Tag: food

3D-Printed Fake Meat and Fish Have Officially Entered American Grocery Stores Without Clear Labeling

3D-printed fake meat and fish have officially hit American grocery stores. Israeli food-technology company Steakholder Foods announced the U.S. retail launch of its PERFECTA brand, introducing 3D-printed meat and seafood to grocery stores across the Northeastern United States.

The packaging DOES NOT disclose that the company’s products are manufactured using 3D-printing technology. Instead, the products are marketed as “premium plant-based meat.”

Steakholder Foods is rolling out five products under its PERFECTA brand:

  • “Marbled Steak”
  • “Filet Mignon”
  • “Chicken Breast”
  • “Salmon Patties”
  • “White Fish Patties”

Its plant-based steak formulation contains soy flour, rapeseed oil, modified starch, methylcellulose, xanthan gum, locust bean gum, and artificial meat coloring designed to imitate the appearance of beef.

These are not ingredients I would put in my body.

One thing is for sure, I will NOT be purchasing this 3D-printed slop.

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Texas AG Paxton sues Gerber, Nestlé over arsenic and lead found in baby foods

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued Gerber Products Company (“Gerber”) and Nestlé USA, Inc. (“Nestle”) for allegedly deceiving parents and other consumers regarding “toxic heavy metals” in their baby foods.

Paxton, who is running as President Donald Trump’s top pick for the U.S. Senate in Texas, announced the lawsuit on Wednesday, contending that Gerber advertised its food as safe, well-tested and recommended by pediatricians, despite its own test results finding “dangerous levels of arsenic and lead.”

In a press release, the attorney general stated that the company “used 67 batches of rice flour with more than nine times the arsenic that the federal government allows in bottled water” between 2017 and 2019. Additionally, its carrots had up to 17 times the limit for cadmium and its sweet potatoes had nearly 10 times the limit for lead. It also seldom tested positive for mercury.

These metals — known as neurotoxins — are listed by federal health agencies as the top substances posing “significant potential threat to human health.” Arsenic is first, lead is second, mercury is third and cadmium is seventh, according to the lawsuit.

Despite Gerber’s findings, it issued no recall or warning about the offending products, according to Paxton’s office. According to the 68-page filing against Gerber, its “marketing has not changed,” and it even tells parents that each jar of food passes “over 100 quality checks.”

“Gerber promised parents its food was safe and rigorously tested. Its own tests showed toxic metals in the food. When a company makes promises about what parents feed their babies, I will hold it accountable to ensure those promises are kept,” Paxton asserted.

Texas’s Consumer Protection Division of the Attorney General’s office notified the defendants of the unlawful conduct, which it said violated the Deceptive Trade Practices Act (DTPA), at least seven days before filing suit, in compliance with Texas law.

The filing noted that beginning in 1867, the baby food industry was built on consumer trust that companies could replace breast milk, which infants relied on until nine to 12 months of age throughout history.

“From its origin, manufactured infant food has been sold on the proposition that a company can be trusted to feed a baby. Nestlé, which began the industry in 1967, acquired Gerber, which has led the American market since 1928,” the lawsuit read. “Gerber and Nestlé USA … violated that trust with Texas consumers.”

Paxton pointed out that though Gerber includes a pathway for parents to find nutrition information about their food, it’s concealed by a QR code and does not provide full transparency.

“Gerber now posts test results behind a QR code on its labels. But the heavy metals in the food did not change, and neither did the safety claims on the front of the package. A code on the back of the jar does not cure a false promise on the front,” Paxton’s office asserted.

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Hackers Target French Grocers

Hackers have demonstrated that you do not need to destroy a farm or stop a delivery truck to destroy food. There was recently an overnight attack on supermarket refrigeration systems in France that forced temperatures as high as 50 C or 122 F across 150 stores. Food had to be discarded after six hours in high temperatures. Every aspect of life that operates online is fair game in cyberwarfare.

Updated Reuters reporting says Carrefour identified 80 affected supermarkets, while Monoprix said roughly 5% of its approximately 490 stores were hit. Intermarché’s chief executive estimated nationwide losses in the tens of millions of euros in a single day, although a verified industry-wide total was not yet available. Danfoss, the refrigeration supplier, said affected equipment was running outdated firmware and that customers had previously been advised to update supported systems or replace older ones.

