Waffle Houses are notoriously the last to close during a natural disaster, and the first to open in the aftermath. Image courtesy of Flickr user atmtx.

Some 3,000 people evacuated Plaquemines Parish outside of New Orleans early Wednesday as Tropical Storm Isaac quickly became a monster of another name: a Category 1 hurricane that slammed into Louisiana with 80 mph winds sending water over levees and flooding areas throughout the Gulf Coast. Things have calmed down—maximum sustained winds have since decreased to 45 mph—but a peek at the Waffle House Twitter account is one of the best ways to tell which region has been hit hardest by Isaac.

It’s no news that the Waffle House has got some moxie when it comes to natural disasters. During Hurricane Katrina, the chain shut down 110 restaurants from Tallahassee to New Orleans. Seventy-five percent of them reopened within a couple days of the storm. “We’re a 24-hour restaurant anyway,” Waffle House spokesperson and vice president of culture, Pat Warner says. “We don’t know how to close.”

FEMA Director Craig Fugate has joked that he watches a “Waffle House Index” to determine the severity of a disaster by the state of a Waffle House in a community. By seeing how much of its menu Waffle House is serving, he says he can tell just how bad it’s been with these three zones:

GREEN: Open and serving a full menu
YELLOW: Open but serving from a limited menu
RED: Location is forced to close

Furgate believes in it so much so that he owns a Team Waffle House Shirt.

But what started as a joke, has become something so much more.

“We started incorporating the social media last year with Irene and what we found was that people not only in the affected area but people who have family in these cities and haven’t heard from anybody look to that as another source of information about the storm.” Warner says. “We did it mainly to let our folks know which restaurants were open at first, but after Irene we realized what people were using it for so we really have paid attention to that.”

The crew has been tracking the storm since it was first spotted near Cuba and by Tuesday afternoon, the Waffle House response team including Warner, set out from Saraland, Alabama to bring aid to the 100 or so restaurants in the Gulf Coast region. The caravan includes two RVs equipped with satellite communication, a trailer with portable generators for restaurant coolers and a pickup truck with a fuel tank on the back.

While it’s great that the company has figured out a way to serve hash browns in a hurricane, what’s more important, Warner says, is the efficiency in informing communities in danger. From the “War Room” located in the company’s headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, communication specialist Meghan Irwin and her team monitor storms the minute they on spotted on the radar.

“With a title like “War Room,” the room itself might underwhelm you,” says Warner. “It is a conference room with the maps taped up on the wall, a speakerphone and about 7 computers to monitor local news reports. Meghan is constantly scanning government websites, closures and curfews and tweeting it out immediately.”

Here is a roundup of tweets from @WaffleHouse over the last three days that maps out the damage of Isaac:

While providing tactical support to their own stores may seem crassly commercial, the reopened Waffle Houses serve an important role for the devastated communities; often, its the only place in town to get a much-needed meal. “People see that we’re open and they say, ‘Okay, we’re working through this.’” says Warner. “Our customers want to regain that sense of normalcy.”

Warner and his team plan on checking on a restaurant near Lake Pontchartrain in Oak Harbor, Louisiana and then they’ll head back to the restaurant in Slidel that they are using as a command center.

Many of the food outrages you’ve been reading about recently—pink slime in your hamburgers, insects coloring your Starbucks’ Strawberries and Crème Frappuccino, or the political frenzy over dog-eating—all revolve around revulsion. They’re foods more disgusting than they are dangerous. Similarly, there’s little evidence that low levels of arsenic harms chickens or the people eating them, but it sounds toxic, right? Policy makers wrestle with the popular notion that water recycling—going from toilet water to tap water—sullies otherwise refreshing drinking water.

What do they all have in common? Magical thinking.

Carol Nemeroff is a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the University of Southern Maine who has, among other things, studied how we react to drinks in which a dead, sterilized cockroach has been dipped or how we react to fudge in the shape of dog feces. These studies, she suggests, demonstrate two kinds of magical thinking. The law of contagion describes how, in the absence of any perceptible differences, we get grossed out by a food’s history of contact. The law of similarity describes how we get grossed out when something benign resembles something disgusting. I talked with her recently about how we think about eating.

Food & Think: Despite the proliferation of exposés and shocking facts about our food—say, how barbaric slaughterhouses seem to those of us far removed from the process—we’re somehow persuaded at the supermarket that meat is pure and clean and perfectly acceptable to eat.

Nemeroff: In order to undo the connection, what we can do is to frame certain things out of awareness. Framing is a technical term from cognitive psychology. The supermarket is a great example: You see neatly packaged hamburger, you do not see dead muscle tissue from a previously living cow. The way that it’s presented is divorced from its history. This is exactly what we want to figure out how to do with recycled water because in the water’s case, it would be a good thing to do. With the case of meat, when people go to the Middle East or Europe and they go to a meat market, they’re shocked because they see a whole cow or a whole chicken, with feet, beak and head. The response they experience is revulsion because it highlights—no, simply, it doesn’t hide the fact—that this is a previously living animal, or sometimes even a still-living animal. So you can frame out of awareness all those elements that interfere with people’s desire to buy it and eat it. We have to do that. If you couldn’t do this, you would end up with a version of OCD [obsessive compulsive disorder]—if we were to think about contagion every time we touch a doorknob or we’re in an elevator breathing someone else’s air or we think about how many hands touched our money. We frame naturally, but by manipulating the framing you can determine what things people focus on and what things they don’t.

