting stories about candy cigarettes, or candy sticks as they are apparently called these days, and some amazing pictures of the old packages which were made to mimic real cigarette brands.

Or if the photo above triggered your consumer craving, you can buy candy cigarettes and bubble gum cigarettes in packages of 24 boxes over at Amazon.com. But be forewarned faithful readers: according to technology blogger Mike Swanson, candy cigarettes are almost as addictive as the real thing. Hopefully candy cancer is not a potential side effect.

Pizza seems so simple. Bread, sauce, the toppings of your choice. And yet this staple of the American diet lies in the center of one of the touchiest food policy issues of the new century.

That’s because the federal regulations of America’s food supply is currently filled with bizarre overlaps and loopholes, and pizza provides the best illustration of how strange those food regulations can be:

If you have meat on your pizza, it is governed by the USDA.
If you have a pizza without meat, it is governed by the FDA.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the federal Food & Drug Administration (FDA) are two separate entities, each with their own laws, regulations, handbooks, edicts, employees, and lawyers who interpret all of these things in a variety of ways. They report to different cabinet secretaries, and have different benchmarks for success. Even the federally mandated purposes of these two agencies are fundamentally different, as USDA was originally created to help promote the consumption of domestic agriculture products and FDA was created to promote food safety after the outcry that followed the muckraking novel The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

And yet you can take two pizzas that are made in the same factory, by the same company, using the same base ingredients, placed in the same type of packaging, shipped on the same truck, to the same store, and displayed in the same frozen food case … and they are regulated by two vastly different federal agencies.

This is not only frustrating and inefficient, but it is also frightening. We often hear that America has the safest food supply in the world, but the reality is that is just a saying … like the admonishment to drink eight glasses of water a day, no one knows where that bit of conventional wisdom comes from and when placed under a microscope it does not stack up to reality.

The reality is that our food regulations are much more permissive than people realize, and America does not have the safest food supply in the world. The fact that we do not have a unified food agency that oversees everything related to the nation’s food and fiber makes it easy for many issues to slip through the cracks. Even the Department of Homeland Security wants a unified food agency, as it makes it easier to protect the nation’s food supply from bioterrorism.

And yet, resistance to this pragmatic idea is so high amongst bureaucrats, food manufacturers, and lobbyists that a unified food agency seems like an impossible dream. Bureaucrats who have spent their lives accumulating power and knowledge about their agency are extremely resistant to giving up their turf. And food manufacturers have learned to survive the fractured environment and take advantage of the existing loopholes are worried that retooling the nation’s food regulations would cost their companies time and expensive changes. So consumers continue to be exposed to more costs and increased risks while an expensive turf war continues as various special interests continue to prolong the obvious.

So the next time you eat a slice of pizza, take a moment to contemplate how this iconic American food symbolizes a public policy firestorm … and the vulnerability of the American food supply.

pizza, USDA, FDA, United States, America, food supply, regulation, food agency

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and the month always brings a feast of limited edition food products. Over the next few weeks the blog will feature pink bagels, pink chocolate products, pink pastries, as October always offers a veritable plethora of pink items designed to raise awareness and funds for breast cancer research.

But October is not just Breast Cancer Awareness Month, it is Domestic Violence Awareness Month as well. Domestic violence is also a huge killer of women, but its purple pride is less trendy (and less profitable) than the pink packaging that dominates the shelves this time of year. This is a shame, because as important as it is to support breast cancer research we cannot forget that domestic violence is quietly devastating women every day:

One in three women has been the victim of abuse at the hands of a boyfriend or husband.

A third of the women in America admit that they have been physically or sexually assaulted by a husband or a boyfriend in their lifetimes.

At least three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends every day.

Children who witness violent acts between their parents are much more likely to grow up to become abusive themselves.

Domestic violence costs the economy over $5 billion dollars every year in health care costs, lost productivity and missed work, and related expenses.

Men are not immune from violence: twenty five percent of the victims of domestic violence are male.

Domestic violence is a devastating epidemic and silence is its friend. Many of the bloggers around the 451 Press network are taking time to promote domestic violence awareness during this first week in October. April has some compelling posts over on Her Daily News, while Susan at Home Computer Talk has a list of online resources for victims or people wanting to learn more about the issues. Beth at Astrology Explored has written about how to recognize the signs that someone is a violent individual and the manipulative traits of an abusive personality.

KD at WatchingCSI.com was kind enough to showcase CSI’s partnership with CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates), a national organization that works with abused and neglected children in foster care.

If you are interested in helping with the issue of domestic violence in a hands on manner, becoming a CASA is an invaluable way to help children who have been removed from violent homes. CASA volunteers get extensive training before they are assigned specific cases by juvenile judges, and they work alongside the attorneys and social workers involved in the case to investigate the child’s situation and make recommendations about what is in the best interests of the child.

If you are interested in learning more about CASA please go to NationalCASA.org or contact the CASA office in your area.

Domestic Violence, purple ribbon, awareness, October, CSI, CASA, astrology