We have developed an absurd assumption that connecting something automatically improves it. Remote access is convenient, so we count the convenience as a benefit while treating the ongoing obligation to secure it as overhead. Yet monitoring a refrigerator and allowing someone elsewhere to change its operation are different powers.

This obsession with connecting everything deserves a harder examination. Remote monitoring can save money and identify equipment failures, but remote control also creates something an attacker can exploit. The issue here is network access to essential controls. Once someone unauthorized can change how the machinery operates, a computer intrusion can produce physical destruction.

People still imagine war requires an army crossing a border. Why invade when you can interfere with the systems that keep the population supplied? If an attacker gained access to refrigeration controls shared across a large chain, food could be destroyed in hundreds of locations before the morning shift arrived. For scale, 1,000 stores losing 10 metric tons each would mean 10,000 tons gone. Extend the disruption into refrigerated warehouses and you threaten supplies destined for many more stores. The food has already been produced and paid for. Restoring a computer does not bring it back, and replacement shipments cannot appear simply because a politician promises that everything is under control. The economic consequences would spread through lost sales, interrupted wages, replacement costs, and potentially higher prices, while frightened customers rushed to buy what remained.

Being on the electrical grid is not the same as being accessible over the internet. This attack is disturbing precisely because it did not require a blackout. Dependence on power creates one vulnerability; insecure network controls create another. Add dependence on digital ordering, communications, and deliveries, and a business can discover that several supposedly separate functions rely on the same fragile chain of services. The question should be how much can continue working when one link fails, rather than how many functions can be managed remotely.

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Soldier blocks Palestinian harvest, says ‘Jews have prior right over Arabs to everything’

A soldier was filmed blocking a Palestinian olive harvest near Ramallah on Friday because, he said, “this is a Jewish state” and “Jews have a prior right over Arabs to everything in this country.”

The soldier documented in the central West Bank’s Birzeit area also said settlers were allowed to be there because those were his orders.

The IDF did not immediately comment on the incident.

Near the village of Yabrud, about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) east of Birzeit, separate footage on Friday showed settlers trapping a Palestinian vehicle and assaulting its occupants, reportedly a father and son, who fled.

Police said they arrested a 15-year-old settler on suspicion of involvement and seized one of the cars that the perpetrators used in the attack, which police described as a “nationalist” assault and car theft.

Rabbis for Human Rights, which published the footage from the Birzeit-area olive grove, said the Birzeit incident occurred as Israeli activists with the group were helping with the harvest on private Palestinian land in the West Bank’s Area C, which Israelis can legally enter without notifying Israel’s Civil Administration.

Nonetheless, soldiers shut down the harvest and removed the Palestinians and activists from the area, according to Rabbis for Human Rights.

The footage published by the group from the scene showed a masked soldier in full gear confronting Israeli activists, who asked why Jewish settlers could be in the area but Palestinians couldn’t.

“I don’t know if you remember, but this is a Jewish state. So Jews have a prior right over Arabs to everything in this country, whether you like it or not,” the soldier said.

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This Won’t End Well… Seattle Becomes First City To Price-Fix Your Groceries

This week the Seattle City Council passed Mayor Katie Wilson’s “Fair Pricing and Transparency” ordinance in a 7-2 vote, a first-in-the-nation ban on so-called surveillance pricing.

The ordinance takes effect in 2027. The Washington Retail Association warned for months that the bill was rushed, would have significant and negative impact on prices, and that nearly all suggested fixes were ignored.

As approved, retailers must decide whether they can keep offering the tailored discounts and loyalty programs that Seattle families actually use or cancel all the programs and charge more for groceries.

Government should not be price-fixing consumer products.

Banning the use of loyalty cards and programs, fuel rewards, and targeted coupons hurts businesses and consumers alike.

Price controls do not make groceries cheaper. They flatten the tools stores use to compete for customers. When discounts vanish, the shelf price becomes the only price. That is how an “affordability” law raises a customer’s grocery bill. A Greater Seattle Business Association and Seattle Latino Metropolitan Chamber guest column put it plainly: trying to control prices through experimental regulation has never worked, and this ordinance will make an already expensive city more unaffordable.

Jan Himebaugh of the Washington Retail Association offered a household example, nearly $1,000 in grocer loyalty savings this year for her family, the equivalent of more than 185 gallons of gas in a state where fuel is among the nation’s most expensive. Those are not corporate talking points. They are the coupons that keep a cart full.