Photo of dog stew (cc) by Flickr user avlxyz

Brown rice. Image courtesy of Flickr user ayayan.s

This year’s Nobel Prize winners were honored for, among other things, discovering that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace; their work on women’s rights and peace-building in Liberia; and advances in the understanding of immunity. But in years past, a number of winners have been recognized for food-related achievements—making food safer, more available or just increasing our knowledge of it. Here are five notable cases:

1904: Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Better known for his research with canines to explain conditioned responses—training dogs to salivate when they heard a sound they had come to associate with food—Pavlov won the Nobel for his earlier work on the digestive systems of mammals. Before he devised a way of observing the digestive organs of animals, there was only a limited understanding of how the stomach digests food.

1929: Christiaan Eijkman, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Eijkman and his co-awardee, Sir Frederick Hopkins, were honored for discovering of the importance of vitamins in health and disease prevention. In the 1890s, Eijkman, of the Netherlands, studied the disease beriberi in the then–Dutch colony of Java, where he made the connection between a diet lacking rice bran (the bran had been removed to make the rice last longer) and high rates of beriberi. This was an important milestone in the eventual formation of the concept of vitamins, though the word itself wasn’t coined until 1911.

1945: Lord John Boyd Orr, Nobel Peace Prize
Orr, of Scotland, devoted much of his life to improving world nutrition and to the equitable distribution of food. After helping shape Britain’s wartime food policy, Orr became director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and tried, unsuccessfully, to establish a World Food Board in 1947. Two years later, by which time he had retired to a lucrative business career, his efforts were recognized by the Nobel committee.

1970: Norman Borlaug, Nobel Peace Prize
Possibly no one on this list had as great an effect on so many people as Borlaug, the American considered the father of the “Green Revolution” for his development of methods that vastly improved yields and disease-resistance in crops. Although some of his methods were later criticized for having a negative environmental impact, they greatly increased food security in poor countries such as India and Pakistan. The debate over how to balance environmental concerns with the food needs of a growing world population continues today.

Braised shark's fin soup with fresh crab meat. Image courtesy of Flickr user Sifu Renka.

California is on the road to becoming the fourth state in the union to ban shark fin soup on account of the ecological impact that rising demand is having on shark populations. A bill nixing the sale, trade or possession of shark fins passed the state senate on September 6 and is awaiting governor Jerry Brown’s signature to be passed into law. The namesake ingredient for this Asian delicacy is harvested by fishermen who catch sharks, remove the fins and dump the carcasses back in the ocean. While other parts of the shark are edible or can be used for other purposes, it makes more financial sense for the fishermen to haul back the fins because they are the most valuable: they can sell (depending on size and the species of shark) for upwards of $880 per pound on the Hong Kong market. (In 2003, a fin from a basking shark sold for $57,000 in Singapore.) It is estimated that between 26 and 73 million sharks are killed worldwide each year for their fins, and with sharks unable to reproduce at such a rate to meet human demand, sustainable shark fishing is a bit unrealistic.

So what’s the big to-do over this dish? It’s certainly not the fin’s flavor—which has been described as being relatively tasteless—but rather it’s unique, rubbery texture. Once dried, processed and incorporated into the soup, the fin looks like fine, translucent noodles whose culinary value is in their mouthfeel—all the flavor has to come from the other soup ingredients. Some chefs have tried using gelatin-based substitutes, but, for those intimately familiar with the dish, imitation shark falls short of capturing the feel of the real deal.

“This is the most stunning aspect of the entire economic empire that has arisen around shark’s fin soup” environmental reporter Juliet Eilperin writes of the soup in her book Demon Fish. “It is, to be blunt, a food product with no culinary value whatsoever. It is all symbol, no substance.” Indeed, with some iterations costing upwards of $100 a bowl, it’s a dish that, if nothing else, displays one’s social status.

The dining tradition that dates back to the Song Dynasty (960 to 1279 A.D.), becoming a mainstay of formal dining during the Ming Dynasty (1368 to 1644 A.D.), and it continues to be a popular dish at Chinese weddings. Opponents see the ban as an act of cultural discrimination, with the language of the bill singling out shark fin soup and giving no mention of other shark-based products, such as steaks or leather goods.

But shark populations are declining. In the 1980s, Hong Kong’s local shark populations were overfished to the point that its fishing market went bust. In the U.S., dusky shark numbers have declined by roughly 80 percent since the 1970s, with conservationists estimating that it would take upwards of 100 years for those populations to rebuild. In western Atlantic waters, hammerhead sharks have declined by up to 89 percent over the past 25 years. And in spite of cultural traditions, the international community—with the exceptions of Japan, Norway and Iceland—has placed bans on whaling because humans put such a strain on those populations. Should the same reasoning be applied to sharks?

Perhaps it's time to start teaching kids useful kitchen skills in home economics classes. Image courtesy of Flickr user cafemama.

What comes to mind when you hear the phrase “home economics”? Perhaps the image of a perfectly attired Stepford wife criticizing the texture of the first pound cake you attempted to make or memories of the flyby course you took when you wanted to put in minimal effort and come out with a passing grade at the end of the term. For many people, the class has a reputation for being an outdated course where the most you learn is how to make biscuits and maybe a cake from a mix and use uni-tasker kitchen appliances. (During a perfectly useless semester in seventh grade, I was made aware of the wonders of an electric sandwich press, but it’s not something I would ever include in my kitchen arsenal.) But with a little retooling and updating, home economics classes could be a valuable tool in the fight against obesity.

