The feds aren't protecting consumers from imported seafood wrongly called "organic," so two leading food safety advocacy groups have asked the top law enforcement officers in every state to halt this misleading practice.

The Center for Food Safety and Food & Water Watch said it is wrong to label imports as "organic," when there are no U.S. organic seafood standards in place.

They sent letters to the AGs in each state telling them that the USDA and the Federal Trade Commission have failed to prevent consumer deception by enforcing the few existing organic labeling laws and regulations.

The practice is a violation of the states' consumer deception and misrepresentation laws, the groups said.

"Allowing importers to label their seafood 'organic' when it does not have to meet any U.S. standards is a disservice to American consumers, who have come to trust and believe in the organic label," said Joseph Mendelson, legal director of the Center for Food Safety.

"USDA's refusal to stop importers from calling their products organic when many of them use antibiotics, parasiticides, or feed that would not be permitted under U.S. regulations is dishonest," he said.

Three years ago, California passed a law preventing the labeling of any seafood as "organic" until federal standards are finalized and in place.

Only now is the USDA in the process of establishing organic regulations for finfish and shellfish but the process may take up to two years.

With U.S. sales of organic food dramatically increasing, an increasing amount of foreign seafood imports labeled as "organic" have appeared to take advantage of this emerging market, the organizations said.

"It is time for other states to follow California's example and stop the abuse of the organic label on imported seafood," said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch.

Leaders of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce have contacted the 10 largest private analytical laboratories responsible for determining the safety of the imported food products entering the U.S. and asked them to fess up to companies importing unsafe food.

In a letter to the laboratory management, Committee Chairman John Dingell and Rep. Bart Stupak, who heads the Oversight and Subcommittee, said that during the committee's ongoing investigations into food safety issues they learned that it is a routine occurrence for private laboratories to discard test results documenting food safety violations at the direction of the importer.

"When this occurs, the importer can then instruct the same private laboratory, or a different one, to test the product again until a clean result is obtained," said Dingell.

The members asked the laboratories to identify the importers of adulterated food in an effort to determine whether this food is making it into the country's food supply.

Under the Food and Drug Administration's Import Alert rules, products are only allowed to enter commerce after a private laboratory has determined they are safe. However, during its investigation, the committee determined that this testing is done without alerting FDA that potentially dangerous food has been imported into this country and has entered commerce.

"Importers should not be permitted to ship food that they know to be contaminated to our stores and ultimately to our tables," Dingell said.

Stupak added: "The fact that the FDA tolerates this imminent threat to the public health is outrageous. We will probably never know how many people have suffered illness or worse because some importers have chosen to profit from selling tainted food.."
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The committee is working on legislation that will require all private food labs to be certified and all test results to be provided to FDA at the same time it is given to importers."

Here is a link to the full text of the letters and to whom they were sent.

The timing was great.

With prices for some wild king salmon soaring higher than $30 a pound, dozens of chefs, fishermen and seafood mongers demonstrated how to put tasty and nutritional wild salmon on the plate that costs about a tenth as much.

The stars of the show on Saturday at Seattle's Fisherman's Terminal was keta, or chum, salmon and pink salmon. Fourteen teams of BBQers from throughout Washington lit their smokers and grills to compete in a fishy cook off where they had to prepare a keta filet, a pink salmon burger, a hunk of albacore tuna and a chowder made from halibut.

Chefs show how to cook Keta, By Andrew Schneider

The keta salmon coming off the Traegers, Webers and skillets were seasoned with almost every spice combination imaginable: curry, Cajun black rub, cumin, smoke-flavored salts and peppers, lemon juice, white wine, butter and garlic, always garlic.

Some cooks seared it quickly on both side to enhance the flavor and then moved it to a cooler part of grill or lowered the heat. One caution echoed by almost all was don't overcook the keta.

The real creativity seemed to come with the pink salmon burgers. The chopped salmon was mixed with everything from full cloves of roasted garlic, to capers, mushrooms, sharp cheddar, blue cheese, peppers of all colors and heat.

