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How Much Time Do Americans Spend on Food?

November 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Kim Egan

Kim Egan, Partner, DLA Piper LLP

Earlier this month and just in time for Thanksgiving, the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service issued a report called How Much Time Do Americans Spend on Food?

The findings include some things we already knew, such as women spend more time grocery shopping than men do, and obese people watch more television than “normal” people do. Men raid the refrigerator at night more frequently than women do. People who live alone are more likely to eat alone. Etc.

The findings include other things we may not have known already but that seem fairly obvious, such as poor people spend less time eating and drinking than people with higher incomes, and people who eat in front of the television are fatter than people who eat while doing pretty much anything else.

The rest is pretty interesting:

  • On average, adult Americans spend 67 minutes a day doing nothing but eating and drinking, and 23.5 minutes a day eating and drinking while doing something else (working, driving, watching TV). That’s about half an hour per meal, assuming three meals a day. I don’t think that’s enough.
  • Eleven percent of the population spends at least 4.5 hours a day eating and drinking. That’s more like an hour and a half per meal. Much better. If I had my way, I’d spend an hour with breakfast, an hour with lunch, and at least 1.5 to 2.0 hours with dinner and dessert, interspersed with nice snacks. My family spent 3.2 hours on Thanksgiving dinner (excluding snacks and appetizers).
  • Another 11 percent of us are what USDA calls “constant grazers.” These are people who spend 75 minutes a day doing nothing but eating and drinking, 2.2 hours eating while doing something else, and 8 hours a day (i.e., ALL DAY), doing nothing but drinking, which is defined to exclude water. That comes to more than 11 hours of eating and drinking every day — most of a normal person’s time awake. If these people didn’t need to sleep, they’d probably eat more.
  • Four percent of us appear never to sit down to a proper meal at an old-fashioned dinner table. Instead, we spend all our eating and drinking time doing something else as well (mostly watching TV). I would have expected that figure to be higher.
  • People in the Northeast and the West spent more time eating than anyone else. The study didn’t look at this but I suspect average BMIs are lower in those regions as well.
  • Almost 70 percent of Americans do their primary eating and drinking at home. Only 0.2 percent of us do our “primary eating” on a “mode of transportation.”

What the study did not research is what percentage of meals eaten every day are home-made. That would be interesting to study. Just because one eats at home does not mean one eats well. Especially if one is a “constant grazer” and one spends 8 hours a day drinking something other than water.

Kim Egan is Partner in the firm DLA Piper LLP

You can also follow her here on Twitter: http://twitter.com/kkegan

 

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On Pork, Pigs and Hogwash

September 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Kim Egan

Kim Egan, Partner, DLA Piper LLP

Remember when the pork industry started running those commercials — “Pork: The Other White Meat?” , or “Life is just a bowl of pork chops” was another good one. And then remember when we learned that we had been paying for the pork industry’s advertising campaign all along? The National Pork Board uses tax money to pay for them. The National Pork Board is part of the Department of Agriculture.

Now the National Pork Board has a website — www.porkbeinspired.com — that has pork recipes, pork nutrition information, and a pork blog called “I ♥ Pork: The Latest from Pork, Knife and Spoon.” The website comes up first in a Google search. Did our tax dollars pay for that, too?

Pork, of course, is food. Pigs, on the other hands, are animals. We have different terminology for animals when we eat them – sheep/mutton, veal/calf, pork/ pig, beef/cow, sweet meats/animal brains. And we have a different word when we have raised the animal specifically for food – cattle/cows, hogs/pigs, etc. Beef comes from cattle; pork comes from hogs.

This is only an issue for a minority of the world’s humans. Pigs are not kosher (cloven hooves, no cud) nor do they pass Islamic muster (the Koran says God “has forbidden you only… the flesh of swine”). Rastafarians, Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, and Seventh Day Adventists aren’t supposed to eat pigs either. That wipes out a lot of people without even counting vegetarians (including Buddhists) or vegans.

pigletSo the National Pork Board has not only a small constituency but a small audience, too. We would reach more citizens if we used our swine-specific tax dollars for a blog called “I ♥ Heart Pigs.” There are about 2 billion pigs on the planet on any given day and there are more pigs than people in North Carolina. We have the Palwan Bearded Pig, the Warty Pig, the Wild Boar, and the Domestic Pig (sus domestica). There are also those that descend from the men that Circe turned into pigs in the Odyssey. Happy pigs root around for bugs, truffles, seeds, flowers and nuts. Happy pigs sigh in the mud. Pigs are smart, so they say. We keep pot-bellied pigs as pets.