Home economics had its start in Lake Placid, New York during a series of annual conferences held between 1899 and 1910. Organized by MIT sanitary engineer Mary Richards, librarian Melvil Dewey and a host of other educators, the meetings were dedicated to finding ways to apply the latest in science and technology to improve life in the American home. In 1908, the conferences led to the creation of the American Home Economics Association, which lobbied the federal government to fund educational programs, and the resultant classes were a means of guiding young people through modern consumer culture. Between stocking a pantry, furnishing and maintaining a home, caring for children and managing a budget to take care of it all, there are a lot of issues a person has to juggle in order to make a home function smoothly.

But along the way home ec attained the reputation of being a relic, a gender-stereotyped course meant to confine women to domestic roles. Some school systems have managed to breathe new life into the course by divvying it up into more specialized classes—like courses that specifically address food preparation, which might be more attractive to prospective students in the age when Food Network-style programs inject fun and excitement into life in the kitchen. However, because home economics is typically classified as an elective course, it—like art and music classes—is prone to being eliminated from a school’s course offerings.

Furthermore, over time the cutting-edge knowledge about nutrition and sanitation that was the impetus for home ec in the first place came to be viewed as common sense. But is common sense really all that common? We hear all the time that Americans are getting fatter, and a cultural preference for prepackaged convenience foods isn’t helping matters. If this is the case, couldn’t a home economics course focused on planning and preparing nutritionally balanced foods help alleviate this problem?

It’s a question assistant professor of history Helen Zoe Veit explores in a recent New York Times oped. A victim of the stereotypical kind of class where you learn how to make doughnuts from prefab biscuit dough, she argues that instead of condescending to students’ fledgling abilities in the kitchen, classes should teach them how to cook real food. “Too many Americans simply don’t know how to cook,” she says in the article. “Our diets, consisting of highly processed foods made cheaply outside the home thanks to subsidized corn and soy, have contributed to an enormous health crisis.” Those sentiments are shared by nutrition scientist Alice Lichtenstein and physician David Ludwig, who wrote an editorial on the subject in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “[G]irls and boys should be taught the basic principles they will need to feed themselves and their families within the current food environment: a version of hunting and gathering for the 21st century,” they say. “As children transition into young adulthood, they should be provided with knowledge to harness modern conveniences (eg, prewashed salad greens) and avoid pitfalls in the marketplace (such as prepared foods with a high ratio of calories to nutrients) to prepare meals that are quick, nutritious, and tasty. It is important to dispel the myths—aggressively promoted by some in the food industry—that cooking takes too much time or skill and that nutritious food cannot also be delicious.”

Personally, I couldn’t agree more. I learned my way around a kitchen because I had a mom who cooked all the family’s meals. That’s the standard of living I want to maintain because I prefer the taste of “from scratch” food over the prefab stuff. If I didn’t have that kind of a model at home to follow, I might have ended up trying to sustain myself predominantly on convenience food. Wouldn’t giving home ec a much-needed facelift—and maybe even making it a graduation requirement—potentially turn out more savvy, self-efficient and healthy young adults?

School lunch program poster. Courtesy of the National Archives

When Thomas Jefferson visited Lombardy, Italy in 1787, exporting rice in the husk was illegal on pain of death. Such trivialities didn’t keep this founding father from secreting illicit grains in his pockets and taking them back to America. “The greatest service which can be rendered to any country,” he later wrote, “is to add a useful plant to its culture.” (Indeed, he considered his introduction of European rice and olive trees to the Americas as one of his greatest life accomplishments alongside writing the Declaration of Independence.) That attitude was adopted and maintained by the United States government, and a show on view at the National Archives explores how Uncle Sam affects how we eat. Through paper ephemera, sound recordings, posters, the show illustrates how the government influenced food on the farm, in the factories, in our homes and in the overall American diet.

I think most of us are at least somewhat aware of the ways in which the government guides how we eat. If you went to public school, you were probably exposed to the federally subsidized lunch program (for better or for worse). You may have noticed the recent unveiling of the plate-shaped infographic designed to help Americans plan balanced meals. And then there are FDA food recalls. Those facets are certainly represented here. But this show is a revelation (at least for me) for exhibiting the breadth of Uncle Sam’s involvement in our food. Beginning in the 1830s, the USDA started a seed distribution program in which they gave free seeds to farmers in an attempt to figure out which plants would fare well in a variety of soils and climates. And when food production became industrialized—with factories and canneries cranking out prefab products—the USDA had to step in to set quality guidelines when Americans were getting sick from ill-prepared foodstuffs. It got to the point where a “poison squad” was appointed to test suspect additives and preservatives to determine which ones were actually safe for human consumption.

