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Entire food system may be contaminated with BPA and other plastic nasties

by s1cx54s Posted on February 28, 2013

Entire food system may be contaminated with BPA and other plastic nasties

By Susie Cagle

sea turtle

You still probably shouldn’t cook your turkey in plastic.

Eat organic all you want. Avoid plastic like the plague. It may not matter after all — you could still be ingesting a lot of nasty bisphenol A and phthalates, chemicals that leach from plastics and potentially disrupt human endocrine systems.

A study by Sheela Sathyanarayana published in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology compared one group that avoided BPA and pthalates in accordance with written directions and another group that ate a catered, local, organic diet prepared without use of plastic for cooking or storage.

From Fast Co.Exist:

The researchers assumed that urinary BPA and pthalate levels would drop in the catered group compared to the group using written instructions — people are generally bad at following advice from their doctors after all. “Instead we saw big spikes and increases in the catered diet group and no changes at all in the written education group,” she says.

Sathyanarayana’s team tested the food samples in the catered group to find the source of contamination. The culprits: milk, cream, and ground coriander. “I honestly don’t know why the spices were more contaminated or why the dairy had higher contamination, but I do know it’s consistent with other reports,” she says. …

The authors conclude in their study: “It may be that our findings reflect an isolated rare contamination event because of unusual processing or a packaging abnormality. It also could be the case that the food supply is systematically contaminated with high phthalate concentrations, which are difficult to identify.”

It could! Oh god, oh god, it really could.

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Shell to ‘pause’ Arctic drilling in 2013

by HarralGeidl697 Posted on February 27, 2013

Shell to ‘pause’ Arctic drilling in 2013

By Susie Cagle

After an epic string of screw-ups, Shell is pulling way back on its plan to conquer the far north frontier and drill the ever-loving hell out of it. Pause, baby, pause!

kullukresponse

Shell’s Kulluk drilling rig, which the company

ran aground in Alaska

in December.

Shell has spent more than $4.5 billion in its quest for oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off the north coast of Alaska and so far has nothing to show for it but a series of embarrassing mishaps.

“Our decision to pause in 2013 will give us time to ensure the readiness of all our equipment and people following the drilling season in 2012,” Marvin Odum, director of Shell’s “Upstream Americas” operations, said in a statement.

The company pledges that it isn’t giving up on its quest for Arctic oil: “Alaska remains an area with high potential for Shell over the long term, and the company is committed to drill there again in the future. If exploration proves successful, resources there would take years to develop.”

But at least for now: Congratulations, Alaska!

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Why shouldn’t you eat horse?

by wqds234der Posted on February 27, 2013

Why shouldn’t you eat horse?

By Susie Cagle

From Tesco to Burger King to IKEA, the horse-meat saga has gripped the western world for the past month. Horse hasn’t even made it into stateside meaty meals, but you wouldn’t know it from our outsize horror at the idea of chowing down on lovable ponies.

As someone who hasn’t eaten animals in a really long time, I’ve been kind of confused about all this. Why the moral panic about this four-legged mammal and not all the other ones that end up in sandwiches? This isn’t a modest proposal — I’m genuinely trying to understand.

“The unfolding drama around Europe’s horse-meat scandal is a case study in food politics and the politics of cultural identity,” Marion Nestle wrote at Food Politics. “They (other people) eat horse meat. We don’t. Most Americans say they won’t eat horse meat, are appalled by the very idea, and oppose raising horses for food, selling their meat, and slaughtering horses for any reason.”

Raising horses for meat was re-legalized in the U.S. in late 2011, against the wishes of the Humane Society, which argued that horses shouldn’t be eaten because they’re considered “companions.” But since then, no horse slaughterhouses have actually managed to open their doors in the U.S.; one would-be horse-meat purveyor recently sued the government for moving too slowly on inspections.

As Cord Jefferson points out at Gawker in a post entitled “You should eat horse,” horse meat is cheaper than beef, comparable in terms of calories and protein, and has way more omega-3 fatty acids. But he notes that there’s some legit cause for concern:

There are two very valid reasons to be upset at the thought of someone switching your beef with horse. The first is that consumers have a right to purchase food whose labels don’t lie to them. Secondly, not all horse meat is created equal. While some horses killed for food, particularly those in Europe, are safe for human consumption, many of the more than 100,000 American horses shipped outside our borders to be eaten annually are former racing animals whose flesh is laced with steroids and other chemicals as harmful as phenylbutazone. European food-safety officials started turning away American horse meat last year for fear it was too full of dangerous drugs, but this horse-as-beef scandal now calls into question how effective those officials actually are.

I think we can all agree that our food safety system sucks. But this horse-meat scandal also calls into question our deep cultural food biases.