We have imaginary pigs: Porky Pig and his girlfriend Petunia, Little Pig Robinson, Wilbur, the Three Little Pigs. And of course, Babe. George Orwell had a bunch of pigs in Animal Farm — Snowball, Squealer, Old Major, and the big bad Napoleon. Both the Beatles and Pink Floyd sang about pigs.

We anthropomorphize pigs. Winston Churchill said that “Dogs look up to man. Cats look down to man. Pigs look us straight in the eye and see an equal.” The pigs in Animal Farm changed the law to read “Some animals are more equal than others.” Happy people are said to be as happy as a pig in mud. People who are getting swindled (no pun intended) are said to be buying “a pig in a poke,” in other words, no pig at all. The “poke” is the pocket, or bag. “I will never buy the pig in the poke — there’s many a foul pig in a fair cloak.”

But the thing that bothers me the most about the “the white meat” campaign is not that my tax dollars paid for it or that it reflects the insidious relationship between industry and government, or that eating meat is bad for the environment. It’s that pork is not, actually, a white meat. All you have to do is go to the USDA’s Pork Fact Sheet to learn that “pork is classified a red meat…”

Snort.

Kim Egan is Partner in the firm DLA Piper LLP

You can also follow her here on Twitter: http://twitter.com/kkegan

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Watermelons are Sensitive

September 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Kim Egan

Kim Egan, Partner, DLA Piper LLP

Last May, the director of the vegetable research institute at the Qingdao Academy of Agricultural Science told the media that the Chinese government does not encourage farmers to use plant hormones on watermelons because watermelons “are very sensitive.”

The Chinese had learned about watermelons in a hurry lately because watermelons all over the Chinese countryside had been exploding “like land mines.” The British media reported that Chinese watermelon fields were “erupting by the acre,” with melons blasting apart one by one. These reports, of course, intrigued the West. The U.S. National Watermelon Association reacted quickly and soberly. “I have never seen this phenomenon,” said its executive director.

But getting accurate information about fruit in China is not easy. The Fruit Industry Association of Guangdong tried but failed, informing the media that “most ‘imported’ fruits are grown in China.” And the Chinese hastily pointed out that 10 percent of all American watermelons also explode (they did not say why).

Eventually the fruit-consuming public learned that the sensitive Chinese watermelons were exploding because they had been over-exposed to forchlorfenuron. Forchlorfeuron is a plant hormone that does wonders for the size of the average Chinese watermelon when applied at the right time under the right conditions. When mishandled, the hormone gets carried away and decimates its host melon in a pulpy, seedy, gooey melon spectacle. The Chinese exploding watermelon farmers were apparently all first-time watermelon entrepreneurs and perhaps they did not follow the proper watermelon hormone directions.

WatermelonBut we can’t criticize the Chinese for using it. The U.S. government allows farmers to use it on grapes. There is no scientific evidence to suggest that consuming a florchlorfeuron-treated grape will blow up a human being. But consider wearing a face guard next time you visit your local winery.

The Chinese aren’t the only ones with exploding food experience. The Nazis experimented with it to try to break the Britons. The best idea by far was the experimental exploding Smedley’s English Grown Plums can. The Nazis also came up with combustive chocolate bars and incendiary frozen eggs. History does not record whether the Nazis deployed these weapons.

I am sure I am not the only who finds the idea of exploding fruits and vegetables delightful. I regret that I was not standing in a Chinese watermelon field during the May bombardments and I would have liked to be on the anti-exploding-Smedley’s-plums detail in British intelligence.

So I did some research and learned how to make my own exploding fruit extravaganza at home. You can make a lemon explode by stuffing it full of mints and dropping it into a cup of club soda. You can obliterate an orange by putting it in a microwave without piercing its rind. You can annihilate any fruit cake by saturating it in a healthy volume of rum and baking it in the oven. Apply more rum as needed. Etc.

As for the Chinese watermelons, the farmers fed them to their pigs. Pork lo mein, anyone?

Kim Egan is Partner in the firm DLA Piper LLP

You can also follow her here on Twitter: http://twitter.com/kkegan

 

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An Ode to Mayonnaise

June 13, 2011 By 2 Comments
Kim Egan

Kim Egan, Partner, DLA Piper LLP

Mayonnaise looks icky. It comes in pale plastic jars that bounce. Rachael Ray says it’s gross. It must have the worst reputation of any condiment. I used to refuse it on grounds of general creepiness.