Steady readers know of my love of food-related crime, so it was fascinating—if not slightly bizarre—to see mug shots of men who did time for violating the oleomargarine act by selling margarine that was colored to look like butter. Another display—attractively housed in a doughnut-shaped frame—talks about how World War II-era studies showed that B1 promoted energy. Since the nation was mobilizing for war, one food manufacturer responded with vitamin doughnuts. The poster on display hawking the product promises plenty of “pep and vigor” as evidenced by the pair of grinning, rosy-cheeked children who are noshing on vitamin B1-fortified pastry. The government stepped in saying that this and similar products could be marketed only as enriched flour doughnuts. I also loved seeing sample recipes for federally subsidized school lunches from circa 1946. Liver loaf, ham shortcake and creamed vegetables seem a far cry from the sentimental favorites from when I was buying school lunch. Any other fans of the chicken fillet on bun out there?

In the show, stereoscopic viewers let you take a look at vintage 3-D photographs, mocked-up radios allow viewers to “tune in” to food-related radio programming, and there’s a hearty helping of snippets of government-produced movies—everything from short silent movies promoting the nutritive merits of milk to informational films featuring flustered housewives who need some words of wisdom to put a healthful meal on the table. My favorite was the clip from the Mulligan Stew informational films from the 1970s, a trippy series in which the kid stars not only dispense dietary advice but also have a rock band. (I was also quite taken by the themed wainscoting, with carvings of corn stalks in the farming gallery, canned goods in the factory gallery and so on. Even the paint on the walls made the show a vibrant and fun experience. Were photography allowed, I’d go back with the Sherwin Williams app on my iPod to get some digital paint swatches. But I digress.)

The show covers a wonderfully wide swath of territory, and I heartily recommend that you make a point of visiting the National Archives, where “What’s Cooking Uncle Sam” will be on display  until January 3, 2012.

Salisbury steak TV dinner. Image courtesy of Flickr user kewagi

I can picture it now: two oblong ground beef patties taking a gravy bath, neatly sequestered in their aluminum compartment to prevent the sauce from bleeding onto the tater tots, pea-and-carrot medley or, most importantly, the apple dessert. A meal for a Hungry Man—or a child of the 1970s with an unsophisticated palate. (I considered TV dinners a treat when I was a kid, especially the ones with built-in dessert.)

The phrase “Salisbury steak” no longer sets off my salivary glands—quite the opposite—but it’s a lot more appetizing than how Dr. James Henry Salisbury described the dish before it was named after him: “muscle pulp of beef.”

And that may be the least nauseating bit in his scatalogically dense 1888 book, The Relation of Alimentation and Disease. Dr. Salisbury, like many people before and since, believed that food was the key to health and that certain foods could cure illness, especially of the intestinal variety. He tested his theories during the Civil War, treating chronic diarrhea among Union soldiers with a diet of chopped-up meat and little else. After 30 years of research he finally published his ideas, setting off one of the earliest American fad diets.

“Healthy alimentation, or feeding upon such foods as the system can well digest and assimilate, is always promotive of good health. Unhealthy alimentation always acts as a cause of disease,” he wrote. Most modern physicians would agree with the sentiment to at least some degree, if not as to what constitutes healthy or unhealthy alimentation (more commonly known as “food” nowadays).

For Salisbury, minced beef patties were health food. The enemies, believe it or not, were fresh fruit and vegetables. When overconsumed “at the expense of more substantial aliments,” he wrote, these led to “summer complaints” in children.

As for the ill soldiers, the problem was an “amylaceous [starchy], army biscuit diet,” with not enough variety or nutrients. His prescription:

The first step is to wash out the sour stomach and bowels [by drinking hot water], and to change the food. The food selected should be such as is least liable to ferment with alcohol and acid yeasts. This is muscle pulp of beef, prepared as heretofore described, when it affords the maximum of nourishment with the minimum of effort to the digestive organs. Nothing else but this food, except an occasional change to broiled mutton.

In the preface, Salisbury described the research that led him to his conclusion:

In 1854 the idea came to me, in one of my solitary hours, to try the effects of living exclusively upon one food at a time. This experiment I began upon myself alone at first…. I opened this line of experiments with baked beans. I had not lived upon this food over three days before light began to break. I became very flatulent and constipated, head dizzy, ears ringing, limbs prickly, and was wholly unfitted for mental work. The microscopic examination of passages showed that the bean food did not digest.

Did the intrepid scientist stop there? Of course not! In 1858 he enlisted six other schlemiels to come live with him and eat nothing but baked beans. He did not mention whether he had a wife who had to put up with seven flatulent, dizzy mopes in her home; my guess is no. Later he and four other guys subsisted solely on oatmeal porridge for 30 days. Other single-food experiments followed, leading him to the conclusion that lean beef, minced to break down any connective tissue and fully cooked, was the best and most easily digested food. By the time the Civil War started, in 1861, he was ready to test his theories on suffering soldiers.

When Salisbury’s book was published, two decades after the end of the war, his ideas caused a sensation. An Englishwoman named Elma Stuart extolled the healing virtues of the Salisbury diet in a book described by one observer as being “written in a popular and racy style,” helping to publicize the mincemeat regimen. For about two decades the diet—not that different, when you think of it, from extreme versions of the low-carb diets of recent years—was all the rage.

Not for another half-century would the Salisbury steak’s future TV dinner companions, tater tots, be invented. By then, Salisbury had been dead for almost 50 years, too late to object to such “unhealthy alimentation.”

Screenshot of the Food Desert Locator home page.

