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Hunting for chemicals
in the food we eat
Little-known system monitors safety from store to test tube
Article by Associated Press Posted on CNN News
BELTON, Missouri (AP) -- Thirteen cooks bustle in a steam-filled church kitchen, filleting catfish, frying lamb chops, roasting eggplant and stirring up soup -- 250 pounds of food, all bought with federal tax dollars.
Despite the tantalizing smells, nobody gets to eat these meals: Food and Drug Administration scientists will pull them apart, hunting for pesticides and other contaminants lurking in the food supply, and counting the nutrients.
This is the backbone of the nation's patchwork food-safety system, a massive yet little-known program that monitors Americans' favorite menus -- from Oreo cookies to tuna casserole, Budweiser to home-brewed iced tea -- for a long list of chemicals, bad and good.
And it hinges largely on one group of retired women, many in their 70s and 80s, in this rural spot of middle America. The women, all volunteers, gather in the tiny basement kitchen of Belton United Methodist Church on 16 Friday mornings a year to whip up feasts that land in test tubes instead of on dinner plates.
"Bacon, hot bacon," comes the warning cry, and Margaret Kershaw sidesteps the sizzling tray passing by. She deftly cuts squishy beef livers and drops them into pans of oil, a pink gingham apron catching spatters.
"I get stuck with the liver," she says with a little grin, because the other women "don't like handling all that bloody stuff, you know." The previous week she made coleslaw, cutting up "I don't know how many pounds of cabbage."
"Sometimes you think to yourself, 'Well this is a waste of food,"' says the briskly practical Kershaw, a retired nurse who emigrated from Britain shortly after World War II. "'Why do they need all those pans of bacon' ... . But with all the tests they do, I guess they need that much."
The amateur chefs learned quickly not to add secret spices or ice the cakes too elegantly -- the scientists neither taste nor admire before dissecting. The cooks must precisely follow FDA's recipes, carefully mixing ingredients bought in different cities for a nationally representative sample of meals.
A picture of the American diet
"It's painting a picture of the American diet," explains FDA chemist Chris Sack, who heads the pesticide-hunting branch of the program, called the Total Diet Study.
The U.S. food-safety system consists of a hodgepodge of agencies that mostly monitor fields, factories and shipping ports to ensure food makers and sellers follow quality and safety rules. When the Environmental Protection Agency checks pesticide levels, for instance, it tests a watermelon's rind to see if the farmer sprayed the right kind and amount.
But people don't eat the rind, so that testing says little about what chemicals we actually absorb.
Enter the Total Diet Study. It measures traces of chemicals in the average diet -- levels some 20 times lower than other food-monitoring programs can detect -- both in packaged foods and after consumers wash produce, mix up ingredients and properly cook a meal.
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