But I have been reading up on the history of sauces and mayonnaise is turning into my Top Sauce. For starters, it is so ludicrously simple to make at home that no-one should ever be bamboozled into buying it in a store. You can make a batch from scratch in five minutes and you can prepare just enough for the sandwich you are making or the fish you are grilling.

Here’s how:

Take one egg yolk, preferably an organic one from a chicken raised outside, within 50 miles of you in a nice green sunny pasture. Add a little lemon juice and a little vinegar. Exact quantities irrelevant. Stir. Start whisking with a fork or an actual whisk and drop some olive oil (preferably organic extra virgin) in, drop by drop. Do not just dump your olive oil in — you will drown your egg yolk and it will sulk and refuse to perform. Whisk and add olive oil until you have the consistency and volume you want (exact quantities irrelevant) or until your arm hurts. Stop whisking. Consume.

If you do not plan to consume your mayo instantly, use a vegetable oil other than olive oil because olive oil will divorce itself from your egg yolk in a few hours. And by vegetable oil I mean an oil made from an actual identifiable vegetable, not Acme Vegetable Oil. No matter what, eat your mayo within 3 days and refrigerate it in the meantime.

Ta da!

If you want to get gourmet, you can add mustard seed. If you add garlic mush, you have aioli. If you add pickled cucumbers and onions, you have tartar sauce. If you add ketchup, pickle relish, herbs and spices, you have Thousand Island dressing. If you add buttermilk and minced onions, you have Ranch dressing. If you add tomato sauce, cream, and brandy, you have the delightful Marie Rose sauce.

Commercial mayonnaise, on the other hand, is made in blenders. If you put an egg yolk in a blender, however, you will blow your egg yolk to smithereens (recall that it sulks when mistreated). So food companies use whole eggs and the albumen in the egg white buffers the delicate yolk from the blender. Food companies also add things not on the list of approved ingredients for home-made mayo: sucrose, corn sugar, citric acid, thickeners, emulsifiers, “sequestrants” and “crystallization inhibitors.” This means industrial mayo does not spoil if you do not refrigerate it, and even in the refrigerator it can last for centuries. Like I said, creepy.

Other fun facts:

The sauce is from the Mediterranean where butter and cream are uncommon but chickens and olives are.

It was named after Port Mahon on the island of Minorca. There is tons of bologne on the Internet about how it got its name, but that’s the real answer.

The Catalonian name for it is “mahonesa.”

The British ran into it for the first time (apparently) in 1756, when they were defeated on Minorca by the Duke of Richelieu.

Chile is the world’s third largest consumer.

Japanese mayonnaise is made with apple cider or rice vinegar and a Japanese mustard called karashi.

The mayonnaise lobby is the Association for Dressings and Sauces (on Facebook at Condiment Circus).

FDA gets upset about “undeclared eggs” in mayonnaise. That’s like the “contains peanuts” warning on your bag of peanuts.

FDA says “all the ingredients from which [commercial mayonnaise] is fabricated shall be safe and suitable.” Comforting.

FDA allows commercial manufacturers to prepare mayonnaise “in an atmosphere in which air is replaced in whole or in part by carbon dioxide or nitrogen.” Not comforting.

FDA allows you to make your mayo with “[a]ny spice (except saffron or turmeric) or natural flavoring provided it does not impart to the mayonnaise a color simulating the color imparted by egg yolk.”

So if it turns your mayo yellow, it’s not allowed. I’m sure there’s a reason for that. Aren’t you?

Kim Egan is Partner in the firm DLA Piper LLP

You can also follower here on Twitter: http://twitter.com/kkegan

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Organic Bean Sprouts Can Kill You

May 4, 2011 By 3 Comments
Kim Egan

Kim Egan, Partner, DLA Piper LLP

I don’t know how I missed this gem but on March 24, 2011, FDA sent a Warning Letter to Jonathan’s Sprouts, Inc., informing the company that it was (among other things) marketing its organic mung bean, alfalfa, and broccoli sprouts as drugs. FDA said it has not approved sprouts as drugs and therefore, the mung bean, alfalfa, clover, and broccoli sprouts are “unapproved new drugs” subject to enforcement action by the agency.