Traditionally, the United States is portrayed as a land of plenty, yet many people live in areas without ready access to fruits, vegetables, whole grains and the other foods that compose a healthy, well-balanced diet. These areas are known as food deserts, and living in one can have serious ramifications on one’s health; it’s a risk factor for obesity and cardiovascular disease induced by junk food-heavy diets. According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is a close correlation between income level and ethnic background and the likelihood of living in a food desert, with poor, non-white populations being at a higher risk.

In 2008, 2009, as a part of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative, the USDA’s Economic Research Service began gathering data about areas of the United States with limited access to healthy food, resulting in the Food Desert Locator, which launched last week. Here, food deserts are defined as census tracts with a high poverty rate that are more than one mile away (in an urban setting) or 10 miles away (in a rural setting) from a supermarket or large grocery store. You can also look at other statistics such as how many people within a census tract do not have a car. (If you own a car, making a mile-long trip to the store isn’t so bad; but if you can’t afford one, hoofing a mile carrying bags full of groceries is task most people would just as soon avoid.) This tool allows users to search a map of the United States to look at food desert statistics for a given area—and there are a lot of red patches on the map. Approximately 23.5 13.5 million Americans are living in food deserts, most of whom live in urban areas. With major supermarket chains keeping away from low income urban areas, the price of healthy options such as fresh produce are beyond people’s means since corner convenience store-type establishments sell those items at much higher prices.

The tool might spur local efforts to eradicate food deserts with solutions such as urban farming or Detroit’s Green Grocer Project, which provides grocers with funding to establish a sustainable, successful business.

A welcome sign for Spanish-speaking customers. Image courtesy of Flickr user dannyman

Cinco de Mayo has become the Mexican-themed equivalent of St. Patrick’s Day, when Americans of all ethnicities celebrate with margaritas and tacos. Most probably don’t know, or care, that the holiday commemorates the Mexican army’s underdog victory against the French at the Battle of Puebla, any more than your average March 17th reveler gives a hoot about the patron saint of Ireland.

In my opinion, the growing popularity of Mexican food—one of the world’s great cuisines—is reason enough to celebrate. But here’s some comida for thought: There’s an excellent chance that no matter what you eat today, a Mexican immigrant (documented and otherwise) or Mexican-American had something to do with bringing it to your table—often literally. From picking vegetables, packing eggs and processing meat to preparing, cooking and serving meals in restaurants at every price range and of every kind of cuisine, Hispanics are a major presence in the American food system—and the largest Hispanic group in the country is of Mexican origin.

More than 40 percent of the entire farming, fishing and forestry sector’s labor force is Hispanic, according to 2010 numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. More than a third of all cooks, and nearly 40 percent of all dishwashers are Hispanic. In major cities in the Southwest and East, the percentages are probably higher.

The statistics don’t note the immigration or citizenship status of Hispanic workers, but it’s likely that a large number of them are undocumented (if they show up in the statistics at all). The outspoken TV personality, author and former chef Anthony Bourdain told a Houston reporter in 2007: “The bald fact is that the entire restaurant industry in America would close down overnight, would never recover, if current immigration laws were enforced quickly and thoroughly across the board. Everyone in the industry knows this. It is undeniable. Illegal labor is the backbone of the service and hospitality industry—Mexican, Salvadoran and Ecuadoran in particular. …I know very few chefs who’ve even heard of a U.S.-born citizen coming in the door to ask for a dishwasher, night clean-up or kitchen prep job. Until that happens—let’s at least try to be honest when discussing this issue.”

There’s one more sign of an increasing Latino presence in the American food industry: The National Restaurant Association reports that the number of Hispanic-owned restaurants increased by 30 percent in the past five years. Sadly, none of them are within an hour drive of where I live, or that’s where I’d be eating tonight.

Here is the breakdown of the percentage of Hispanics in various occupations, from a 2010 Bureau of Labor Statistics report:

Food preparation and serving related occupations total: 22.2

Chefs and head cooks: 17.9

First line supervisors: 14.9

Cooks: 32.5

Food preparation workers: 23.7

Bartenders: 10.7

Combined food preparation and serving workers, including fast food: 16.6

Counter attendants, cafeteria, food concession, and coffee shop: 18.5

Waiters and waitresses: 16.6

Food servers, nonrestaurant: 16.3

Dishwashers: 38.5

Hosts and hostesses, restaurant, lounge and coffee shop: 14.3

Farming, fishing and forestry occupations total: 41.8

Graders and sorters, agricultural products: 50.3

Miscellaneous agricultural workers: 47.9

Emergency food pack, courtesy of Flickr user earthworm

Judging by my Twitter feed this morning, the only people not enthralled by a certain extravagant British wedding were protesters in Uganda and Syria, people across the South affected by yesterday’s terrible and deadly tornadoes and me. If you were hoping for an in-depth report on royal canapés, sorry to disappoint. You’ll have to look elsewhere—or read Abigail Tucker’s fascinating history of wedding cakes.

The tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis and other natural disasters that have been punctuating news reports between birth conspiracy theories and nuptial to-dos in recent months are a good reminder that it’s wise to keep an emergency supply of food and water on hand. Even if you don’t live in earthquake or tornado country, floods, snowstorms, power outages or space alien invasions could disrupt supplies or leave you stranded. OK, probably not that last one—although, now that SETI suspended its search for alien signals, who knows if we’ll be caught unawares?

