My Visit to BPI

I had the opportunity today to visit Beef Products Incorporated (BPI) in South Dakota.  If you’re unfamiliar with BPI, they are the manufacturers of lean fine textured beef (LFTB) (more popularly and derogatorily known as “pink slime”).  I learned a lot and came away from the tour both impressed and depressed.

I’ve been in a lot of food plants, but BPI’s was one of the most technologically advanced, food-safety focused plant I’ve seen.  There is a deep irony in the fact that a company that proactively invested millions in preventative measures to prevent food safety problems found themselves in the limelight for faux safety reasons.  It wasn’t an actual sickness or recall or outbreak, it was a sensational news story that tarnished their reputation.  That’s what I find depressing.  Here is a family-owned business started by an entrepreneur trying do things right.  Prevent waste, make more affordable food, make safer food.  And they’re made out to be a villain.  For what?

 Here are some things I learned:

 1)      LFTB is beef.  That’s all. I suppose that’s why the meat-industry created a website called beefisbeef.com. But seeing it made a huge impact on me. There is no bone that goes into the process.  You could quite plainly see big tasty-looking strips of beef and roasts going into the process; it simply isn’t worth the packer’s time to carve away all the fat which is why BPI gets it.  So, big beef hunks go in one end and out the other end come three products: tallow, cartilage (which is the only waste), and LFTB.

2)      Much has been made of BPI’s use of ammonium hydroxide to kill pathogens.  But, I didn’t realize that BPI also makes LFTB without ammonium hydroxide, depending on their customer’s wishes.  I also found the graphic on their web site interesting, which compares the amount of ammonia in a beef patty with LFTB to the other parts of the burger.

3)      At no point in the process did I see anything that remotely resembled the pictures one sees on the internet.  LFTB is a little pink but that’s because it is completely frozen.  When it is thawed, it looked almost identical to package of ground beef you see on the grocery store shelf.

4)      BPI and others have done numerous taste tests with LFTB.  In blind taste tests, people almost always prefer ground beef that incorporates up to about 25% LFTB.  Burgers with LFTB taste better.  Who knew?    

5)      Cargill made a lot of news a couple weeks ago with their announcement to label their version of LFTB.  I was surprised to hear that BPI has been doing it for over a year!  But, here’s the thing.  BPI doesn’t sell directly to retail, so it isn’t as simple as telling BPI they should label because – number 1 the USDA controls what they can put on their label – and number 2, they can’t control what the retailer puts on their label. 

6)      The removal of LFTB from the market caused a spike in the price of lean ground beef and an increase in supply of fattier 73% lean ground beef.  Beyond the adverse price impacts on consumers, what are the health impacts of increased saturated fat consumption? 

7)      For all the talk about the need for more transparency in the food system, I was surprised to learn how untransparent were some food activists in misrepresenting their purposes and intentions when seeking information from BPI.

 I don’t necessarily mean to cheerlead for BPI.  I’m sure they have their faults.  But seeing the people up close and personal who were affected by all the media hype was, quite frankly, tragic. 

 Surely there is a good journalist who could find a story in that.    

Food Conspiracies

This past weekend, I was a guest on a radio show that is broadcast through a network to about 100 stations across the US.  I was talking about my book, The Food Police.  Having done dozens of these kinds of shows over the past six or seven months since the book release, I figured that I've heard just about every question there was to ask.  I was wrong.  

After some standard back-and-forth questions with the host, the line was opened to callers.  Here are a few of the claims I heard - each from a different caller: 

• Adding fluoride to water doesn't prevent cavities and causes joint pain, teeth browning, cancer, and Alzheimers   
• Canola oil is an "unnatural" newly created synthetic product that causes cardiac problems and high blood pressure
• Organic farmers are small farmers; small farmers treat their soil better than large farmers
• With GMOs the genes they inject into DNA.  They are unnatural and become free floating in the soil; 70% of babies have the Bt toxin in their blood as a result of GMOs; the implication is that GMOs are very dangerous
• A new wave of cancer patients are successful fighting cancer by moving to a diet of organic produce 

Some of these are more grounded in reality than others but overall I think I lost a little bit of faith in my fellow man.  I don't mean that in a belittling way.  But it makes me wonder what it is in human nature or what incentives exist in media/internet that would take a little grain of truth and turn it into some of these beliefs that are so at odds with the evidence.  

Ban Beer?

The abstract of recent article from the journal Economic Inquiry:

Few studies explore the linkages between health behaviors and macroeconomic outcomes. This study uses 1971–2007 state-level data from the United States to estimate the impact of beer consumption on economic growth. We document that beer consumption has negative effects on economic growth measures once the endogeneity of beer consumption is addressed. Our estimates are robust to a range of specification checks. These findings run parallel to a large body of literature documenting substantial social and economic costs stemming from alcohol use.

If we apply the same logic the FDA used to justify banning transfats, then clearly beer must be also banned.  Prohibition redux.  