This seems silly at first and reminds us of FDA going after General Mills for unapproved drugs claims on Cheerios. And as a humagetarian myself (will eat meat if produced humanely), I would have expected FDA to go after something other than organic bean sprouts. Like genetically-modified baby sea turtles.

But FDA’s job is to make sure that anything marketed as a drug, including organic bean sprouts, is supported by data demonstrating the safety and efficacy so that FDA can be sure that the benefits of consuming the sprouts (for example) exceed the risks. This also seems silly at first and must just be a technicality so surely Jonathan’s Sprouts can pony up the info and all will be well.

A closer look shows trouble ahead.

Let’s start with mung beans. Mung beans are used to make cellophane noodles and various kinds of jellies and in Hong Kong, a mung-bean flavored ice cream. Jonathan’s Sprouts said that “Mung Bean Sprouts [Have Been] Identified as Potent Anti-tumor Agent” because they contain phytochemicals. FDA knows phytochemicals. Hippocrates extracted a phytochemical, salicin, from willow bark and thus discovered aspirin (salicylic acid). Taxol is an FDA-approved cancer therapy and contains a phytochemical from the Pacific yew tree. FDA knows phytochemicals and all it is willing to concede about phytochemicals in food is about tomatoes, to wit: “Very limited and preliminary scientific research suggests that eating one-half to one cup of tomatoes and/or tomato sauce a week may reduce the risk of prostate cancer.” Mung beans aren’t tomatoes.

Next up are alfalfa sprouts. The most revolting thing I learned about alfalfa preparing this post is that it is a “galactalogue,” which is a substance that induces lactation. The second most revolting thing I learned is that galactalogues not only induce lactation but also attracts insects. Just what a lactating mammal wants. The third most revolting thing I learned is that I have been consuming galactalogues with abandon for some time now. They are found in asparagus.

This company avoided galactalogues and said instead that alfalfa sprouts are “High in [a] Cholesterol Lowering Agent,” namely, saponins. The Internet says (so it must be true) that saponins have antimicrobial and antifungal properties, along with anti-inflammatory and immune-stimulating properties (sounds good!). The problem is they might also be toxic. But Jonathan’s Sprouts also relied on canavines as well as saponins to support its health claims for alfalfa: “Studies on canavanine . . . in alfalfa, have demonstrated benefit for pancreatic, colon and leukemia cancers.” I couldn’t find very much understandable information about cavanine except this rather alarming statement from a New Zealand website: “Any animal that ingests canavanine makes incorrect proteins that malfunction as enzymes. The damage is non-specific and widespread, affecting RNA and DNA metabolism, as well as a key enzyme for destroying alcohol. Because it messes up so many aspects of metabolism, canavanine is a highly toxic chemical to animals. Pigs refuse to eat feed containing too much canavanine . . . [H]umans are not immune to canavanine [and] we don’t seem to taste it.“. If not even a pig will eat it, FDA might have a point.

Next are phytoestrogens which Jonathan’s Sprouts said “prevent . . . osteoporosis,” reduce the risk of breast cancer, control fibrocystic breast tumors and may also have cardiovascular benefits and benefits for diabetics. Phytoestrogens are just want you think they are — female sex hormones. We call them “dietary estrogens” because they come from plants instead of ovaries. That may be the fourth most revolting thing I learned preparing this blog. Regardless, the history of pharmaceutical-grade estrogens has been tumultuous and millions of dollars worth of litigation has ensued and in any event, FDA has not approved a health claim for food that says that estrogens prevent breast cancer or osteoporosis (or anything else).

Finally, broccoli. Jonathan’s Sprouts said there is “strong evidence that just two or three tablespoons of broccoli sprouts a day can help prevent cancer, gastric cancer, and other diseases.” This may be true, and indeed, the Wikipedia entry for broccoli extols its anti-cancer properties. But that same site also bears a big notice saying that as of April 2011, “The neutrality of this article is disputed.” In any event, the most FDA will allow anyone to say about broccoli is that “Broccoli is high in vitamin A and C, and it is a good source of dietary fiber.”

We knew that already.

