Organic food safety

The New York Times (March 3): "To emphasize that reporting basic health violations is part of an organic inspector’s job, Ms. Robinson last week issued a directive to the 96 organizations that perform foreign and domestic organic inspections that they are obligated to look beyond pesticide levels and crop management techniques. Potential health violations like rats — which were reported by federal inspectors and former workers at the Texas and Georgia plants — must be reported to the proper health and safety agency, the directive said.
Meanwhile, consumers are becoming more skeptical about certification, said Laurie Demeritt, president of the Hartman Group, a market research firm. Some shoppers want food that was grown locally, harvested from animals that were treated humanely or produced by workers who were paid a fair wage.

The organic label doesn’t mean any of that. " Read more.

Salt regulation

The New York Times (Feb.26): "“The E.U. is trying to change the way we bake our bread, change the way we market it — and of all things, change the taste of our bread,” Mr. Wiemers said. “And all this is taking place just months before we go to the polls to elect a new European Parliament. This is exactly the kind of interference and overregulation by Brussels that annoys citizens and even makes the E.U. unpopular.”
German bakers pointed out that this time around, the European Union was not only trying to dictate taste, but was undermining its goal of improving energy efficiency. “So, we are being asked to change our recipes by reducing the level of salt. But that means we will have to bake the bread for longer and use more energy,” a spokesman for Bavaria’s 2,500 bakeries, Roland Ried, said.... Back in 2006, in what was viewed as a move to improve people’s health, by, for example, helping them cut back their intake of salt, sugar and saturated fats, the commission published a consultative paper about labeling of food products." Read more.