I also have to wonder whether beer consumption is causing lower growth or whether lower growth is causing beer consumption.  Or whether higher growth states are shifting from beer to wine consumption.   Or whether there is some third factor, like unemployment, that drives lack of growth and beef consumption.  The authors tried to address some of these questions in their analysis, but it isn't clear how well their approach controls for these problems problem.  

(HT: Andreas Drichoutis)

Stiglitz on Farm Policy

The Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, weighs in on recent farm bill debates in the New York Times.  Here are a few excerpts

American food policy has long been rife with head-scratching illogic. We spend billions every year on farm subsidies, many of which help wealthy commercial operations to plant more crops than we need. The glut depresses world crop prices, harming farmers in developing countries. Meanwhile, millions of Americans live tenuously close to hunger, which is barely kept at bay by a food stamp program that gives most beneficiaries just a little more than $4 a day.

and

FARM subsidies were much more sensible when they began eight decades ago, in 1933, at a time when more than 40 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. Farm incomes had fallen by about a half in the first three years of the Great Depression. In that context, the subsidies were an anti-poverty program.

Now, though, the farm subsidies serve a quite different purpose. From 1995 to 2012, 1 percent of farms received about $1.5 million each, which is more than a quarter of all subsidies, according to the Environmental Working Group. Some three-quarters of the subsidies went to just 10 percent of farms. These farms received an average of more than $30,000 a year — about 20 times the amount received by the average individual beneficiary last year from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program, or SNAP, commonly called food stamps.

Unlike Stiglitz, I do not believe that the food stamps program is a sacred right that should be protected at all costs (I'm sure that's not his precise view but that's the way this piece reads), but he is right on the optics of the farm bill which, as he says, is

 taking from the poor to subsidize the rich.

Those are the optics but I'm not even sure that those are right.  It is not as though the poor are paying the farm subsidies.  Most of the taxes are paid by the rich.  So, farm policies are taking from the less-well organized rich to subsidize the better organized rich.

TED talks and GMOs

A friend sent me a link to this TEDx talk about GMOs by Robyn O'Brian in 2011.  The speaker strikes me as incredibly earnest, very persuasive (the video has been downloaded 760,000 times!), and ultimately very wrong.  The speaker, after finding one of her children had food allergies, came to the conclusion that the answer must be GMOs or hormones used in milk or some combination of those things.  But, this is sheer illusory correlation and she cites no credible scientific study to make such a link.  She also uses a number of persuasive and scary but misleading story lines.  Some examples.

She says that the US has the highest rates of cancer compared to anywhere else on the planet.  I'm not sure whether that's true or not (presumably people in many countries don't live long enough to develop cancer).  But, what I do know is that CDC data shows that age adjusted cancer deaths and incidence rates have been falling over time in the US.  Falling at the same time we have adopted GMOs and other technologies that worry O'Brian.  So much for that link. 

She doesn't mention that rBST use in milk fell dramatically after the initial adoption phase and that almost any grocery store sells milk without rBST (in fact milk without rBST is all many stores offer).

She says that the concept of "substantial equivalence" used in the US regulatory process was invented by the tobacco industry.  I don't know whether that's true or not but that is simply an ad hominem argument trying to falsely equate GMOs and tobacco.  She also claims that other countries took a more precautionary approach than the US to GMOs.  That's true.  But, what she doesn't say is that in Europe, despite their different regulatory process, many GMO varieties are approved. 

I could go on but I believe the point has been made.  

Taking a step back, I found it interesting to see what the TED organizers put up on their web site as advice to organizers of TEDx events (independently run events that license the TED brand name) to avoid pseudo-scientific presentations:

2. Red flag topics

These are not “banned” topics by any means — but they are topics that tend to attract pseudo-scientists. If your speaker proposes a topic like this, use extra scrutiny. An expanding, depressing list follows:

Food science, including:

• GMO food and anti-GMO foodists (EDIT 10/3/13: “Foodist” was the wrong word here and we recognize it was offensive to many.)
• Food as medicine, especially to treat a specific condition: Autism and ADHD, especially causes of and cures for autism

Because of the sad history of hoaxes with deadly consequences in the field of autism research, really look into the background of any autism-related talk. If you hear anything that sounds remotely like, “Vaccines are related to autism,” — RUN AWAY. Another non-legitimate argument: “We don’t know what works, so we have to try everything.” Pretty much all the time, this argument is designed to cause guilt in suffering parents so they’ll spend money on unproven treatments.

Curiously, it seems there were conspiracy theories upon conspiracy theories because the TED site added the following last month:

If you’re coming to this post because of an allegation that TED has “banned discussion of GMOs” or has a relationship with Monsanto, please know that these rumors are not true. We have not banned these topics, and we have no relationship with Monsanto. 

In fact, we have many great talks on food and health that challenge entrenched ideas in smart and creative ways. 

Now is the time that I should add that I talked about GMOs in my own TEDx talk (and judging by the mere 1800 downloads, I must not be nearly as convincing as O'Brian) and have also let it be known that I don't work for Monsanto.