Kim Egan is Partner in the firm DLA Piper LLP

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Cheeseballs Through the Ages and the Pope’s Mustard Man

April 18, 2011 By 3 Comments
Kim Egan

Kim Egan, Partner, DLA Piper LLP

I traveled to Madison, Wisconsin recently and discovered the National Mustard Museum. It is the brain child of a former Assistant Attorney General for the State of Wisconsin, who once argued a case before the U.S. Supreme Court with a jar of mustard in his pocket. Most interesting mustard fact: Pope John XXII loved the stuff and created the Vatican office of the Grand Moutardier du Pape, installing his nephew as the first one.

Madison is also the home of Oscar Mayer, now a subsidiary of Kraft. As you approach the Isthmus from the Dane County Regional Airport you pass the Oscar Mayer facility and you can see the Weiner Mobile in the parking lot. On National Mustard Day (first Saturday in August), the Weiner Mobile drives over to the Mustard Museum and they spend the day together.

The National Mustard Museum calls itself America’s Favorite Condiment Museum. Which is unfair because there is no ketchup, mayonnaise or pickle relish museum, though there is a Pickle Museum in Germany. Interesting pickle fact — Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian pickle peddler. There is also an online Condiment Package Museum — pages of purloined packets. Also online is something called The Extinct Beverage Museum. Or at least I think it’s still online. It’s like The Decoy Museum in Maryland. You can’t fool me! I’m going to wait for The Real Museum!

Some food museums have mottos. The Idaho Potato Museum in Blackfoot, Idaho has the best: “We give taters to Out-of-Staters.”

Food museums can be educational. You can learn how to butcher a pig at the Salami Museum in Ferrino, Italy. At the Dutch Cheese Museum you can learn that in days of yore, when the Dutch army ran out of ammunition, it used cheeseballs as cannonballs. You can finally learn what is in spam at the SPAM Museum in Austin, Minnesota (and you will also learn that the 7 billionth can of it was sold in 2007). You will learn at The Banana Museum in Auburn, Washington that bananas cause 300 accidents a year (mainly slip & falls). The Saffron Museum, located (oddly) in Switzerland, is philosophical; the Swiss tourism website ponders, “Why is rye also cultivated on the saffron fields? How is the ‘red gold’ harvested? What happens to the saffron after the harvest?”

Some food museums are exactly where you would expect them to be. There is a Ramen Museum in Japan and an Orange Museum in Valencia. The New Orleans Beverage Museum is in New Orleans. The Currywurst Museum is in Berlin. Currywurst — a hot pork sausage covered in a sauce made with ketchup and curry powder — is the second most popular staple in the German diet after bread. The Bread Museum is in the German cathedral town of Ulm.

Dairy products do well in the museum department. In addition to the Dutch Cheese Museum, there is a Butter Museum in County Cork, Ireland (the Irish preserved butter in peat bogs), a museum devoted to Dairy & Milk from the Dolomites, and a Milk Museum started by a retired milkman. It houses 10,000 milk bottles, the oldest dating back to 1890.

There are lots of other food museums, of course. In fact, of the 37,000 museums in the world, 131 of them are devoted to specialty foods and 70 are devoted to beverages.

The one I did not find anywhere was a Fish Museum. And then I remembered. They’re called “aquariums.”

Kim Egan is Partner in the firm DLA Piper LLP

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Congressional Committee to Reduce Waste Eliminates Self

March 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Kim Egan

Kim Egan, Partner, DLA Piper LLP

It turns out that I am not the only one who has noticed that food regulation is sometimes a little, well, silly.  The federal government recently “identified a mother lode of government waste and duplication” and decided that getting rid of it “could potentially save billions of tax dollars annually and help agencies provide more efficient and more effective service.”  This according to Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in response to the GAO’s first ever audit of federal agency overlap.

One of the biggest culprits is food safety.  There are over 30 food-related laws administered by 15 different federal agencies and still the public lacks confidence in the safety of our food supply.  What to do?

GAO recommends that as “a next step, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, in consultation with the federal agencies that have food safety responsibilities, should develop a government-wide performance plan for food safety that includes results-oriented goals and performance measures and a discussion of strategies and resources.”  What does that mean?  It sounds an awful lot like the “next-generation-platform-based-information-management-solutions” type stuff we heard about during the tech boom.

GAO insists that “[w]ithout a government-wide performance plan for food safety, decision makers do not have a comprehensive picture of the federal government’s performance on this crosscutting issue.”  In other words, if no-one tells the boss what’s going on, the boss won’t know what’s going on.  Let’s definitely fix that.