Thin-margin stores close. When they close, the result is the very “food deserts” Mayor Wilson has spent a campaign and a mayoralty promising to fight. Wilson has said Seattle will not accept food deserts as the cost of doing business, but the “Fair Pricing” policy creates a retail environment that does exactly the opposite.

A pricing ordinance that chases discounts out of the city works against that goal. You cannot subsidize corner markets on Sunday and make their discount model legally hazardous on Tuesday.

If Wilson wants more grocery access, the path is not to micromanage how a retailer prices a gallon of milk. It is to stop piling first-in-the-nation experiments onto businesses already carrying Seattle’s tax and regulatory load.

Personalized discounts are not surveillance. They are how competitive stores keep prices down and stay open. Kill those discounts, and the desert grows.

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A $120 Can of Spam Busts Open Seattle’s Food Stamp Fraud

Look in the mirror: You’re looking at an attractive, smart, hardworking taxpayer. 

And here’s where hundreds of millions of your food stamp tax dollars are going: straight into the hands of addicts, the pockets of pimps, and the funds of charlatans. 

It wasn’t bad enough that California hospice owners were driving Ferraris bought with stolen tax money, and that FireAID donations were given to nonprofits that had nothing to do with actual, you know, fire aid. Now we discover that food stamp fraud is taking place in the open on the streets of America, and nobody’s doing anything about it, apparently.

Independent reporter Nick Shirley, with a group of other indy reporters, revealed the open-air federal food stamp fraud taking place on the streets of Seattle. 

Shirley, San Francisco-based street reporter Darren Stallcup, Seattle’s Jonathan Choe, and other intrepid indy reporters followed the money. 

Choe tells Shirley that EBT cards litter homeless encampments, where they receive so many of them that they begin to throw them away. Many of those “homeless” drug zombies use their food stamp cards to buy drugs. 

Choe and Shirley found EBT cards and sought to follow the lucrative scam from beginning to end. Shirley lays out how simple this is in a new video displaying how one abandoned EBT card can buy drugs, sex, and a $120 can of Spam.

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Global Crop Prices Log Biggest Quarterly Jump Since Ukraine Invasion As Sticky Inflation Hits Grocery Bills

The Bloomberg Agriculture Spot Index (BCOMAGSP) posted its largest quarterly gain since Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, as Black Sea disruptions, a crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, and mounting El Niño risks have formed what could be considered a perfect storm poised to drive food prices higher.

BCOMAGSP, which tracks 10 major crops including corn, soybeans, wheat, coffee, sugar, cotton, cocoa, and others, jumped 13% in the third quarter.

Beyond the Russia-Ukraine fighting and disruptions to grain shipments from the Black Sea region, the next big threat to the crop space is a strengthening El Niño, on track to rank among the strongest on record. This puts various types of crops in major growing belts around the world at risk and has sent harvest yields plunging. 

Already, India’s weakest monsoon season in a decade has added to concerns about harvests and food prices.

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Food Labeling Should Not Be This Hard

Knowing what’s in your food or whether what you’re about to eat comports with a medically prescribed diet can be difficult. There’s no reason why the government should make it harder. But that’s exactly what the United States Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration are doing when they prohibit companies from conveying information about FODMAP content on food labels.

Although not inherently harmful to most people, FODMAPs are a broad category of short-chain carbohydrates and sugar alcohols believed to trigger gastrointestinal symptoms in individuals living with irritable bowel syndrome and possibly several other functional gastrointestinal disorders.

In technical terms, FODMAPs are fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. More practically, people with IBS might want to be careful around most standard dairy items, honey, several cereals and artificial sweeteners, and a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and spices.

When consumed, these items can lead to luminal distension by causing increased amounts of water to enter the gastrointestinal tract and increased gas production by bacteria living in the colon. In some individuals with IBS and other functional gut disorders, this may trigger or exacerbate certain symptoms of their condition (e.g., intense pain and changes in intestinal motility), possibly through neurons in the gut responding abnormally to these physiological responses to FODMAP consumption. 

Hence, some patients with these conditions choose to limit their FODMAP intake or are encouraged to do so by their health care provider. Some go on strict low-FODMAP diets long term. Others temporarily do so for two to eight weeks then work to reintroduce specific FODMAP-containing foods into their diet to determine what they can tolerate. Broadly speaking, a lot of patients with relevant conditions find that the diet helps alleviate their symptoms.