As a nation, we eat a hell of a lot of animals, more than any other country on Earth. We eat lab-produced foods, fast-food junk, and bugs. We eat mislabeled seafood; recent studies on widespread seafood fraud have gotten attention, but strip-mall sushi restaurants don’t appear to have experienced a dropoff in popularity. So why the uproar over horse?

Just think how much worse this could be, folks. German politicians have suggested distributing horse-tainted products to the poor. And in South Africa, burgers and sausages have been found to contain water buffalo, donkey, and goat. Then again, maybe buffalo and goat would be considered offal-esque delicacies in American bistros.

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From red to black: How Philly remade its transit system

by donseoo Posted on February 26, 2013

From red to black: How Philly remade its transit system

By Susie Cagle

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority has come a long way, baby. Back in the ’90s, it was mired in $75 million in debt and under investigation by the FBI. Now it’s being honored [PDF] as one of the top transit agencies in the nation.

dan_ol

The Philadelphia Daily News has the story of how SEPTA was turned around over the last two decades, in large part thanks to board chair Pat Deon. After years of operating in the red, Philly’s transit systems added revenue-generating advertisements, balanced its budget, and drove right into the black.

SEPTA’s chief financial officer, Richard Burnfield, said the Deon-era board’s commitment to running SEPTA like a business with balanced budgets has attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding that riders enjoy through new Silverliner V regional-rail cars ($330 million), 440 new hybrid buses ($232 million) and beautifully rebuilt subway stations such as Spring Garden and Girard ($30 million).

There were also some notable cultural shifts at the agency.

A big accomplishment during Deon’s tenure has been the cessation of hostilities between the 15-member board’s 13 suburban members and two city members.

Rina Cutler, who was appointed to the board by Mayor Nutter five years ago, said, “It was very clear to me that the city and SEPTA spent a long time poking each other in the eye, and that this relationship was not useful.

“I came from Boston, where people have such a love affair with transit, they wear T-shirts with an MBTA [Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority] route map on them,” Cutler said. “That model didn’t exist here.”

Cutler said she and Deon “have a healthy respect” for one another and “we don’t poke each other in the eyes anymore.”

Deon told the Daily News: “When I first came here, this was just a pitiful operation. For myself and the board, it was like turning around an ocean liner. But we did it.”

Now Deon is pushing for a new smart-card system that would allow poorer transit riders without bank accounts to deposit their checks directly into the system, saving hundreds of dollars in fees and streamlining their rides. The city also plans to phase out subway tokens (!) by 2014.

The problems SEPTA has faced are more or less the same ones facing other regional transit systems that reach across poor urban communities and more affluent suburban ones (give or take an FBI investigation and some bus-related gunfire). If Philly can turn things around, perhaps there’s hope for us all.

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From red to black: How Philly remade its transit system

by 9ji7g4x Posted on February 26, 2013

From red to black: How Philly remade its transit system

By Susie Cagle

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority has come a long way, baby. Back in the ’90s, it was mired in $75 million in debt and under investigation by the FBI. Now it’s being honored [PDF] as one of the top transit agencies in the nation.

dan_ol

The Philadelphia Daily News has the story of how SEPTA was turned around over the last two decades, in large part thanks to board chair Pat Deon. After years of operating in the red, Philly’s transit systems added revenue-generating advertisements, balanced its budget, and drove right into the black.

SEPTA’s chief financial officer, Richard Burnfield, said the Deon-era board’s commitment to running SEPTA like a business with balanced budgets has attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding that riders enjoy through new Silverliner V regional-rail cars ($330 million), 440 new hybrid buses ($232 million) and beautifully rebuilt subway stations such as Spring Garden and Girard ($30 million).

There were also some notable cultural shifts at the agency.

A big accomplishment during Deon’s tenure has been the cessation of hostilities between the 15-member board’s 13 suburban members and two city members.

Rina Cutler, who was appointed to the board by Mayor Nutter five years ago, said, “It was very clear to me that the city and SEPTA spent a long time poking each other in the eye, and that this relationship was not useful.

“I came from Boston, where people have such a love affair with transit, they wear T-shirts with an MBTA [Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority] route map on them,” Cutler said. “That model didn’t exist here.”

Cutler said she and Deon “have a healthy respect” for one another and “we don’t poke each other in the eyes anymore.”

Deon told the Daily News: “When I first came here, this was just a pitiful operation. For myself and the board, it was like turning around an ocean liner. But we did it.”

Now Deon is pushing for a new smart-card system that would allow poorer transit riders without bank accounts to deposit their checks directly into the system, saving hundreds of dollars in fees and streamlining their rides. The city also plans to phase out subway tokens (!) by 2014.