GAO also wants Congress to ask the National Academies of Science to ask a blue ribbon panel of experts to come up with some “alternative food safety organizational structures.”  The GAO proposes that Congress ask the NAS to ask the blue ribbon panel to consider the excellent example of Europe.   Somehow I don’t think our Tea Party Congress will cotton to that idea.  Europe has one food safety agency and one, transparent set of food safety rules.  That seems so sensible, no?

The GAO also appears to recommend Food Communism: “a coordination mechanism that provides centralized, executive leadership for the existing organizational structure, led by a central chair who would be appointed by the president and have control over resources.”  The Tea Party won’t like that either.

Because the solution to our food problems is to become more European, we can rest assured that nothing at all will change.  We will stick with our quaintly provincial and silly system of food regulation.  FDA will continue to make sure that shell eggs are properly labeled while the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service will continue to ensure the health of the chicks that hatch from them.  FDA will continue to regulate products made from the shell eggs (that one hopes were properly labeled) while USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service will continue to grade eggs for beauty and purity.  And it will continue to be the case that nobody at all in the federal government will be making sure that the eggs sold in your local grocery store are free of Salmonella.

The good news is that it’s not just food that gets taken to task in this report.  The GAO says we could probably save some money “defending our northern border” from our staunch Canadian ally as well, ironically, as our efforts to identify government overlap.  No. 14 on GAO’s list of things to de-dupe is “Enterprise Architects,” which it says are “key mechanism for identifying overlap and duplication.”

What a waste.

Kim Egan is Partner in the firm DLA Piper LLP

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Food Stuff: Wilts, Smuts, Blotches and Rots

February 7, 2011 By 1 Comment
Kimberly Egan

Kim Egan, Partner, DLA Piper LLP

For reasons I won’t bore you with, I recently typed “Karnal Bunt” into Google followed shortly thereafter by “smut.”  No, not the smut you’re thinking.  “Smut” comes from the German for “dirt” and refers to a collection of revolting plant diseases.

Smuts are fungi.  I know this because my Googling sent me straight from “Karnal Bunt” to “corn smut” to a place where I could build my own “fungi portal.”   There are many kinds of smut, all of which are regulated by the Department of Agriculture.  That is a sentence I never expected to type.  There is the aforementioned “corn smut” and also “sugarcane smut” and the “common smut” and the “loose smut“.  Loose smut kills barley, along with reputations.

Smuts are in the same family as rusts and presumably blights.  A rust is a dark smut.  There is cedar apple rust and white pine blister rust and wheat rust and daylily rust.

Blackleg potato

Blackleg potato rot | Photo by Gary D. Kleinschmidt | UC ANR

Blights are a bummer.  The chestnut blight destroyed one of the stateliest American trees.  And there’s a blight (or smut, I’m not sure) that causes Sudden Oak Death.  Fire blight kills pears.  Water mold caused the famous Irish Potato Blight.  Potatoes also get something called “bacterial wilt” and something else called “soft rot” and something else called “blackleg.” Potatoes can get “ring rot” and “pink eye” and “common scab” and “zebra chip.”  The zebra chip diseases gives potato chips black lines like a zebra.

Many plant diseases sound like they were dreamed up around a peat fire in a thatched hut somewhere on the MacGilliycuddy Reeks or the Heptonstall Slacks.  Plants get blotches, cankers and galls. Apples get fruit blotch and twig canker.  Caneberries get leafy gall.  There’s a disease called the “boysenberry decline.”   There’s something called “black speck”.  Citrus fruits get the “blast” and “damping-off” and the dreaded “sooty blotch.”

Plants also get viruses.  There’s “bud union crease” and “crinkly leaf” and “navel infectious mottling.”  Plants can spread contagious pathogens — the “fatal yellows” or the “rumple of lemon fruit.”  Oranges get sunburn. Lettuce get stunt. Peanuts get scorch.

No problem, you say.  I will just buy my produce at a supermarket to be sure I’m not eating wilts or blotches or rots.

But then you might be eating bug secretions.  This goes for vegetarians or vegans, too.

That’s because grocers can wax their fruit and vegetables with something called “food grade shellac.”  When slathered on candy it’s called “confectioner’s glaze.”  Shellac comes out of the glands of the female lac bug.  You see it most frequently on apples.   Sometimes it contains crushed insects.  It is exactly the same stuff you use to polish a wood floor.

Enjoy.