So, what should be in this emergency cache, and how much of it? At the very least you should have about three days’ supply of water and food per person in your household, recommends the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). These should be kept in a “grab and go” container—one for home, work and car—in case you need to evacuate quickly. Each kit should contain at least a half-gallon of water per person per day. You might also consider buying water purification tablets or another water sterilizer from a camping goods store (you can also boil water to purify it, but it’s good to have a back-up in case you don’t have power or a gas stove).

FEMA also suggests keeping a two-week supply of food and water at home for “sheltering needs.” These foods should, obviously, be nonperishable: canned goods, dry mixes, cereals. Try to avoid foods that will make you thirsty or that require a lot of water or special preparation. Don’t forget a manual can opener. If the power is out and your appliances are electric, you may be able to cook on a camp stove, barbecue, fireplace or solar oven, but consider storing foods that don’t require cooking.

Even nonperishable foods need to be replenished periodically. According to a FEMA chart, dried fruit, crackers and powdered milk will last about six months. Most canned foods, peanut butter, jelly, cereals, hard candy and vitamins will keep for a year (but check expiration dates on packaging). Stored properly, wheat, dried corn, rice, dry pasta, vegetable oils, baking soda, salt, instant coffee or tea, and bouillon will keep indefinitely.

Finally, don’t forget your pets. Fido and Mr. Bojangles need food and water, too!

A baby bottle filled with apple juice... or is it a margarita? Image courtesy of Flickr user quite peculiar

How young is too young to drink alcohol? The answer differs in various cultures, but most would probably agree that a child who hasn’t yet developed fine motor skills shouldn’t drink anything that would impair them. Even in European countries that have looser attitudes than the U.S. about youthful drinking, toddlers aren’t swilling cocktails out of their sippy cups.

But that’s what happened a few days ago at an Applebee’s in Michigan, where a 15-month-old became intoxicated after being accidentally served a margarita instead of apple juice. The parents (themselves underage) discovered the mix-up when their little boy began talking to the wall and then put his head down on the table. His blood alcohol content was tested at .11—roughly equivalent to what a 200-pound man’s BAC would be after six drinks and well over the legal limit for operating a vehicle in most states. Fortunately, he had a designated driver, and he was cut off before he suffered anything more serious than a wicked three-day hangover. Now the parents are suing Applebee’s, which has said it is making changes in how it serves drinks to avoid this happening again (it wasn’t the first such incident at the chain). Olive Garden was forced to give a similar statement this week when one of its servers in Florida also had trouble distinguishing between sangria and unadulterated juice, in this case, contributing to the delinquency of a two-year-old.

For obvious legal and ethical reasons, little scientific research has been done on the effects of alcohol on young children, but in adults the range that can lead to serious impairment or even death is roughly .30 to .40. In January, a 4-year-old in Alpharetta, Georgia, died with a BAC of .272, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, after her father and aunt allegedly gave her alcohol. Both adults were arrested and charged with felony cruelty to children and felony murder.

In France and other countries that traditionally drink wine with meals, children are sometimes allowed to have small amounts of wine, usually watered down, at the dinner table. But even there, attitudes about the appropriate age for drinking have shifted; the legal age to purchase wine and beer was raised from 16 to 18 in 2009. The purpose was to curb binge drinking among teenagers, although critics of the law argued that it was counterproductive, pointing to the higher incidence of binge drinking in countries like the U.S., where the legal drinking age is 21.

They may have a point—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 11 percent of alcohol in the U.S. is consumed by people aged 12 to 20. A 2009 survey found that 42 percent of high school students drank some alcohol during the past 30 days, and 24 percent binge drank. In 2008, there were about 190,000 alcohol-related emergency-room visits by people under 21.

Like many Jewish kids, my first taste of alcohol was at the Passover table. I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I was allowed to trade grape juice for a few sips of sickly sweet Manischewitz, but I do recall the almost instantaneous warm, heady sensation it gave me.

The first time I drank enough alcohol to get drunk was when I was 12. It was New Year’s Eve, and my parents left me and their friends’ daughter home alone while the adults went out to celebrate. My friend and I raided her parents’ liquor cabinet, mixing small amounts from each bottle so their absence would be less noticeable, and then added some melted ice cream. Our cocktail tasted atrocious, but we drank enough to feel giddy at first, then a little nauseated, while we watched MTV. We didn’t get caught. As far as drunken teen (or tween, as the case was) escapades go, it was pretty tame.

Though I had wilder drinking days ahead, I’m fortunate I never became a serious binge drinker as a teen or adult. Aside from the obvious deadly stupidity of driving while impaired—there were 1,398 under-21 drunk-driving fatalities in 2009—the consequences of heavy adolescent drinking can be far more serious than a hangover. Research on teens, conducted mostly through self-reporting (those legal and ethical issues again) or on animals, has found that repeated binge drinking can have serious effects on brain and body development. A 2005 report by the National Institutes of Health lists findings on adolescent alcohol use that include: reduced levels of growth hormones in both sexes; adverse effects on the maturation of the reproductive system in female rats; lowered bone density in human males; reduced hippocampal volumes associated with alcohol abuse (that’s the part of the brain involved in memory and spatial navigation); and long-lasting changes in memory in adolescent rats.

Less serious, but worth noting: in the age of YouTube, alcohol-induced embarrassing behavior can be long-lasting, too.

Preschool Bento #211: July 9, 2009. Image courtesy of Flickr user Wendy Copley.