The problems SEPTA has faced are more or less the same ones facing other regional transit systems that reach across poor urban communities and more affluent suburban ones (give or take an FBI investigation and some bus-related gunfire). If Philly can turn things around, perhaps there’s hope for us all.

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Can Yahoo be more ‘efficient’ with more workers driving to the office?

by d2wk58 Posted on February 26, 2013

Can Yahoo be more ‘efficient’ with more workers driving to the office?

By Susie Cagle

Adam Tinworth

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer puts the kibosh on telecommuting.

In a decision that sent the internet into a tizzy today, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has decided that employees will no longer be allowed to telecommute to work. USA Today reports:

Yahoo’s decision is meant to foster collaboration, according to a company memo sent to employees Friday.

Yahoo’s head of human resources, Jackie Reses, wrote that communication and collaboration will be important as the company works to be “more productive, efficient and fun.” To make that happen, she said, “it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people and impromptu team meetings.”

According to Census figures from 2010, about 9.5 percent of the U.S. workforce telecommutes at least one day a week. That’s actually not very much, considering telecommuting can be more productive for some workers, not to mention more comfortable. Millions of Americans working from home or local co-working spaces each day save millions of tons in emissions each year, and potentially cut down on traffic deaths.

According to a source inside the company, many workers across all of Yahoo’s divisions have been telecommuting for a long time now, in arrangements distinctly unlike those at other Silicon Valley tech giants.

The telecommuting issue is relevant to many office workers in America, but especially so in the Bay Area, with its crappy regional transit options and big distances between desirable office parks and desirable bedroom communities. Some of the biggest Silicon Valley tech companies have enlisted their own private busing systems to cut down on telecommuting and also keep up with the desires of their workers to live in dense urban areas outside of sprawly, beige, boring Silicon Valley.

It’s not like we’ve looked to Yahoo for leadership in tech in a long (long, looong) time. Still, this is a sudden switch for the company’s culture, and it may be bad news for telecommuters at other organizations that want to get more “collaborative.”

So, Yahoo workers intending to keep your jobs by moving to the Bay Area: Please just don’t move to Oakland. Hey, I hear San Jose is pretty nice!

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Organic tomatoes are healthier for you, researchers find

by donnajansen Posted on February 25, 2013

Organic tomatoes are healthier for you, researchers find

By Susie Cagle

They may be smaller but they’re also mightier. Organic tomatoes pack in more cancer-fighting phenols and vitamin C than conventionally grown tomatoes, according to research published in the journal PLOS One. But the organic tomatoes do tend to be about 40 percent tinier, so make sure your next tomato fight features the conventional kind.

waltarrrrr

From Mother Jones:

The authors hypothesize that the additional stress experienced by organic plants — having to fend off pests, scrounge harder for nutrients like nitrogen in soil, etc. — “resulted in oxidative stress and the accumulation of higher concentrations of soluble solids as sugars and other compounds contributing to fruit nutritional quality such as vitamin C and phenolic compounds.” In other words, when the plants suffer a bit, they generate more of these vital nutrients. And the same could be true for other phenol-rich fruits and vegetables.

If you’re excited about this news, that’s great! But don’t get too excited. Tomato season is summer and early fall, so even though our globalized industrial food system brings organic tomatoes to stores year-round, they won’t taste really good until several months from now, when they’re also more likely to be locally grown.

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Transit advocates stop cuts using civil rights legislation

by nension Posted on February 21, 2013

Transit advocates stop cuts using civil rights legislation

By Susie Cagle

No justice, no ride to work! The vast majority of transit systems in the U.S. have cut service, raised fares, or both over the last two years, affecting those who rely on public transportation especially hard.

An article in the current issue of the Boston Review outlines the struggle for more justice and more buses:

For millions of American families, the commute to work is more than stressful: it can also be cripplingly costly. While the average family spends around 19 percent of its budget getting around, very low-income families (defined as families who make less than half of an area’s median income) can see as much as 55 percent of their earnings eaten up by transportation costs, according to a report by the Center for Transit-Oriented Development. …

Nationwide about 80 cents out of every federal transportation dollar goes toward highways—used disproportionately by more affluent drivers — and only 20 cents goes toward mass transit systems, which are heavily used by people of color and by lower-income workers. When it’s time to distribute that 20 percent, regional authorities often favor light-rail systems for suburban commuters over bus lines for city riders.

Some hope, though: A few cities have managed to wrest money away from the ‘burbs and back to the urbs by filing lawsuits claiming civil rights violations.

That tactic may not work for New Yorkers, though, who are about to see yet another fare hike, their fourth in five years — and it’s not because transit workers are getting a raise. Here, New Yorkers campaigning against fare hikes explain how debt service has increased train costs.