Low-FODMAP diets though are generally considered sort of bland. They also tend to require a certain amount of time and education to be effective. Looking at a table of high- and low-FODMAP foods to make decisions about what to eat may not require an advanced degree in nutrition, but it is not difficult to imagine how having to break out such a table to evaluate every item you consider purchasing at the grocery store could become rather burdensome, especially if you’re new to the diet.

Fortunately, there are organizations and companies out there to help. Monash University, for example, has labs that both study the effectiveness of low-FODMAP diets and test food items for FODMAP content. Monash also offers several resources to help those on low-FODMAP diets make informed meal choices and works with companies that wish to offer low-FODMAP food options. If a company wants to submit a product to Monash for evaluation and Monash determines the item is low in FODMAP content, the company can then use a trademarked label to convey this information to consumers.

However, as one US company learned, even if one of the world’s leading FODMAP research facilities tells you your food is low in FODMAPs, this isn’t exactly the kind of thing you can just put on a label in the United States.

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Americans Were Hungry. FDR’s Government Was Killing Pigs to Raise Prices.

In 1933, about one-quarter of America’s workforce was unemployed. Hunger and malnutrition were widespread, families had lost homes and savings, and millions were trying to survive an economic catastrophe.

Franklin Roosevelt’s government responded to part of that crisis by paying farmers to destroy things Americans could use.

From the Library of Congress:

In a country with abundant resources, the largest force of skilled labor, and the most productive industry in the world, many found it hard to understand why the depression had occurred and why it could not be resolved. Moreover, it was difficult for many to understand why people should go hungry in a country possessing huge food surpluses. Blaming Wall Street speculators, bankers, and the Hoover administration, the rumblings of discontent grew mightily in the early 1930s. By 1932, hunger marches and small riots were common throughout the nation.

In June of 1932, nearly 20,000 World War I veterans from across the country marched on the United States Capitol to request early payment of cash bonuses for their military service that weren’t due to be paid until 1945. The marchers, who the organizers called the “Bonus Expeditionary Force” but who became widely known as the Bonus Army, spent several days in Washington, D.C., pressing their case, but a Congressional bill to pay the bonus was defeated. On July 28, U.S. troops and tanks commanded by General Douglas MacArthur dispersed the marchers and destroyed their makeshift camps in the city.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act rested on an economic theory that sounded tidy in Washington. Farm prices had collapsed because farmers were producing more than markets could absorb.

Reduce the supply, officials reasoned, and prices would rise, and higher prices would restore farm income.

Farmers desperately needed help. The question is what Washington chose to do with that desperation.

In the summer of 1933, the government launched an emergency hog program. Federal officials bought about 6.2 million young pigs and another 222,000 sows to remove them from future markets.

Pigs that couldn’t economically be processed for food were turned into grease and tankage. About 100 million pounds of edible pork did reach relief programs.

The USDA’s own history says officials expected the slaughter to provoke public outrage but considered the action necessary. Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace later acknowledged how disturbing the policy looked, describing the destruction of growing production as a grim consequence of an economy Washington believed had become badly unbalanced.

The administration understood exactly what it was doing.

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Mamdani Blindsided by Fresh Lawsuit — The NYC Mayor Now Has to Fight in Federal Court

New York City Zohran Mamdani will soon have to defend his socialist schemes in federal court.

That’s because of a fresh lawsuit that accuses his socialist supermarkets of “unfair competition” against local grocers.

The National Supermarket Association and two of its members – City Fresh Market in Harlem and C-Town Supermarket in the Bronx – are taking the mayor to court for violating antitrust laws. 

The litigants are filing their lawsuit in the Southern District of New York, which is not exactly renowned for its concern over civil rights.

The association’s president, Anthony Peña, told The Post that the millions of dollars going to the government-backed stores are a form of “unfair competition.”

“We are arguing that everyone has to be able to access these subsidies,” Peña said. “It’s not about us being afraid of competition. We are against unfair competition.”

The group represents 450 independent grocery stores in New York City. It is filing the complaint with the America First Policy Institute, which is chaired by Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s former top economic advisor.

“Independent supermarkets have invested in our neighborhoods, created jobs, paid taxes and served local families for generations,” Peña added. “They deserve a fair and level playing field – not competition against a government-subsidized program operating under different rules.”

The Mamdani grocery plan is now facing two major legal offensives — an August state-court challenge consisting of two separate MBC filings, and a new federal antitrust lawsuit from independent supermarket operators.

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