For students at Little Village Academy in Chicago, bringing lunch to school is verboten. Principals of Chicago’s public schools are allowed to implement a “no bag lunch” policy if they say it serves the needs of their students. Principal Elsa Carmona began the ban at Little Village Academy six years ago in response to seeing students eating chips and soda during school field trips. ”Nutrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school,” Carmona told the Chicago Tribune. “It’s about the nutrition and the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom). It’s milk versus a Coke.” Exceptions are made for students with food allergies or other medical issues that would prevent them from being able to eat the school’s offerings.

Home-packed lunches have raised issues well before the Tribune‘s story lit up the Internet Monday morning. Because some children have life-threatenng allergies, public schools have been known to ban specific foods—such as nuts and nut-based products—to try to create a safe environment for those students with special needs. (Schools have also restricted milk and egg products, but these instances are comparatively rare.) Some schools also implement “no trading” policies, prohibiting students from exchanging food so that allergic reactions aren’t accidentally triggered. While some parents argue that asking an entire school population to adjust its behavior to accommodate the few, others rise to the challenge of working within the school’s parameters.

I started packing lunch in response to appalling food options offered at school. My high school cafeteria was littered with vending machines–soda, ice cream, snack foods, and one that offered every flavor of milk except plain—and your choice of Taco Bell and Subway fare for a main course. I had nutritionally balanced lunches by way of the federally subsidized lunch program in elementary and middle school—as well as eagle-eyed cafeteria staffers who would send you back in line if you came to the register without a fruit or vegetable on your tray. I still have no idea why school food became so poor once I got into high school, but I’m glad it got me into the habit of bringing my own food. And I still pack lunch on a daily basis. Knowing I have to fill the lunchbox in the morning has been a big incentive to cook for myself and to pack fruit to snack on throughout the day. And as others will attest, brown bagging it has some serious advantages—notably when it comes to saving money.

However, food from home and good nutrition are not necessarily one in the same. With childhood obesity levels staggeringly high, public schools are a venue where kids can be guaranteed access to healthy food, especially with the recent expansion of the federal school lunch program. And hopefully, those changes will indeed bring about positive nutritional changes. The blogger known only as Mrs. Q documented a year of eating public school lunches and the quality of the meals really ran the gamut. And who here remembers the state of school lunches served in Huntington, West Virginia before Jamie Oliver mounted an intervention?

Is this a nanny state policy or a step in the right direction? Continue the discussion in the comments area below.

Margarine on the shelves, courtesy of Flickr user DianeDuane

Last week, the FDA began to reconsider whether artificial food dyes impact our health. The nine dyes currently in use were approved in 1938, and officials have since attested to their safety. Nevertheless, the connection between artificial dyes and ADHD in children has been a matter of debate since the 1970s. The expert panel selected to review the matter reported that the scientific evidence does not merit placing warnings or restrictions on products using the dyes. But it also advised the FDA to pursue additional studies.

The battle over food coloring isn’t new. While vegetable-based colorants have been used in food for thousands of years—ancient Egyptian chefs used saffron for yellow, the Romans used mollusks to impart purple hues and the red dye derived from cochineal insects were in use by the Middle Ages—the industrial revolution ushered in new technologies that allowed manufacturers to chemically alter the taste, smell and appearance of food. However, the metallic compounds used to create appetite-whetting hues were toxic—mercury, copper salts and arsenic among them. Farmers and some politicians railed against such practices, deriding them as attempts to bamboozle consumers into buying sub-par products. The controversy over how colorants could be used in foods came to a head in 1886 when margarine became a subject of national debate.

The oil-based spread originally called oleomargarine was a cheaper alternative to butter that originated in France and began to be manufactured in the United States in the mid-1870s. Although naturally white, dyes were added to give it a buttery shade—so between the lower price and the visual similarities, dairymen were not pleased to have margarine tromping on their turf. They decried the product as a fraudulent butter intended to deceive consumers. “You may take all the other colors of the rainbow,” declared New Hampshire Senator Henry Blair, “but let butter have its pre-empted hue.” The butter lobby’s arguments were made without mind to the fact that butter’s natural color varies depending on the diet of the cow—and that they used dyes to give it a consistent aesthetic.

Ultimately, the Margarine Act of 1886 was passed, placing a tax on margarine and requiring that manufacturers secure licenses to produce the product. Vermont, South Dakota and New Hampshire state legislatures all passed laws requiring margarine to be dyed bright pink—a visual declaration of the product’s artificiality that was also sure to be perfectly unappetizing to prospective buyers. The Supreme Court later overturned these “pink laws” as unconstitutional.

Butter shortages during World War II allowed margarine to gain a strong foothold in American homes. It was sold in its pasty, white state along with a capsule of vegetable dye, which the home cook would have to mash in to turn it an appetizing yellow. In the postwar era, the laws restricting margarine’s coloration began to lift and it gained in popularity. Even former first Lady Eleanor Roosevelt—who tried, unsuccessfully, to battle the butter lobby and provide tax breaks on margarine—appeared in a television commercial for the product. Ironically, in the early 2000s, Parkay tried to ride the trend of creating brightly-colored food products that catered to children and rolled out squeeze-bottles of—what else?—pink margarine.

