Archive for November 2nd, 2002

Get Your Fill, But Get It Good

Posted November 2, 2002 By Pattie Gillett

Taking your infant to the doctor can be a nerve-wracking experience. Not only do you have to sit there and not throttle the person sticking sharp metal objects into your helpless child, there’s generally something the doctor finds that you – yes, YOU – could be doing better.

This visit, it was feeding. Apparently, Alex is on the low end of the weight scale for her height. She’s healthy, but the doc would like to see her put on a little weight. Now, anyone who has seen our child can tell you that she is no waif. She’s got properly plump baby arms and legs and round, plump cheeks (yes, on both ends, thank you very much). At first I was a bit perturbed. What the heck did this doctor want, a Michelin baby? I thought Alex was fine. But the doctor is the expert and when I looked at the growth charts myself, I could see she had a point. Where had we gone wrong? I am still breast feeding as often as I can, though she occasionally gets formula bottles when I can’t feed her myself. We recently started her on solids with much success. As Dave so eloquently put it one day, “I’ve been shoveling orange stuff into her all day!� He was referring to Alex’s fondness for the yellow and orange end of the baby food spectrum – carrots, squash, peaches, etc.

This was, apparently, where we slipped up. A little too much solid stuff and not enough breast milk and formula. Apparently, the two solid food meals per day were filling her tummy so that she wasn’t hungry enough for the amount of breast milk/formula that a baby her size needs. Baby fruits and veggies are relatively light on calories whereas breast milk and formula are not. Admittedly, Dave and I may have been a little too excited about Alex starting solids that we overdid it. Now we know. Ease up on the colorful food pastes and crank up the liquid stuff – for now anyway.

Around the same time that we were revising Alex’s menu, I discovered that feeding children properly is a very hot topic these days. Earlier this year, the East Penn school district (near Allentown, PA) caused a national stir when it sent letters home to the parents of overweight students warning them about the dangers of obesity-related health problems. The national media soon got wind of the letters. The stir spurred an avalanche of articles in parenting and news magazines about an “epidemic of obesity� among American children.

In statistical terms, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that 13% of American children ages 6 to 11, and 14% of children 12 to 19, are overweight or obese. The CDC says it has been ringing the alarm about childhood obesity for years but that it was the so-called “fatty letters� from East Penn that finally brought the matter to the national forefront. In the meantime, everyone’s laying blame. Some blame the fast food company for marketing fatty meals to kids. Some blame schools for cutting back on physical education programs and serving unhealthy foods in cafeterias. Predictably, there are some blaming the Internet, TV, and computer games for being more interesting than the great outdoors.

It’s obvious that there a number of factors at work here, and as much as I would like to blame McDonald’s for all the world’s ills, I cannot. Really, the bottom line is, education. Beyond calories and fat, most Americans really don’t know a lot about nutrition. Many know they should eat better but don’t take the time to learn how. Given that adult obesity rates are upwards of 55%, is it any wonder that kids aren’t making sound nutritional choices? Kids follow the nutritional examples of the adults around them. I have firsthand knowledge that babies aren’t born hating carrots but if all I eat for the next five years is cheese fries, which do you think Alex is going to prefer?

But just as adults who put themselves on strict diets doom themselves to almost certain failure, forcing kids to subsist on soymilk and spinach isn’t realistic. Eating healthfully isn’t an all-or-nothing endeavor, nor should it always be about calories and losing or gaining weight. It’s about achieving balance – and that’s hard for an adult to understand, let alone kids. Our society’s motto is, if a little is good, more is better. If you’re looking for solid information on good nutrition, here are some sources on the Net:

Even though my daughter’s weight issue came from the other end of the scale, I can sympathize with the East Penn parents who received those letters. I felt tremendous guilt that someone else had to point out I wasn’t making all the right choices for my child’s health. But I made a commitment to myself and to Alex to fix my mistake. We followed the doc’s advice about solids. I also picked up a book nutrition for children. In Child of Mine: Feeding with Love and Good Sense, Ellyn Satter offers the following advice:

“The parent is responsible for what, when, where. The child is responsible for how much and whether. If you are doing your job and your child’s job, you are doing too much.â€?

As I write this, Alex is telling me, in her own special way, that she is hungry. If nothing else, the kid’s got a great sense of timing.

Filed in Life in Practice

Why I Watch Them Play the Games

Posted November 2, 2002 By Dave Thomer

I’m starting this essay while waiting for the start of a Monday Night Football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the San Francisco 49ers. Since the Eagles’ franchise quarterback Donovan McNabb broke his ankle last week, there’s a very good chance that the Eagles will lose and I will be a sullen, morose individual by the time I’m finished. Because while intellectually I can accept that the odds are against my team, I still believe they can win, and I certainly hope that they do.

You may ask yourself at this point why I’m going to spend three to four hours absorbed in something that’s likely to disappoint me. Besides a healthy dose of masochism, there’s something uniquely compelling about sports, because you can’t help but be aware that no one really know what’s going to happen next. It’s one of the greatest proving grounds for the notion that truth can be stranger than fiction. Last night I watched a football game between the Indianapolis Colts and the Denver Broncos, played in Denver, in the snow. Indianapolis’ kicker, Mike Vanderjagt, had missed field goals attempts in each of his last three games, but he hit a 54-yarder in the final seconds to tie the game. Then he hit a 51-yarder into the wind to win the game. All of those late heroics were only possible, however, because Denver’s placekicker had missed an extra point earlier in the game – his first miss in over 300 attempts. You write that in a script, no one believes it. But to see it unfold live was exhilarating. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Special Order Speeches

It’s Not Just Sausages

Posted November 2, 2002 By Pattie Gillett

For those of you who haven’t read Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the American Meal, forgive me for giving away some of the mystery – fast food is bad for you. It contains lots of fat, salt, calories, cholesterol, and other things that can, over time, be hard on your health. Good, with that out of the way, we can get down to what this book is really about – and it ain’t just French fries.