If there’s one thing the status quo has no answer for, it’s digging out of debt. Sorry, New York.

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Read and take over: Occupying urban streets with guerrilla libraries

by Louise6qy Posted on February 13, 2013

Read and take over: Occupying urban streets with guerrilla libraries

By Susie Cagle

Whether because of budget cuts or natural disasters, many of our nation’s libraries are struggling. But DIY efforts are filling the cracks in a few especially hard-hit communities.

Urban Librarians Unite

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Urban Librarians Unite in New York has set up sidewalk mini libraries outside less-mini libraries that have closed due to storm damage.

These tiny, all weather libraries house about a hundred books at a time and there is no expectation whatsoever that the books will come back. … The Mini Libraries are a resource for our communities, a chance to experiment in library science, and a reminder to the public that even if the library itself is in ruins the librarians are still thinking of them.

ULU is quick to point out that its orange boxes, while super-awesome, aren’t a replacement for real library infrastructure.

Advocates of little libraries are often rabid supporters of big libraries as well and it is their respect for the institution that makes them want to emulate it. It is impossible to mistake a citizen’s reading exchange for a well run reference desk. Our Mini Libraries will suffer from the same limitations as any little library. They could never be mistaken as an alternative to the branch libraries they substitute and intended to support. They do offer some comfort and succor, especially to kids and families, and they remind people that libraries — and their librarians — are nimble, caring and quick to respond to the needs of their communities.

We hope that our Mini Libraries will evolve.

“I smell the spirit of Occupy,” writes a Seattle Post-Intelligencer blogger.

Jaime Omar YassinThe Biblioteca before the city booted it off library grounds.

For an even more grassroots effort on the opposite coast, there’s the six-month-old Biblioteca Popular in Oakland. On Aug. 13, 2012, activists occupied an abandoned library in East Oakland only to be booted by the city within the day. Undeterred, they set up on the grounds and sidewalk outside, providing garden space, kids’ activities, and books in both English and Spanish. At first the city left Biblioteca alone, but then three weeks ago it locked down the grounds and gardens, pushing the library onto the sidewalk outside, where it remains now.

All power to the book people.

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Study questions eco-benefit of vegetarian diet; we question study

by rikkiqlyons Posted on February 13, 2013

Study questions eco-benefit of vegetarian diet; we question study

By Susie Cagle

I feel like the world is constantly conspiring to get me to eat bacon. That was my first thought when I saw this new study from France claiming that a plant-based diet is not actually the planet-saver we all thought. (My second thought was: WTF, I don’t want to eat bacon.)

The study followed nearly 2,000 diners who self-reported their meals to scientists at the National Research Institute of Agronomy in Marseille; the researchers then tried to determine how much greenhouse gas was emitted in production of the most commonly consumed foods. Let the fuzzy math ensue! Reuters reports:

Overall, about 1,600 grams of carbon dioxide were emitted for every 100 grams of meat produced. That’s more than 14 times the amount of greenhouse gas emitted during the production of fruit, vegetables and starches. It’s also about 2.5 times as much greenhouse gas as that generated by fish, pork, poultry and eggs.

That gap narrowed, however, when the researchers looked at how many grams of carbon dioxide were emitted per 100 kilocalories (kcal) — a measure of energy in food.

The most greenhouse gas — 857 grams — was still emitted to produce 100 kcal of meat, but it was only about three times the emissions from a comparable amount of energy from fruit and vegetables.

Wait wait, hold on, Reuters — the lede of your article says that a plant-based diet “might not be the greenest in its environmental impact.” Now you’re telling me it’s only three times better? Oh, wait, and now you’re telling me it’s no better at all?

And when [senior author Nicole] Darmon and her colleagues looked at what people actually ate to get a certain amount of energy from food every day, they found that the “highest-quality” diets in health terms — those high in fruit, vegetables and fish — were linked to about as much, if not more, greenhouse gas emissions as low-quality diets that were high in sweets and salts. …

Darmon said that’s because people who eat a plant-based diet need to eat more produce to get the amount of energy they’d have in a piece of meat.

Roni Neff of Johns Hopkins, who studies food’s contributions to climate change, expressed skepticism about the new research. “[S]he points out that according to the study’s calculations, people would need to eat about nine pounds of fruit and vegetables to make up for a smaller serving of meat, and that may be unrealistic.”  Uhhh, may be! 

For a very different take on the planet-saving benefits of not eating bacon, check out Shrink That Footprint’s recent math comparing the impact of five kinds of American diets.

Shrink That Footprint

No, you’re not carbon neutral even if you’re a fruitarian, but there are definitely food choices that can make a difference — and they don’t require a gut-busting nine pounds of produce per meal.

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