Alder, apple and hickory smoke from the grills and the aroma of cooking salmon wafted across the scores of boats comprising Seattle's portion of the berthed Alaska fishing fleet. Lines of eager samplers queued up at each of the competitor's make-shift kitchens to taste what a little ingenuity can create out of the cheapest salmon. Few were disappointed. Many said they were surprised at the flavor, especially the burgers.

Several of the professional chefs and caterers said that keta will be showing up more frequently in restaurants as cooks come to appreciate the fish's firm pink flesh, moderate fat content and delicate flavor.

"This is the fourth year for the Keta Festival and we hold it to show how great Keta and the pink salmon can taste when they're properly prepared," said Paula Cassidy. She and her husband, Jon Speltz, opened the Wild Salmon Seafood Market about 13 years ago and are one of the main sponsors of the event.

"There are few other places in the country where people are as experienced at recognizing quality salmon as we are here in Puget Sound, but Seattle is also full of salmon snobs," Cassidy told me. "They think if it's not King or Coho, it's not worth eating. I'm sure that after tasting what these barbeque-ers and the professional chefs have done to the keta and pink, we've convinced a bunch of people that any salmon can be great as long as it's wild salmon."

One of the most popular venues was where John Van Amerongen from Trident Seafood was cutting 1-inch wide strips of Keta, removing the skin, rolling it into a pinwheel, running a couple of wooden skewers through it and seasoning it.

"I rub both sides with a little olive oil infused with some fresh rosemary, a bit of garlic salt and pepper," said the chef. "I sear both sides in a hot (skillet), cover it, lower the heat and cook for about 10-minutes."

Some, like Charlotte Wang and her 4-year-old daughter, lined up for seconds and thirds.
"This is amazing. It doesn't have oil like King salmon but it still tasted great and I can afford it," said Wang, who lives in Everett.

Knife wielders from Wild Salmon Seafood Market and Seattle culinary schools gave demonstrations of how to filet whole salmon, which may have been the most useful lesson of the day.

Knowing how to fillet a salmon can save big bucks.

Why? Check out the numbers: Filets of troll-caught Alaskan King was selling at $25.99 a pound. The whole King was selling for $17.99 a pound. For Keta, the fillets were $4.99 – or $2.99 a pound for a whole fish.

The experts said all that is needed to save a lot of money in your fish purchases is a sharp, inexpensive filet knife and a bit of practice. Soon you'll be cutting your salmon steaks and filets to order and at a much lower price.

Keta was considered the best value on the market and that was before the Pacific Fishery Management Council canceled the commercial salmon season off California and Oregon.

Recipes and more information on wild salmon can be found on the Web
sites of the festival sponsors, which include the Port of Seattle, Puget Sound Salmon Commission, Washington Sea Grant, The Fishing Vessel St. Jude, Wild Salmon Seafood Market and the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute.

It's invisible. It's called the wave of the future. It's being used in thousands of products and processes and scores more applications are added to the list of uses every day. However, nanotechnology is pretty much unregulated by anyone, and of greater concern is that no one has shown that exposure to these sub-microscopic nanoparticles is safe.

In fact, a Japanese study released last week claims to have shown a link between nanoparticles and mesothelioma, a fatal lung disease almost always caused by asbestos exposure. The fact that the study is actually examining the health implications has been widely praised as needed, but the methodology used by the study's authors has been denounced by others in the field.

However, I'm told that another "more comprehensive and realistic" study will be released in the next few weeks that also will document a health hazard caused by the use of nanoparticles. Let's see what, if anything, our federal health protectors – NIH, EPA, OSHA and FDA - have to say about it.

But this week, a coalition of consumer, health, and environmental groups filed a legal petition with EPA demanding that the agency use its pesticide regulation authority to stop the sale of numerous consumer products now using nano-sized versions of silver, called nano-silver.

The petition was filed by the International Center for Technology Assessment, a non-profit public interest research group that focuses on technological impacts on society. The group said that manufacturers are infusing a large and diverse number of consumer products with the most common commercialized nanomaterial - nano-silver - for its enhanced "germ killing" abilities.

Advertisements claim that some nano-silver products can kill approximately 650 kinds of harmful germs and viruses and "kills bacteria in as little as 30 minutes."

CTA says it has found more than 260 nano-silver products currently on the market, ranging from household appliances and cleaners to clothing, cutlery, and children's toys to personal care products and coated electronics.

