Articles by Grist staff

The FDA sat on evidence of mercury-tainted high-fructose corn syrup

High-fructose corn syrup rose from obscurity to ubiquity starting in the late 1970s, borne up by an informal public-private partnership between grain-processing giant Archer Daniels Midland and the federal government. For me, HFCS is at best a highly processed, lavishly subsidized, calorie-heavy, nutritional vacuum.

I recently visited a public high school in Boone, N.C. The main hall literally hummed with machines peddling variations on Coca-Cola's formula for success: fizzy water with artificial flavor, artificial color, added caffeine, and a jolt of HFCS. Other machines displayed snack "foods" tarted up with HFCS. Why are we feeding our kids this crap, again?

Now comes news that makes even an HFCS cynic like me do a spit-take over my home-brewed morning coffee. Turns out that HFCS is commonly tainted with mercury -- a highly toxic substance -- according to a peer-reviewed report published by Environmental Health (abstract here; PDF of the must-read full text here.)

The Environmental Health study draws on samples of high-fructose corn syrup taken straight from the factory. But no one drinks the stuff straight. What about, say, cookies sweetened with HFCS? The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy plucked HFCS-containing products from supermarket shelves and tested them for mercury. The result?

Overall, we found detectable mercury in 17 of 55 samples, or around 31 percent

Traces of mercury turned up in name-brand products from makers including Quaker, Hunt's, Manwich, Hershey's, Smucker's, Kraft, Nutri-Grain, and Yoplait.

That a ubiquitous industrial-food ingredient such as HFCS should be tainted by mercury is bad enough. But it gets worse. The FDA has apparently known about this since 2005 -- and done nothing to publicize it or change it.

Tainted peanut butter and our troubled food system

An email from a PR person recently hit my inbox claiming that by high-school graduation, the average American has consumed 1,500 peanut butter sandwiches. I certainly did my bit to hold up the average; to this day I revere the unctuous paste of crushed, roasted peanuts.

Now, of course, comes news that a large producer of this protein-packed national treat (widely reviled, for reasons I can't fathom, by people in other nations) has been sending out product that's tainted by a particularly nasty strain of salmonella.

The New York Times' Kim Severson has a good piece on how the suspect peanut butter moved through the industrial food system, working its way into products as diverse as Clif Bars and Famous Amos Cookies.

News accounts don't typically mention that good old peanut butter has been tainted for a while now -- by sweeteners and dodgy industrial products. Look at Jif (not implicated in the salmonella outbreak), which is owned by Smuckers, which also owns Crisco, Pillsbury, and Hungry Jack. Merely roasting peanuts and pureeing them with a little salt isn't enough for the makers of Jif peanut butter. Its ingredients include: roasted peanuts and sugar, plus "2 PERCENT OR LESS OF: MOLASSES, PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE OIL (SOYBEAN), FULLY HYDROGENATED VEGETABLE OILS (RAPESEED AND SOYBEAN), MONO- AND DIGLYCERIDES AND SALT." Yuck.

Come to think of it, the PR person whose email got me thinking about this issue was actually peddling a smart solution: a high-powerd kitchen contraption that allows you to make your own peanut butter (among many other things). As our famously fragmented food-oversight system continues to fail and our industrial-food purveyors continue to pump unnecessary crap into our food, do-it-yourself solutions make more and more sense.

Grist grades the best/worst in climate change news

Today we kick off a regular feature in which Grist’s editorial team celebrates — and carps about! — notable climate-related steps taken by businesses, politicians, and individuals. Think we patted the wrong back or slapped down the wrong pol? Jump in the comments section to let us know. This week’s grades: A big green thumbs-up […]

GAO: EPA's chemical oversight system is broken

Few Obama officials have quite as much mess to clean up as EPA administrator Lisa Jackson. As if to warn her of the gravity of her task, the General Accounting Office has just added a key EPA oversight area to its list of government functions that are at "high risk" of "fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement" (short HTML version here, massive PDF here).

The GAO added three areas to its "high-risk list" this year, making a grand total of 30. The EPA's "Processes for Assessing and Controlling Toxic Chemicals" was one of them. (The other two new areas added to the GAO "high-risk list" are the FDA's process for approving medical products -- anyone up for a dose of Vioxx? -- and, um, the "the Outdated U.S. Financial Regulatory System," an attempt to shut the barn door on a banking meltdown that will only cost your kids a few trillion, if we're lucky.)

The section on the EPA and toxic chemicals will make bracing reading for the new administrator. Here are some highlights: