Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

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Superbug Summer Books: DINNER: A LOVE STORY

July 8, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I have a small private belief — for which, despite being a science writer, I can produce no data — that much of the complex difficulty of the American food system would vanish if people knew how to cook. When I say “cook,” I don’t mean mimicking “Top Chef” theatrics, or reproducing the transglutaminase excesses of molecular cuisine; I don’t even, particularly, mean carefully following recipes. What I mean, instead, is getting people to a place where they can walk into a store, or into their own pantries, emerge with a handful of ingredients, and make them into a meal.

If people trusted they could feed themselves, without much effort or advance planning, they wouldn’t be so vulnerable to the lure of fast and processed food. And if sales of those diminished, the market for the cheap products of industrial agriculture would diminish too. This I believe.

To trust that you can feed yourself, it helps to know a few techniques and to have developed a feel for some simple kitchen processes: when it’s appropriate to use a saute pan or a stock pot, and how long it takes water to boil. Most of all though I think it requires not being intimidated by the idea of cooking. Which is why I wish anyone who wants to be someone who cooks — but doesn’t quite know how to get there — could read “Dinner: A Love Story” (Ecco). At first glance, it’s a cookbook, based on a blog, by Jenny Rosenstrach, a magazine columnist and editor who lives outside New York City. But really, it’s a memoir, and also a how-to manual: a smart, pragmatic, warm and thoughtful guide to how two young professionals taught themselves to cook, and then taught their two kids to like food, and then organized their lives so that they all convene at a home-cooked meal, almost every day.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: #SBSBooks, Books, food, food policy, Science Blogs

Not Your Usual Holiday-Danger Warning: Don't Eat the Grill Brush

July 4, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

See the wires dangling from the tuft of bristles at the lower-right corner of the image? Don’t eat them.

It’s kind of a tradition, on Independence Day, for health journalists to relay warnings from public-health authorities. Wear sunscreen, watch the alcohol, don’t leave kids alone in pools, don’t stick sparklers in your eye — that kind of thing. They are important to say, because they might actually prevent someone getting injured, but they are dully familiar, because we’ve heard them all before.

Here’s one I suspect no one has heard before: Don’t swallow your grill brush, it will puncture your intestine.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: food, food policy, Grill, Science Blogs

News Round-Up: Meat, Superbugs, Denmark And Big Food

July 2, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I was off-line for a week with family issues, and while I was gone, news broke out. (It senses your absence, news does. This is the real reason why coups and major foodborne outbreaks happen in August.)

So while I dive into the bigger stories that seem to be happening — and get some fun summer stuff lined up — here’s a quick recap of things worth noticing:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, Denmark, food, food policy, Resistance, Science Blogs, Who

People Want to Eat Meat Raised Without Excessive Antibiotics. Wouldn't You?

June 20, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

This news is going to be everywhere today, but it’s solidly in the topics I care about (and you readers care about — at least I think you do), so I’m going to cover it regardless.

The magazine Consumer Reports is publishing a report and poll on US consumers’ attitudes toward the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture. From everyone’s reactions when I write about this, I thought people cared about this issue, but the numbers are a little surprising even to me: 86 percent of shoppers in a nationally representative sample of 1,000 adults said they wanted meat raised without antibiotics to be available in their local supermarkets. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, antibiotics, FDA, food, food policy, food safety, growth promoters, Resistance, Science Blogs, USDA

9-Year-Old Who Changed School Lunches Silenced By Politicians

June 14, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

NeverSeconds’ first school-lunch photo, May 8, 2012. The tubular thing is mashed potatoes in a crust.

[Updated: June 15, 2012. Read to the end for developments!]

For the past two months, one of my favorite reads has been Never Seconds, a blog started by 9-year-old Martha Payne of western Scotland to document the unappealing, non-nutritious lunches she was being served in her public primary school. Payne, whose mother is a doctor and father has a small farming property, started blogging in early May and went viral in days. She had a million viewers within a few weeks and 2 million this morning; was written up in Time, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and a number of food blogs; and got support from TV cheflebrity Jamie Oliver, whose series “Jamie’s School Dinners” kicked off school-food reform in England.

Well, goodbye to all that.

This afternoon, Martha (who goes by “Veg” on the blog) posted that she will have to shut down her blog, because she has been forbidden to take a camera into school. She said: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: food, food policy, kids, nutrition, Science Blogs, Scotland

Beyond Factory Farming: Creating An Appetite For Pastured Poultry

June 11, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I get this a lot: “I understand that the things you write about are important — but they’re so depressing. Couldn’t you write some, you know, good news, for a change?”