The group's concern is that the release of this unique substance may be highly destructive to natural environments and raises serious human health concerns.

"These nano-silver products now being illegally sold are pesticides," said George Kimbrell, CTA nanotech staff attorney. "Nano-silver is leeching into the environment, where it will have toxic effects on fish, other aquatic species and beneficial microorganisms.

"EPA must stop avoiding this problem and use its legal authority to fulfill its statutory duties."

Nanotechnology deals in the atomic and molecular level and just as the size and chemical characteristics of manufactured nanoparticles can give them unique properties, the "tiny size, vastly increased surface area to volume ratio and high reactivity," can also create unique and unpredictable human health and environmental, the petition contended.

The legal petition demands that the EPA regulate nano-silver as a unique pesticide that can cause new and serious impacts on the environment.

Among the demands in the 100-page petition are that EPA must regulate these nanotechnology products as new pesticides; require labeling of all products; assess health and safety data before permitting marketing; analyze the potential human health effects, particularly on children; and analyze the potential environmental impacts on ecosystems and endangered species.

Joseph Mendelson, CTA's legal director, says "The law does not allow the (EPA) to stand idle while a new legacy of toxic pollution emerges."

Two years ago, EPA said that it would regulate nano-silver products as pesticides, but the groups say the agency has done nothing.

The products come not only from the U.S., but are imported from the U.K., Canada, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China, New Zealand, and Germany.

Also supporting the legal action was the Center for Food Safety, Beyond Pesticides, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, ETC Group, Center for Environmental Health, Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Clean Production Action, Food and Water Watch, the Loka Institute, the Center for Study of Responsive Law, and the Consumers Union.

Here is a link to the list of products submitted with the petition and to the full legal submission.

Researchers at Texas A&M university have reported that the vaunted beef brisket is the healthiest part of a cow and its fat is as healthy as olive oil.

The Aggie scientists, who have seldom been heard uttering a discouraging word on anything to do with cattle, say the brisket contains 'depots' or tiny reservoirs of healthy monounsaturated fatty acids, according to a statement from Texas' first public institution of higher learning,

The beef brisket is a unique hunk of meat. It holds a treasured place in the heart of most southern barbecue connoisseurs who will always make room for it in their smokers.

Brisket photo by Christopher Blank

But the inexpensive, boneless, cut of meat can be found slow cooking until tender in heavy pots and Dutch ovens throughout the country. Cured in a brine of salt and seasonings, it is the most popular cut for corned beef. Almost every ethnic group has its own recipes, seasoning and accompaniments for brisket, so what you do with it is limited only by your cleverness and taste buds.

And now Texans in white lab coats like Prof. Stephen Smith, a research meat scientist, and his grad student, Stacey Turk, tell us that brisket not only tastes great but is also good for us.

Smith says that oils like olive or canola are the best sources of monounsaturated fatty acids since they contain 70 percent to 80 percent oleic acid.

"However, the fat in beef brisket from corn-fed steers contains nearly 50 percent oleic acid, and oleic acid increases the longer cattle are fed a corn-based diet," said the researchers.

Turk's study could trigger a change in how meat processors view the brisket by offering a ground product that's more nutritious than those found in retail grocery outlets today, the university said.

"We found the brisket to be the most healthful area of the carcass," Turk said. "This would allow processors to place a premium on a "ground brisket" and market the product."

That may be a difficult battle. The professor said he spoke to different meat producer groups, and "they don't want to talk about fat in their product, and I can understand that."

However, producers of Wagyu beef raised in Japan, U.S. or Australia aren't afraid of the association with fat. Wagyu beef is known for its high marbling and monounsaturated fat.

"They're not afraid of fat, and I hope the rest of the industry sees that," Smith said.

Every week I get a couple of dozen e-mails or phone calls asking me which food additives are safe and which aren't. When I suggest that the readers check out the Food and Drug Administration's Web site or Goggle or Yahoo, what I all too often wind up with are frustrated and unhappy readers.

The problem is that for every article or posting offered on the internet that says something is unsafe and should be avoided, there is another that can be easily found that says the identical substance could be consumed in large quantities. Now I know this will amaze you, but over the years I have found that the positive reviews are sometimes written by doctors (MDs or PhDs) who work for the company making or selling the additive. Articles waving consumers off have often been written by scientists with competing financial interests.

Where can a consumer turn who wants the latest "unbiased" information on the safety of what's added to our food?

One place is the Center for Science in the Public Interest. This public advocate for nutrition and food safety has been around for 30-plus years and is equally loved and disdained by all sides, so they're probably doing something really well.

The organization has just released its latest revision on which food additives are safe and which aren't. It's called "Chemical Cuisine," the Classic A-to-Z Guide

The guide may help you know what you should do if a waiter offered you some butylated hydroxytoluene with your food. You'd probably decline. Yet that chemical is one of scores of hard-to-pronounce additives that routinely show up in the fine print on packaged foods' ingredients lists.

Is BHT safe? CSPI says food manufacturers use it to keep oils from going rancid, but animal studies differ on whether in promotes or prevents cancer.

"Just because an additive is artificial doesn't necessarily mean it's unsafe," said CSPI executive director Michael Jacobson, who began researching food additives in 1971. "That said, the Food and Drug Administration hasn't done nearly enough to police the preservatives, dyes, emulsifiers, stabilizers, thickeners, sweeteners and other chemicals many of us eat every day."

Chemical Cuisine ranks additives as "safe," "cut back," "caution," "certain people should avoid," and "everyone should avoid." Some additives that fall in the latter category include:

• Acesulfame potassium, Aspartame, Saccharin. Those artificial sweeteners are either unsafe or poorly tested. The only artificial sweetener to get a "safe" grade is sucralose (Splenda).

• Partially hydrogenated oil. This is one artificial food ingredient that CSPI has asked the FDA to get out of the food supply, since its trans fat component is a potent cause of heart disease and possibly other health problems. Yet Burger King and many other restaurants still deep fry with it; many manufacturers of frozen foods par fry with it; and some manufacturers, restaurant chains, and bakeries still use it in pie crusts, pastries, and other foods.

• Potassium bromate. This chemical strengthens dough, and most of it breaks down harmlessly. But bromate itself does cause cancer in animals, and isn't worth the small risk it poses to humans. Many bakers have stopped using bromated flour.

Jacobson says that while it's important to pay attention to the presence of many of these food additives, the presence of salt and sugar must also be weighed.

"Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and high blood pressure are such problems in this country in part because Americans are eating way much more sugar and salt than our bodies can handle," said Jacobson. "They're both perfectly 'natural' ingredients but everyone should cut back."

Farming has to be one of the most difficult, unpredictable and sometimes frustrating professions there is, especially for the small mom and pop growers.

EWG President Ken Cook

And for some, the financial picture gets even better. Under formulas set by Congress, taxpayers topped off the record farm earnings with another $5 billion in "direct payment" crop subsidies, says EWG President Ken Cook.

"Over 60 percent of the subsidy was pocketed by just 10 percent of the recipients-the largest and generally wealthiest subsidized farming operations in the country, said the head of the public interest research group.

More than 400 Washington State farms got a piece of the public pie according to the EWG's database of recipients. Here a link that will tell you who got what in our state.

For a breakdown of payouts in the rest of the country check out this link.

There have long been debates over whether massive factory farms are better for the consumer and livestock being raised for market than the traditional family operation. Well, now a 2 1/2 -year analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health document how and why industrial-scale farm animal production poses unacceptable risks.

The 124-page report, "Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America" shows that while the mammoth, industrial farming operations have, in some cases, lowered food costs, they harm human health and the environment, treat animals inhumanely and destabilize the already beleaguered economy of rural America.

A cattle feed lot Photo by Andrew Schneider

"Significant changes must be implemented and must start now," the commissioners said, and here are some of the recommendations the organization offered:

1. Ban the non-therapeutic use of antimicrobials in food animal production to reduce the risk of antimicrobial resistance to medically important antibiotics and other microbials.

2. Implement a disease monitoring program for food animals to allow 48-hour trace-back of those animals through aspects of their production.

3. Treat these farms as the industrial operation they are and implement a new system to deal with farm waste to protect Americans from the adverse environmental and human health hazards of improperly handled IFAP waste.

