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Over the weekend, Lebanon shattered three food-related Guinness World Records: Largest plate of hummus (over 2 tons), largest plate of tabbouleh (nearly 4 tons), and largest plate in general. (I liked the headline over this news brief in the Washington Post Express this morning: “Tragically, Giant Pita is Overlooked.”)

Between this and the 500-pound kibbeh (a snack made of minced meat and bulgur wheat) which earned Lebanon a world record earlier this year, you could be forgiven for calling the country obsessed with setting records. But this is no mere hobby; it’s a culinary campaign—specifically against Israel, the previous hummus record holder—to establish national ownership of these foods and the economic potential they represent. The name of the recent event says it all: The “Hummus and Tabbouleh are 100 percent Lebanese” festival. Neal Ungerleider has a good post on this topic at True/Slant.

Last year, the head of the Lebanese Industrialists Association told the media that his group planned to sue Israel for “stealing” hummus and other dishes (though as far as I can tell, no lawsuit has materialized), citing the precedent of feta cheese, a food name that the European Union has ruled belongs exclusively to Greece. And then, of course, there’s France’s champagne and Rocquefort cheese, Italy’s Parma ham and Parmesan cheese, and hundreds of other food products with “protected designations of origin” under European Union rules. (India’s Darjeeling tea could be next.)

What do you think, should a country or region be allowed to lay exclusive claim to particular foods or food products?

Vegemite on toast, courtesy Flickr user StephenMitchell

The Australian snack spread Vegemite, a yeasty brown goop, is one of those taste sensations—like cilantro—that inspires either fierce loyalty or disgust.

I know it has a lot of nutritional value, but personally, I can’t think of anything less appetizing than “a food paste made from yeast extract.” (Well, maybe aspic; I’m with Colin Flynn there.)

So I was bemused to read recent news articles about the “storm of complaints” that erupted from the Australian public when Vegemite’s maker, Kraft Foods Australia, announced plans to make a new “cheesy” version of this odd food product. It wasn’t necessarily the new product itself that bothered people (although my first reaction was amazement: There IS something less appetizing than yeast paste! Yeast paste mixed with cream cheese!), it was the new product’s name: Kraft proposed naming it iSnack 2.0. (Wow, something even less appetizing: Yeast paste mixed with cream cheese and named after an inedible electronic device!)

After polling some 30,000 consumers, Kraft has since settled on a new name: Vegemite Cheesybite, which beat out Smooth, Snackmate, Vegemate, Vegemild and Creamymate. (The company apparently did not consider a few of the more creative names suggested by some online commenters: “Veg-I-Mite-Not,” anyone? How about “Vegemort, the snack which cannot be named?”)

“We have been overwhelmed by the response from the public; it clearly demonstrated your passion for this brand,” Kraft writes on the Vegemite web site. (It almost sounds like they were surprised to realize people liked it, too!)

I know, I know…I really should try the stuff before I knock it. But there’s a very similar product called Marmite in England, where I studied abroad in college, and if it didn’t have a label I would have sworn it was some sort of industrial glue or solvent.

Have you tried Vegemite (or Marmite)? Did you like it?

Oh, and just for fun:

As I wrote last week, food safety is a hot topic right now, and it just keeps getting hotter. Although there’s a growing “locavore” movement in parts of the United States, it’s still far from mainstream, and imports constitute a growing portion of the national food supply (80 percent of seafood, 60 percent of fresh fruits and vegetables, and 15 percent overall).

On Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report about what it calls “gaps in enforcement and collaboration” in the current system for ensuring the safety of imported food. You can read the entire 78-page document online, or just a summary.

That same day, I attended a “global food safety policy forum” at the Senate, convened by the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Waters Corporation. Lisa Shames, director of the GAO’s food safety division, was among the speakers, and she discussed the highlights of the report.

I learned that three separate agencies are involved in the food import inspections system, which might be part of the problem in itself. Get ready for the acronyms: There’s the Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) division of Homeland Security.

The CBP’s role seems the most clear-cut: It’s their computer system that importers use to report incoming shipments to all the agencies involved. But that’s not as simple as it sounds. As Shames noted, the CBP’s computer system isn’t set up to share information about when a shipment actually arrives. In other words, the FDA might plan to inspect a boatload of Asian seafood from a certain importer, but by the time it finds out that the boat has physically arrived in port, that seafood may already have cleared a CBP inspection (which has more to do with documentation than food safety) and be on its way to your plate. Not reassuring, is it?

This lack of information sharing is one of the problems highlighted in the GAO report. Another problem is also technological: The same importer might have dozens of different identification numbers within the CBP’s computer system, making it nearly impossible to notice when they have a pattern of violations.

Also, the FDA’s rules for importers lack teeth. The GAO report includes this unsettling tidbit:

“Equally problematic is FDA’s lack of authority to assess civil penalties to deter importers from bringing violative goods into the country….liquidated damages that importers incur are often so small that they, in effect, encourage future illegal distribution of imported shipments.”