So here you go: a solutions post for once, instead of another problem. (But I can’t promise to make a habit of it.)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, antibiotics, chicken, food, food policy, food safety, Resistance, Science Blogs

The Superbugs In Your Dinner: A Storify

June 7, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

As I said Wednesday would happen, I participated in a Twitterchat today about antibiotic-resistant foodborne illnesses arising as a result of agricultural antibiotic use. This is the subject of my investigative piece in the June issue of SELF Magazine. Chat participants were me and blogger and cancer survivor Lisa Bonchek Adams, with many constant readers checking in. And because I’m sure you were all busy, but I want you to know what we talked about, I made a Storify for you. You’re welcome.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, FDA, food, food policy, foodborne, Resistance, Science Blogs, self, twitter

Court Scolds FDA Over Ag Antibiotic Use

June 5, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

There’s been another development in the continuing court battle to get the US Food and Drug Administration to exert some control over agricultural use of growth-promoter antibiotics — and it arrives accompanied by some remarkably direct language from the US magistrate judge hearing the case.

In a Memorandum of Opinion and Order that was filed last Friday afternoon — which I extracted from the PACER system and stashed in my Scribd account — Judge Theodore Katz addresses the FDA’s denial of two citizens’ petitions regarding ag antibiotic use. I’ll explain the details below, but here is the key language:

… the Court finds the Agency’s denial of the Petitions to be arbitrary and capricious. For over thirty years, the Agency has been confronted with evidence of the human health risks associated with the widespread sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics in food-producing animals, and, despite a statutory mandate to ensure the safety of animal drugs, the Agency has done shockingly little to address these risks.

Whew. OK, the details:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: animals, antibiotics, FDA, food, food policy, growth promoters, NRDC, Resistance, Science Blogs

Food Trade Too Complex to Track Food Safety

June 4, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

The data-dense graphic above may be too reduced to read (here’s the really big version), but its intricacy masks a simple and fairly dire message: The global trade in food has become so complex that we have almost lost the ability to trace the path of any food sold into the network. And, as a result, we are also about to lose the ability to track any contaminated food, or any product causing foodborne illness.

The graphic, and warning, come from a paper published last week in PLoS ONE by researchers from the United States, United Kingdom, Hungary and Romania. The group used United Nations food-trade data — along with some math that I do not pretend to understand — to describe an “international agro-food trade network” (IFTN) with seven countries at its center, but a dense web of connections with many others. Each of the seven countries, they find, trades with more than 77 percent of all the 207 countries on which the UN gathers information.

As a result, they say: “The IFTN has become a densely interwoven complex network, creating a perfect platform to spread potential contaminants with practically untraceable origins.”

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: E. coli, food, food policy, food safety, foodborne, Science Blogs, Who

What Industrial Farming Has to Do With Devastated Seas

May 24, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I spent the end of last week at the latest iteration of the Sustainable Foods Institute, an intense two days of discussion that the Monterey Bay Aquarium (home of Seafood Watch, the guide to sustainable seafood choices) puts on every year to bring together journalists, advocates and chefs. The Institute takes place within Cooking for Solutions, an overlapping food and wine conference dedicated to the proposition that sustainability and care for the planet are inseparable from deliciousness.

This is not as universal an idea as you might think. As the conference was opening, the New York Times ran a joint interview with the globally influential chefs Thomas Keller and Andoni Luis Aduriz in which they explicitly rejected ecological concerns over where or from whom they source the food they serve. Keller: “Is global food policy truly our responsibility? … I don’t think so.” Aduriz: “To align yourself entirely with … sustainability makes chefs complacent and limited.” (In a great response piece, Grist food editor Twilight Greenaway explains why their thinking is so short-sighted.)

But “global food policy” ought to be the concern of anyone who raises, grows, catches, fishes, forages, sells or even just eats food — because, as University of Minnesota academic Jonathan Foley said in a devastating talk halfway through the two days: “We’re running out of everything. We’re running out of planet.”

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, fish, food, food policy, Science Blogs

Mothers, Farmers and Chefs Against Antibiotic Misuse

May 15, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you may remember Everly Macario and her son Simon Sparrow: I told their story in my 2010 book Superbug and blogged about them in 2011. Everly is a public health researcher in Chicago and the sister and daughter of physicians. Yet despite all her own knowledge, and all the knowledge resident in her family, she was unable to protect 17-month-old Simon from the MRSA infection that killed him in 24 hours in 2004.

Simon, as I wrote about him last year, was:

[A] big, sturdy child with no health problems except a touch of asthma. The day before he died, he woke up feverish and disoriented, startling his parents with a cry unlike anything they had heard from him before. It was a busy morning — his older sister had a stomach virus — but they got him to the pediatric ER, got him checked, and brought him home when doctors found nothing unusual going on.

