Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

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Thankful For A Good Kid, And A Chance To Pay It Forward

November 22, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

On a day when we all think about food, I want to revisit, and update, my favorite food-related story of the year.

Constant readers may remember, from back in June, the story of 9-year-old Martha Payne of Scotland. Her blog “Never Seconds,” featuring photographs of her unhealthy school lunches, caused so much embarrassment in her school district that the county council tried to shut her down. The news of their mendacious unfairness rippled across the media and the Internet, and hundreds of thousands of people — including a number of celebrities, and thousands of Superbug readers — applied enough pressure to get the decision reversed.

Martha (whom I’ve never met) seems to be a smart, sensible kid, with caring, thoughtful parents; her mother is a primary-care doctor, and her father has a small farm. With rare maturity, they resisted enormous pressure to monetize her celebrity, and turned the attention into a benefit for someone else.

Actually, lots of someones. They asked readers and supporters to donate to a charity, Mary’s Meals, that feeds schoolchildren in some of the world’s poorest areas — including Malawi, where Scottish roots date back to the arrival of explorer David Livingstone in the 1860s. At this point, five months later, Martha and her family have raised £120,000 (almost $200,000), enough to build a kitchen and distribute school supplies to thousands of kids.

[Read more…]

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

Advice for the Annual Observance of Food-Poisoning, Umm, Thanksgiving Day

November 20, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

My grandparents — children of Irish and Scottish immigrants, for whom calories per penny was a much more important food value than fine cuisine — had a little mnemonic for Thanksgiving. It went like this:

Turkey, tetrazzini, ptomaine.

Perhaps that requires a little explanation.

The turkey part should be self-evident. Tetrazzini — a cream-sauce casserole based on spaghetti, one of those early 20th-century dishes invented to honor Italian opera stars — was what they did the second day with the turkey leftovers. Ptomaine (the “p” is silent) was what they worried lay in wait for them on the third. A late 19th-century term that has passed out of use, it derived from the notion that poisonous compounds lurked in rotting food.

For people who grew up before the antibiotic era — and who learned to cook when refrigerators were literal ice chests that kept things cool at best — “food poisoning” was a reasonable fear, and a risk they refused to take. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, no matter how delicious it appeared, whatever remained of the turkey went into the trash.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: CDC, FDA, food, food policy, foodborne, Science Blogs, Thanksgiving, Turkey, USDA

Human Health, Hog Production and Environmental Harm

October 28, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I’ve been offline not just for deadlines (as usual), but also because I was preparing for the annual conference of the National Association of Science Writers; I am a member and was a presenter on a couple of panels. The NASW meeting is twinned every year with a second meeting hosted by the nonprofit Council for the Advancement of Science Writing; NASW sessions are peer-to-peer journalism learning, whereas CASW ones feature academic researchers talking about their newest work.

This year’s meetings (collectively called SciWri12, or #SciWri12 if you want to find them on Twitter) were held in Raleigh, NC, and one of the most striking talks there was a report from epidemiologist Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill about his decade-long work investigating the local health effects of very large swine farms. (I’ve written about Wing’s work before.)

The newest news is a paper that he and his team published just as his talk commenced, in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, which finds an association between air pollution and odor in the near vicinity of swine farms, and hikes in blood pressure in local residents. When you put the pieces together — most hog c0nfinement operations are in poor, non-white areas; cardiovascular disease is endemic in African Americans;  North Carolina lies within the worst US area for cardiovascular disease, known as the “Stroke Belt” — you can see that anything that makes blood pressure chronically worse is bad news for public health.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, environment, food, food policy, North Carolina, Resistance, Science Blogs

Becoming Part of the Story (Maybe): The Peanut Butter Recall

October 5, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment


Earlier this week, something happened to me that happens to at least 48 million people in the United States every year: I got a foodborne illness. After a completely normal weekend and Monday, I woke in the middle of the night unusually thirsty; I glugged a big glass of water and stumbled back to bed. I got up Tuesday morning still thirsty, feeling kind of chilled and sluggish, and with no appetite. I skipped my usual fruit and yogurt, downed my usual two cups of coffee, skipped my usual hour-long walk and went to my desk.

About two hours later, my abdomen started to cramp.

About 30 minutes after that, I realized it would be a good idea if I went into the bathroom fairly soon.

I was there for a while. [Read more…]

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

Drug Resistance in Food: Chicken, Shrimp, Even Lettuce (ICAAC 4)

September 13, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

A final post from the ICAAC meeting, which concluded at one end of the Moscone Center in San Francisco Wednesday just as the Apple iPhone 5 launch was beginning at the building’s other end. (Definitely a crossing of geek streams.)

There’s far too much going on at a meeting like this to cover everything. So what emerges, as journalists move around the session rooms and exhibit floors, are stories regarding whatever caught a reporter’s eye based on his or her existing interests and news sense.

What caught my eye was a lot of research into foodborne illness, and particularly into the possibility of food being a reservoir for antibiotic resistance (which, constant readers will know, is something I’m interested in). [Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, cephalosporins, E. coli, food, food policy, ICAAC, salmonella, Science Blogs

E. Coli Behaving Badly: Hospitals, Travel, Food (ICAAC 2)

September 11, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

A quicker post today from the ICAAC meeting because there’s lots of news coming down this afternoon. At a conference like this, where the focus is on new behavior of pathogens and new drug compounds to contain them, there is a natural focus on emerging antibiotic resistance. Out of the first two days of (hundreds of) papers and posters, here are just a few unnerving reports.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, E. coli, food, food policy, ICAAC, Resistance, Science Blogs

News Round-Up: Sausage, Soil, Skeeters, Camping, China, Chimps And Other Hazards

August 31, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

This has been my week: Oh, wow: I should write about that. No, wait — that. Damn, new news; I’ll blog this paper instead. Except, hold on — this one is great too…

So to solve my indecision before the week ends, here you go: Most of this week’s most interesting news, in round-up form.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: agriculture, antibiotics, China, counterfeit, drugs, food, food policy, food safety, foodborne, meat, MRSA, Reuters, russia, Science Blogs, South Korea, TB

CDC: Pretty Much Everyone Is Fat

August 13, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released its latest mapping of obesity in the United States, based on data gathered by a CDC project known as BRFSS for the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. The BRFSS is a massive, continuous telephone survey of adults in U.S. states and territories, and every year it churns out high-quality information on a vast array of public health issues: smoking, heart disease, arthritis, asthma, immunization coverage, cancers, diet…. For anyone interested in health data, it’s a huge resource.

The current dive into the data for 2011 finds, unsurprisingly but depressingly, that a significant proportion of the U.S. population is obese. Not just overweight: obese. From the report:

[O]besity prevalence ranged from 20.7% in Colorado to 34.9% in Mississippi in 2011. No state had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%. 39 states had a prevalence of 25% or more; 12 of these states had a prevalence of 30% or more: Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia.

[Read more…]

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

Investigation: Drug Resistance, Chicken And 8 Million UTIs

July 11, 2012 By Maryn Leave a Comment

So, there’s this thing. A big project. An investigative project, actually. I’ve been working on it for months, and finally I can tell you about it, because it all just published, in various venues, today.

I’ve been working with a great new group, the Food and Environment Reporting Network — one of the grant-funded journalism organizations that have arisen in the wake of the collapse of mainstream journalism — on an important, under-reported topic. Which is: Over the past decade, a group of researchers in several countries have been uncovering links between the use of antibiotics in chicken production and the rising occurrence of resistance in one of the most common bacterial infections in the world.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: antibiotics, chicken, E. coli, food, food policy, Resistance, Science Blogs, The Atlantic

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

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