Kim Egan is Partner in the firm DLA Piper LLP

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Of Fruits and Vegetables, and Everything in Between

January 24, 2011 By 1 Comment
Kimberly Egan

Kim Egan, Partner, DLA Piper LLP

It might surprise you to learn that FDA has taken the time to promulgate a regulation that identifies the 20 most frequently consumed raw fruits, vegetables, and fish in the United States. See 21 C.F.R. sec. 101.44. As a result we now know that the 20 most frequently consumed raw fruits are apples, California avocados, bananas, cantaloupes, grapefruits, grapes, honeydew melons, kiwifruits, lemons, limes, nectarines, oranges, peaches, pears, pineapples, plums, strawberries, sweet cherries, tangerines, and watermelons. And the 20 most frequently consumed raw vegetables are asparagus, bell peppers, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, celery, cucumbers, green snap beans, green cabbage, green onions, iceberg lettuce, leaf lettuce, mushrooms, onions, potatoes, radishes, summer squash, sweet corn, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes.

Do these lists interest you at all? They interest me. What is a “vegetable” anyway? Why is a banana a “fruit” but a squash is deemed a vegetable? Why are tomatoes called vegetables but nectarines are fruit? Why are watermelons fruits but cucumbers vegetables? What would you call a beet and why isn’t it on the list of 20 most frequently consumed vegetables? Do we really eat more kiwis than raspberries or blueberries? Isn’t a mushroom a primeval parasite and not really a plant at all?

Harold McGee, the food scientist and author of On Food and Cooking, is my kind of guy because he’s taken up this subject with gusto. Fruits are, technically speaking, the reproductive organs of plants. Everything on the 20 most frequently consumed raw fruits list has a seed in it somewhere. But then why do we call green beans, eggplants, cucumbers, and corn vegetables when they, anatomically speaking, are fruits? And then there’s the tomato, the most famous vegetable-that-is-really-a-fruit.

McGee wonders if the distinction is that fruits are plants that are sweet and tasty and vegetables are plants that are nutritious and wholesome. “The apple of your eye” and “what a peach” and “life is just a bowl of cherries” are good things. “You’re nuts” or “that’s not worth a hill of beans” are bad things. McGee goes off on a tangent about how the lemon fits into this equation — long story short, it looks like it should be sweet but it isn’t at all. It’s a deception — a lemon.

We in America are fortunate that we can turn to our Supreme Court for an answer. It has been the law of the land in America since 1893 that a tomato (and by extension the cucumber and the green bean) is a vegetable, even though it has seeds like a fruit. The story is that a 19th century food importer wanted to bring a load of tomatoes in from the West Indies tax free, arguing that tomatoes were botanical fruits and thus exempt from the import duty. The Supreme Court, apparently mindful of the benefit unrestrained tomato tax revenue would have on the public coffer, said no, tomatoes are vegetables and thus taxable. The Court held that tomatoes are “usually served at dinner in, with, or after the soup, fish or meat, which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits, generally after dessert.” Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893).

For you lawyers out there, Nix v. Hedden is still good law. The Second Circuit cited it in 1990 for the proposition that common usage can trump science when it comes to commerce. “In common parlance tomatoes are vegetables, as the Supreme Court observed long ago [in] Nix v. Hedden 149 U.S. 304, 307, 13 S.Ct. 881, 882, 37 L.Ed. 745 (1893), although botanically speaking they are actually a fruit . . . Regardless of classification, people have been enjoying tomatoes for centuries, even Mr. Pickwick, as Dickens relates, ate his chops in ‘tomata’ sauce.” JSG Trading Corp. v. Tray-Wrap, Inc., 917 F.2d 75 (2d Cir. 1990).

I am also told that the New Jersey legislature cited Nix in 2005 when it voted to make the tomato the state vegetable of New Jersey. This apparently alarmed some people because the tomato is not an entirely benign plant. For starters, it’s a member of the nightshade family, along with eggplants, the hallucinogenic jimson weed and, of course, the deadly nightshade. Moreover, only the crazy Italians were brave enough to eat a tomato for the longest time — the English and the French thought it was poisonous because it turns out the tomato plant leaves are, actually, rather deadly. And even though the English called them “love apples,” the Latin name for tomatoes is lycopersicon esculentum. Translation — “edible wolf’s peach.”

I’d love to see a “Candied emulsion of organic edible wolf’s peach” on the menu at, say the Gramercy Tavern or Restaurant Nora.