A few hours later, Everly was working at home, watching both kids, and Simon’s breathing changed. Her husband James, a history professor, had driven a few hours away to give a speech. She called a friend who is a pediatrician, held the phone up to Simon’s nose and mouth so she could hear, and then got back on the line.

“Hang up,” her friend said. “Call 911.”

She did, and then she called her husband, who reversed course and began tearing back to the city. At the hospital, Simon failed rapidly: His heart raced, his blood pressure crashed, his lungs filled with fluid. His skin darkened with pinpoint hemorrhages. He died the following morning.

Simon Sparrow. Photo: Courtesy Everly Macario

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, congress, food, food policy, MRSA, Resistance, Science Blogs

Antibiotics in Ethanol Grains: Glass Half-Empty or Half-Full?

April 10, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

So hi. Apologies to disappear, constant readers — I was mired in the last revise of a big magazine story (which will be out in two months and will be very exciting). Back now, and catching up. Here’s something that caught my eye yesterday, on a topic that I haven’t looked at since this blog was at its former home: the issue of ethanol-manufacturing leftovers, and whether they contribute to antibiotic resistance in the animals they are fed to.

Quick background: Making ethanol is a lot like brewing beer. You take a starchy carbohydrate, wet it down to make a mash, warm it up, add yeast, and wait. To fuel its reproduction, the yeast digests the carbohydrate; as waste products, it respires carbon dioxide and produces alcohol. (So basically beer is yeast pee, but let’s not get off track.)

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: animals, antibiotics, Ethanol, food, food policy, growth promoters, Science Blogs

Does Foodborne Illness Trigger Lifelong Health Problems?

March 30, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I have a new column up at Scientific American about a health issue that is really just starting to be discussed: Whether foodborne illness causes long-term health problems, and therefore whether it should be a higher medical and public-health priority than it is now.

Quick summary: The few studies that have followed victims of foodborne illness for years afterward show that later in life, they suffer higher-than-usual rates not only of digestive trouble, but of arthritis and kidney problems, as well as greater risk of heart attack and stroke.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, food, food policy, foodborne, SciAm, Science Blogs

More On Court Ordering FDA Hearings on Farm Antibiotics

March 23, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Since I posted last night on the judge’s order that the Food and Drug Administration examine the safety of farm antibiotics — via hearings that the Food and Drug Administration scheduled, but never held, back in 1977 — a lot has happened. Here’s a round-up.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, lead plaintiffs in the suit (with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Food Animal Concerns Trust, Public Citizen and Union of Concerned Scientists) has put up a press release/explainer, accompanied by a blog post written by lead attorney Avinash Kar.  (Correction: The lead attorney is Jen Sorenson.) Key quote from Kar:

The judge’s opinion makes it clear that FDA’s voluntary approach—letting the industry police itself—does not satisfy its legal obligations. FDA must schedule hearings to let drug manufacturers make their case, and if the drug manufacturers cannot prove that the use of antibiotics in animal feed is safe, FDA must withdraw approval for those drug uses.

Kar’s comment to me: “We think this is a great step forward for public health. For 35 years, FDA has basically sat on the sidelines, mostly letting the industry police itself. In that time we have seen a massive rise in the occurrence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This means we now will ensure that we preserve these lifesaving medicines for those who need them most.”

I asked the press office this morning at the Center for Veterinary Medicine, the FDA division named in the order, if the agency has a response yet. They said: “We are studying the opinion and considering appropriate next steps.”

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: animals, antibiotics, FDA, food, food policy, growth promoters, NRDC, Science Blogs

Breaking News: Judge Orders FDA to Examine Safety of Ag Drugs

March 22, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Here’s breaking news that I’ve learned about. The significance is going to unfold over the next 24 hours and more, and when it does, I will update. (Update: Overnight, a lot came out about this, so I’ve wrapped it all into a new post here.)

Here are the basics:

A district judge in New York has ruled in favor of a coalition that sued the Food and Drug Administration in order to compel the agency to follow through on its 35-year-old attempt to exert control over antibiotics in animal feed known as “growth promoters” — tiny doses of antibiotics delivered in feed and water that are believed to stimulate the evolution of antibiotic-resistant organisms.

Technically, Magistrate Judge Theodore H. Katz has granted the groups’ motion for summary judgement, and denied the FDA’s request that the suit be dismissed.

The decision, filed this afternoon, does not compel the FDA to ban growth-promoter (or “feed efficiency”) use of antibiotics. What it does appear to do, though, is require the FDA to follow through on a process that it began in 1977, when the agency was so concerned over the safety of using penicillin and tetracycline drugs in livestock feed that it called hearings to examine withdrawing its approval of using the drugs in animals.