And finally, there’s the reality that it’s not possible—in terms of financial and human resources—for the FDA and FSIS to inspect all, or even most, of the imported food we eat. The FDA’s role includes inspecting overseas food production facilities to make sure they’re in keeping with U.S. food safety standards, but it inspected only 153 of  a total 189,000 foreign facilities last year. The GAO report estimates that if the FDA were to inspect each of these facilities just once in a year, it would cost nearly $3.2 billion—the agency’s entire budget.

Things may improve if the various agencies can start coordinating and sharing their resources better, both in terms of imports and domestic food inspection, but I can see why some people are calling for a single food safety agency to be established.

One of those single-agency advocates, Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who chairs the House Appropriations Agriculture-FDA Subcommittee, was among the forum’s speakers. She discussed legislative efforts to raise standards for food imports, especially Chinese poultry, and said evaluating other countries’ food safety systems should be a precursor, not an afterthought, to establishing trade with them.

“We flirt with disaster when we remain lax,” she said, and “we cannot allow trade issues to trump public well-being.”

Everyone’s talking about food safety—or rather, the lack of it—in the American food system these days.

Ground beef in a U.S. supermarket, courtesy Flickr user hfabulous

The New York Times published a deeply disturbing account this week of the trauma inflicted on one young woman by E. coli-tainted beef. At age 22, Stephanie Smith was left paralyzed by the simple act of eating a hamburger—a hamburger grilled by her own mother, who had no way of knowing that the frozen “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties” she had purchased for her family contained “a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps” from as far away as Uruguay.

Such severe reactions to food poisoning may be rare, but the industry practices revealed by Smith’s story are not. A pound of commercial hamburger contains bits of meat from as many as 400 different cattle, as sustainable foods advocate Marion Nestle has written. The documentary Food, Inc. offers an even higher estimate of up to 1000 cows in a single burger. Gross!

Beef is not the only issue. The Center for Science in the Public Interest recently ranked the “10 riskiest foods” in the country, based on the number of food-borne illness outbreaks associated with all foods under FDA regulation. With leafy greens, lettuce, potatoes, tomatoes, sprouts and berries on the list, it seems that even vegetarians aren’t immune to the risk of food poisoning. Eggs, tuna, oysters, cheese and ice cream are also in the top ten. (Beef isn’t, but it’s regulated by the USDA, so wasn’t factored into this study. Actually, eggs fall partly under USDA’s purview, too. The distinctions can be confusing—maybe this will help, or at least provide a much-needed moment of levity amidst this gloomy discussion.)

“Together, these 10 foods alone account for nearly 40 percent of all food-borne illness outbreaks linked to FDA-regulated foods since 1990,” the report states, adding that because so many cases of food-borne illness go unreported, “the outbreaks included here represent only the tip of the iceberg.”

As a look at a Google News timeline will show, “food safety” has been a buzzword for at least a decade now. Unfortunately, the only thing everyone can agree on so far is that we have a problem. Some people are calling for more government involvement in monitoring and enforcing food safety; others want less; some think oversight should be consolidated. Industry groups hope that advances in food science and technology will provide the answers. Many point the blame at our globalized food system, and advocate eating local.

What do you think?

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Anyone who has ever smelled a durian fruit can tell you that it smells mighty strong. Although Wikipedia claims that this southeast Asian fruit’s aroma can evoke “deep appreciation,” an online search turns up a host of less favorable descriptions for durian’s smell: “almost overwhelmingly foul,” “rotting fish,” “a dragon’s breath,” “unwashed socks,” and “carrion in custard,” to offer just a small sampling. (Or, as a recent comment on a 1999 Smithsonian story about durians puts it, “Durian is like red onion that has been left in the cellar for years and then marinated in acetone.” Wow, that’s specific!)

Durian fruits, courtesy Flickr user wenzday01

Apparently the fruit’s sweet, creamy center is a treasure worth pursuing if you can bear the stink and get past the spiky husk. I don’t know; I’ve never had a chance to try it (and I’m guessing that, like breadfruit, fresh durian may be hard to come by in DC). But now I know not to try it while drinking!

According to New Scientist, scientists at Japan’s University of Tsukuba recently discovered that durian makes it much more difficult for the human body to break down alcohol. In a test tube, they combined fresh durian extract with aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH), the enzyme that functions as the liver’s main weapon against the toxic byproducts of alcohol metabolism. The durian—probably because of its high sulfur content—nearly knocked out the ALDH enzyme, inhibiting it by up to 70 percent. (Or maybe the enzyme just couldn’t stand the smell, either.)

This could explain the occasional news story about deaths related to durian consumption, although it doesn’t quite support the urban legend that combining durian with liquor will make your stomach explode.