Kim Egan is Partner in the firm DLA Piper LLP

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Dreaming of a Vanilla Christmas

December 16, 2010 By 2 Comments
Kimberly Egan

Kim Egan, Partner, DLA Piper LLP

It’s the holiday baking season, which means a lot of vanilla extract is moving through the stream of commerce.  So, just what is vanilla extract, anyway?

Vanilla extract is made from vanilla beans.  Vanilla beans do not grow on a vanilla bush the way cocoa beans grow on a cocoa bush.  Vanilla beans grow on a pretty tropical flowering plant, the flower of which is called…an orchid.  Vanilla beans are orchid seeds.  The vanilla bean orchid plant is native to Mexico and Cortes took it back to Spain with him along with chocolate.  Chocolate and vanilla (and corn and tomatoes) are as American as apple pie.

Before FDA, people made vanilla extract by sticking vanilla beans into the liquid of fermented potatoes, corn, and other things found lying around the Americas.  Liquefied fermenting potatoes, corn, etc., create ethanol, known in Europe as vodka.  Take three vanilla beans and one cup of vodka, stuff it all in a glass jar with a tight lid, shake it around, and wait 2 months.  Voila!  Vanilla extract.  When you start running low, add more vodka.  If you want to sell it for thousands of dollars an ounce, call it “Artisanal Vodka-Infused Mexican Orchid Seed Reduction.”

Other cool things to know about vanilla are that Obelisk’s mother in the Asterix series is named Vanilla and there is a kind of Japanese cartoon pornography called The Vanilla Series.

Now back to FDA.  It says vanilla beans are “the properly cured and dried fruit pods of Vanilla planifolia Andrews and of Vanilla tahitensis Moore.”  FDA says “[v]anilla extract is the solution in aqueous ethyl alcohol of the sapid and odorous principles extractable from vanilla beans.”  Sapid means tasty and odorous means smelly.  At least 35 percent of the liquid must be alcohol.  At least one part per gallon must be vanilla.

Less than 35 percent alcohol and your product is merely “vanilla flavoring.”  More than two parts per gallon of vanilla and your product is “concentrated” vanilla extract.  Then there is “vanilla powder,” ground up vanilla beans to which you are permitted to add sugar, food starch, gum acacia, and corn syrup.  You can even add “anti-caking” ingredients, none of which you would ever eat voluntarily because they are also known as “talcum powder.”

Digging deeper, there are rules about vanilla-vanillin extract, flavoring, and powder, all of which are the same as the above except you can add 1 ounce of “vanillin.”  FDA does not define “vanillin”  but Wikipedia does:  “It is the primary component of the extract of the vanilla bean. It is also found in roasted coffee and the Chinese red pine.”  The last bit is a little jarring.Vanilla Bean

All of this assumes that you know how to weigh your vanilla beans, which is more complicated than you might think.  FDA consulted both the National Archives and the Association of Official Analytical Chemists (AOAC) and shares that a “unit weight of vanilla beans means, in the case of vanilla beans containing not more than 25 percent moisture, 13.35 ounces of such beans; and, in the case of vanilla beans containing more than 25 percent moisture, it means the weight of such beans equivalent in content of moisture-free vanilla-bean solids to 13.35 ounces of vanilla beans containing 25 percent moisture. (For example, one unit weight of vanilla beans containing 33.25 percent moisture amounts to 15 ounces.) The moisture content of vanilla beans is determined by the method prescribed in “Official Methods of Analysis of the Association of Official Analytical Chemists,” 13th Ed. (1980), sections 7.004 and 7.005, which is incorporated by reference, except that the toluene used is blended with 20 percent by volume of benzene and the total distillation time is 4 hours.

Copies of the material incorporated by reference may be obtained from the AOAC INTERNATIONAL, 481 North Frederick Ave., suite 500, Gaithersburg, MD 20877, or may be examined at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). For information on the availability of this material at NARA, call 202-741-6030, or click here.

If you are the careful type and want the National Archives or the Association of Official Analytical Chemists to weigh your vanilla beans for you, make sure your “pods are chopped into pieces approximately 1/4-inch in longest dimension, using care to avoid moisture change.”

The good news is that just four hundred years after Cortes introduced Spain to the sapid and odorous seed of the flowering orchid plant, in 1977, FDA declared vanilla extract, provided it meets all the requirements above, to be Generally Regarded as Safe (GRAS).

Kim Egan is Partner in the firm DLA Piper LLP

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