Much to the dismay of the meat and poultry industries, since its publication in early 2001, Schlosser’s book has put their business under the national microscope as much as it has the actual purveyors of fatty fare, if not more so. Why? Well, Schlosser takes the reader beyond the fast food outlets back to the source of the food – back to the potato fields and processing plants, the cattle feedlots and slaughterhouses, back to the poultry farms.

Whether you agree or disagree with Schlosser’s politics (and they are pretty obvious from the onset), you can’t help but be intrigued or even alarmed by the allegations he makes about the safety of the America’s food supply. He alleges that the meat industry – urged by its largest buyers, the fast food chains – have compromised public health safety in their quest to get meat from “farmâ€? (a loose term since animals rarely graze anymore) to slaughterhouse to market quickly and cheaply.

In the aftermath of the “mad cow� scare, several high profile meat recalls, and with some now worrying that our food supply is vulnerable to terrorist attacks, food safety is high on the national radar. But are we doing anything about it? Frankly, it doesn’t seem like it. Though Schlosser’s allegations created a media stir last year, fast food sales have not plummeted. Beef and poultry sales remain steady. Consumers seem content to remain willfully ignorant about the possibility that the meat they serve may not be entirely safe. The consumer’s mantra: “I try not to think about it.�

I thought about quoting some of the more colorful excerpts from FFN and a series about meat safety that PBS’ Frontline produced earlier this year but, in the interest of space and for those who can’t stomach it, I’ll simply link to them.

I will, however, highlight some of the major concerns that have been raised about the American meat supply. These include compelling arguments that modern methods of feeding, slaughtering and packaging meat actually increase the likelihood that the resulting product will contaminated by E. coli, salmonella, and other foodborne bacteria. In addition, there are huge gaps in the authority the federal government wields over the meat-packing and poultry industries. For example:

  • Incidents of E. coli contamination have increased in the past fifty years because this bacteria does not live in the intestinal tract of cattle fed grass. It is only since cattle began eating largely corn diets that deadly strains of E. coli were able to thrive in their bodies and end up in the meat. Why do cattle eat corn instead of grass? It fattens them up faster, and an animal fed corn can go from birth to the slaughterhouse in 12 to 14 months instead of 3 to 5 years. In 1993, several people died of E. coli after eating hamburgers at the Jack-in-the-Box food chain on the West Coat. Since then, fast food chains have required that the meatpacking firms test their meat before take possession of it. However, most meat sent to supermarkets is not tested.
  • As meat operations merge and consolidate, the number of animals raised and processed under one roof reaches the hundreds of thousands. According to the CDC, this increases the likelihood that pathogens will pass from “one animal to anotherâ€? and on the processing line “from one carcass to another.â€?
  • The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) cannot order a mandatory recall of meat once they know it is contaminated. They must notify the firm in question, which then issues a voluntary recall. While no firm has refused to comply, this system causes delays. Carol Tucker Foreman, Director of the Food Policy Institute at Consumer Federation of America, writes, “I sat in rooms and negotiated voluntary recalls with companies. And their lawyers would quarrel and quibble and hold out for day after day, and by the time you finally got them to recall the meat, guess what? A lot of it had been eaten.â€? Statistics show that the amount of meat returned in recent high-profile national recalls averages around 20%.
  • The USDA is designed with an inherent conflict of interest – it is charged with both the regulation and promotion of meat and poultry products.

The major stumbling block to resolving these and many other issues about the safety of the food industry is the industry itself. The beef and poultry producers in this country comprise a powerful lobbying force. The have successfully lobbied to delay new USDA food testing systems and at least two times have blocked bills that would have given the USDA greater authority.

More recently, Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, then-chair of the Senate Agriculture committee, proposed the Meat and Poultry Pathogen Reduction Act of 2002 (S. 2013). Despite being co-sponsored by several key senators including Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Russ Feingold (D-WI), Paul Wellstone (D-MN), Charles Schumer (D-NY), Herb Kohl (D-WI), Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Arlen Specter (R-PA), the bill never made it out of committee.

There have been instances in recent years where public outcry did help stop some of the delays in legislation and move food safety bills forward to become law. But for that to happen now means that American consumers, not just the media, have to want to really think about what exactly is on their plates.

In the meantime – or perhaps as a starting point to get more involved on your own – there are places on the Net to go where you can learn more about safe meat handling and cooking, general food safety procedures, and alternatives to supermarket meat, including the USDA’s Food Safety site. One such place is the web site for the Whole Food Markets chain of stores. They update their site with the latest news about food safety regulation, heath advisories, recalls, and other information. And, Whole Foods Markets’ site also gets high points for its “Take Actionâ€? page, which allows you to search for your own elected officials, find out which elected officials are on which legislative committees, and more. Well done, Whole Foods. And here I thought you just made great bread.

Filed in Public Policy