4. Phase out the most intensive and inhumane production practices within a decade to reduce the risk to public health and improve animal well-being

5. Increase funding for, expand and reform, animal agriculture research.

Here is a link to Pew and the report.

For those fighting cancer, a healthy diet is critical.

For Alaska Natives fighting cancer, a healthy diet means foods hunted and gathered from land and sea, foods seasoned by a sense of place and community, foods like muktuk and seagull egg pie that the non-Native medical establishment doesn't understand and, therefore, has a hard time endorsing.

Anchorage Daily News Reporter Debra McKinney tells of a new guide which gives dietary credibility to what subsistence eaters have known all along: Wild foods are not only rich in nutrients, but rich in story, culture and comfort, all part of the health and healing package.

The book, "Traditional Food Guide for Alaska Native Cancer Survivors," is of vital importance, the reporter writes, because proportionally, Alaska Natives die of cancer way more than the white population does.

With 400 new cases diagnosed each year, it's the leading cause of death among Natives in Alaska, as it is for all Alaskans. Research indicates that a shift of diet, from traditional subsistence foods toward processed, convenient ones, may play a role, and not just in higher rates of cancer, but diabetes and obesity.

The 142-page guide, primarily funded by a grant from the Lance Armstrong Foundation, provides protein analysis for everything from musk ox to muskrat. It lists the vitamin A and C content of wild celery, fiddlehead ferns, fireweed and other subsistence plants. Calories, cholesterol and carbohydrates, too.

It also explains vital questions like: what's a serving of moose? Check out her story at the link above.

Fish lovers in the Pacific Northwest who have curtailed their consumption of seafood because of concerns over mercury contamination may now get help from science in loading their shopping cart. New technology is permitting some fish mongers to certify that their seafood have low levels of the toxic agent that is known to harm developing nervous system of the unborn and young children.

"Now we can tell markets with scientific confidence that what they're buying from the processors and selling at their fish counters have been certified to contain low levels of mercury," Michael Wittenberg, the CEO of Micro Analytical Systems Inc. told me.

The technology behind Wittenberg's "Safe Harbor Foods" certification centers on the collection of a tiny sample of flesh from the fish being evaluated using a hollow biopsy needle. The sample of fish is then inserted into a sampling console attached to a computer.

"In a minute or less, the analysis is completed, the results printed out and the fish can be tagged certifying that it meets or exceeds government standards," Wittenberg explained to me.
It's this "Safe Harbor Certified Seafood" certification that Haggen, Inc. has introduced at its 33 TOP Food, Haggen and Larry's supermarkets in Washington and Oregon.

"It was the right thing to do for our customers," Russ Casteel, seafood buyer for the chain, explained to me today.

"For the last three years we have seen increasing concern among shoppers over mercury in seafood," "Now, with this Safe Harbor certification, they will know that the seafood they're getting from us has been tested to ensure that the mercury it contains is at or below government standards for safety."

The testing is done at Haggen's two seafood suppliers. All shipments from Alaska of salmon, cod, halibut, rockfish and Dover sole are tested in Seattle. Samples from each shipment of King crab, scallops and lobster tails imported through Los Angeles are tested at that location before shipped to the chain, Casteel said.

"Every swordfish, tuna or other species known to accumulate higher levels of mercury are tested individually," he said. "Anything that exceeds government levels will be refused by our buyers."

The cost of the testing, which Casteel said is minimal, is passed on to the consumer.
The system has been used for two to three years in groceries through California and Wittenberg says they are close to adding new capability that will detect and measure other dangerous heavy metals in seafood.

While mercury is naturally occurring, the largest source is clearly industrial pollution. It falls from the air and accumulates in streams and oceans where its contact with water converts it to methylmercury. The FDA says all fish and shellfish absorb some methylmercury as they feed so it builds up in them. In some species, like shark, swordfish, King Mackerel and tuna the levels can be alarmingly higher than most others.

FDA and other health advisory organizations have set standards for mercury levels but the consumer and the seller didn't know what was in the seafood they were purchasing.

For more information on mercury in fish and Safe Harbor certification here are the links to FDA, EPA, and MASI.