The suburbs, courtesy of Flickr user suckamc

A few years ago, while driving through rural Washington County, New York—a picturesque area that has attracted retirees and city-weary escapees—I noticed a sign declaring it a “right to farm” area. A city person myself until recently, it struck me as strange that anyone would feel the need to declare such an obvious right, kind of like insisting on the right to practice accounting or teach piano lessons. Clearly, I hadn’t spent a lot of time around farms, or understood the conflicts that can arise when city folk start moving into farm country and imposing their city standards.

Say Old MacDonald had a neighbor. And that neighbor didn’t appreciate the constant “oink oink” here and “moo moo” there coming from Old MacDonald’s farm—not to mention the wafting chemicals, noisy machinery operated at all hours and the ever-present stink of animal flatulence.

Assuming the farm was there first, that neighbor had better get used to it. Since the 1970s, all 50 states have enacted some version of “right to farm” statutes, which protect farmers from being considered a nuisance by new neighbors if they weren’t a nuisance before. Some areas (like the one where I saw the sign) have also enacted local ordinances. Although they vary slightly from place to place, they share a motivation: to help preserve farmland in the face of encroaching suburbia. Before the statutes, some farms were forced to shut or change their operations, or spend large sums defending themselves against lawsuits. As the bumper stickers say, No Farms No Food.

But some people think the laws go too far. Idaho is considering a stronger version of its right to farm law that critics say favors big agribusiness and could support environmentally damaging practices. A small-scale hay farmer quoted in the Idaho Press-Tribune called it a “right to pollute” act, saying, “it does nothing to protect small family farmers.” Others complained that it prevents neighbors from seeking recourse when a farm expands or begins offensive practices that make their homes unlivable—as happened to one family who said they could no longer stomach their tap water after a neighboring farm began dumping onions near their water source.

Supporters of the bill, including the newspaper’s editorial board, say that farming is a vital industry and should take precedence over the sensibilities of neighbors. “Cow poop stinks, folks,” the editorial asserts. “Tractors make noise. Expect to smell and hear them if you live near agricultural land. It’s not reasonable to expect otherwise.”

Lately, a new development has flipped the scenario: what happens when it’s farmers encroaching on urban areas? With the advent of the urban farming movement, the culture clash is occasionally going the other way. Many cities have enacted livestock bans; to some people, pre-dawn rooster crowing and barn smells are more offensive than car alarms and rotting garbage.

Novella Carpenter, whose book Farm City describes how she raised veggies and animals on squatted property in her scruffy Oakland, California, neighborhood, recently ran into zoning trouble, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. She now owns the property and sells some of her surplus produce, but a neighbor who didn’t care for her raising rabbits turned her in for operating without a permit. The permit would probably cost more than the couple thousand dollars she makes as an urban farmer.

“Why am I even trying? Why not just move to the country and do whatever I want?” Carpenter wrote on her blog, before answering her own questions. “I’ll tell you why: I love Oakland…. And, at the same time, I love keeping animals and growing vegetables.”

Cookie dough, so tasty but so dangerous. Courtesy of Flickr user sarah sosiak.

The people who work on food safety are pretty excited these days, or I should say they’re excited in the cautious, constantly vigilant manner of people who have spent their careers worried about deadly microbial pathogens. At an event last night sponsored by the D.C. Science Writers Association, experts from academia, government and advocacy groups met to discuss the implications of the recently signed Food Safety Modernization Act and other projects expected to improve food safety.

“Passage of the bill was a huge victory,” said Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The “modernization” part of the name is apt; as Smith DeWaal and others pointed out, the current laws guiding food safety are based largely on legislation passed in 1906. The push for new legislation was inspired in part by high-profile outbreaks of foodborne illnesses: E. coli was found in ground beef and cookie dough; Salmonella in spinach, eggs and peanut butter; Listeria in chicken. The CSPI has a disturbing but strangely fascinating “Outbreak Alert!” database that tracks these things, and they’ve ranked the ten most dangerous foods. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated last month that one in six people in the United States contracts a foodborne illness each year.

The new law requires companies to assess and minimize hazards, increases and prioritizes Food and Drug Administration inspections of food producers, and authorizes the FDA to recall food and shut down producers. The law is just the first step, though. Big scientific and data-management questions remain, such as how to define a high-risk food; how best to reach the public; and how to standardize the methodologies for tracking food, catching outbreaks early, and identifying their sources. Currently, fewer than half of foodborne disease outbreaks are fully solved, with both the contaminated food and the pathogen identified.

One intriguing tool for either identifying outbreaks or alerting customers to recalls is grocery store customer loyalty cards. David Goldman of the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service said that comparisons of retailer databases with USDA databases have been “huge contributors to successful investigations.” (The FSIS is responsible for monitoring food safety before the product gets to market; it monitors slaughterhouses, for instance, and provides the USDA stamp of approval. The FDA is responsible for food once it comes to market. Sometimes the division doesn’t work and foods fall through the cracks, like eggs. Better coordination among the various federal and state agencies in charge of public health is another improvement in public health that is supported by the Food Safety and Modernization Act.)

One important factor in food safety is consumer education, and Goldman pointed out that the USDA has a help line with 24-hour automated responses and frequent live help chats about food safety. (I got a kick out of the name, “Ask Karen,” which is what I do when I have a cooking question because my mom’s name is Karen.)

So things are looking up, but in the meantime, wash those vegetables, cook your meat thoroughly, check dates, and beware of stuffed stuffing.