Because of pressure, largely from certain Congressmen, those hearings were never held.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, FDA, food, food policy, growth promoters, Science Blogs

Gastroenteritis Deaths, Foodborne Outbreaks Increase (ICEID 3)

March 14, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Several related pieces of news today from the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases:

  • The number of people who are dying from illnesses that involve vomiting and diarrhea more than doubled between 1999 and 2007, and most of the increase was due to Clostridium difficile.
  • Disease outbreaks caused by imported foods are rising, and tainted foods are coming into the United States from a wider array of countries than before.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: C.diff, food, food policy, foodborne, Science Blogs

Staph In Pigs And Pig Farmers: The Latest Reports (ICEID 1)

March 12, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Photo: AndJohan/Flickr

I’m spending the first part of this week at the International Conference for Emerging Infectious Diseases, a biennial scary-disease nerdgasm that is sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Society for Microbiology and other worthy organizations, and in this iteration has drawn about 1,600 participants from more than 50 countries. (You can see the program here. I had planned to live-blog it, but the hotel was just renovated and apparently they built a Faraday cage into it, since connectivity is a painful trickle.)

On Monday’s agenda, among other intriguing talks: Two updates on MRSA, methicillin-resistant S. aureus, among farmers in two states.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: Connecticut, food, food policy, Iowa, MRSA, pigs, Science Blogs, ST398

High Levels of Resistant Bacteria on Meat (Again)

March 3, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

A new report is out from the federal collaboration that monitors antibiotic resistance in animals, retail meat and people, and the news is not good.

The full title is the 2010 Retail Meat Report from the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System. This report is issued by the Food and Drug Administration; the humans one comes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the animals one from the US Department of Agriculture. It reports the results of testing on 5,280 meat samples collected in 2010 in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania. (Those are sites of state labs participating in a federal surveillance network, FoodNet, plus one volunteer lab, Maryland.)

The report — which is broken down first by foodborne organism and then by meat type — notes a number of instances where either the percentage of bacteria that are antibiotic resistant, or the complexity of the resistance, is rising. Quoting from the report:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, antibiotics, CDC, FDA, food, food policy, NARMS, Resistance, Science Blogs, USDA

Also Receiving Antibiotics on Factory Farms: Shrimp

February 24, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

Tom Philpott of Mother Jones had a great post earlier this week looking at the vast environmental damage caused by shrimp farming in South and Southeast Asia. He takes off from a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science by J. Boone Kauffman of Oregon State University, which examined the destruction of coastal mangrove forests that allows shrimp farms to be established and found that shrimp’s carbon footprint is 10 times higher than that of beef cattle. Tom says:

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, antibiotics, China, FDA, food, food policy, Science Blogs, shrimp, Vietnam

'Pig MRSA' Came From Humans, Evolved Via Farm Drugs

February 23, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

In the summer of 2004, a 6-month-old girl who lived in the southeastern part of the Netherlands — prime, intensive hog-farming country — went in for surgery for a birth defect of her heart. As is routine in the Netherlands, which has excellent hospital infection control, she was checked before surgery for MRSA, the drug-resistant bacterium that can live on the skin without causing infections and can be unwittingly transmitted from one patient to another. The girl was carrying MRSA, which was a surprise — but the bigger surprise was that her MRSA strain did not render any results on the standard identification test, PFGE.

Looking for a source for the mysterious strain, the hospital epidemiologists where the girl was being treated asked to check her family: father, mother, school-age sibling. They were carrying it. They asked to check the family’s social circle; some of them were carrying it too. Then, flailing about for an answer — the Netherlands has such low rates of MRSA that these persistent findings were really rather odd — the epidemiologists asked what the family and their friends all did for a living, and received the answer that they were all pig farmers. So they checked the pigs, and the pigs were carrying the MRSA strain as well. And if a new MRSA strain in humans was odd, then a MRSA strain in pigs was very odd — because swine have their own varieties of staph, and are not supposed to get S. aureus, the usually human strain that accounts for the “SA” in MRSA.

That summer of detective work (which is told in full in my book Superbug) provided the first sighting of what would come to be called MRSA ST398, or in Europe CC398: a strain which was not quite like hospital MRSA, and not quite like community MRSA, and which carried a distinctive signature of resistance to tetracycline, a drug that is not much used for human MRSA but is routinely used in confinement-style farming. From its first identification, ST398 spread rapidly through Europe, and then into Canada, and then to the United States, being found first in pigs and pig-farm workers, and then in retail meat, and then in people with no connection to farming at all.

The only mystery was where it had come from.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, animals, food, food policy, MRSA, Resistance, Science Blogs, ST398

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