Believe it or Not, People Eat More Than Once Per Year

Charles Lane proposes abolishing "the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps", and transferring the funds to other programs,

If the working poor’s current share of food stamps went instead to increase the earned-income tax credit and expand eligibility for it, Republicans and Democrats would have less to argue about. The tax credit is a wage supplement, delivered through the income tax system, widely considered one of the most successful federal programs at encouraging work and eliminating poverty. It has also enjoyed consistent bipartisan backing.

The problem with this, and I'm a bit surprised that it even needs to be said, is that an additional amount added to your tax refund (if you qualify), many months into the future, doesn't fill the refrigerator.

Lane asserts that he would effectively prevent people hit by an economic downturn from receiving food assistance, but fancies that by compelling "Congress [] to distribute the SNAP budget among other programs for the poor, for which many SNAP recipients also qualify", part of that money "would go to an expanded and more generous unemployment insurance program". Except that nothing in his proposed distribution to "other programs for the poor" compels that result, and unemployment insurance programs are state-based. Frankly, if the law abolishing food stamps gets down to the level of specifying how the money is to be "redistributed", mandating a certain level of federal funding for state unemployment insurance programs, mandating that states actually apply that money to increased befits sufficient to make up for the loss of food assistance, his cure sounds like a regulatory nightmare. And that's before we get to the fact that while SNAP is means tested, programs like unemployment insurance and Social Security retirement are not. When Lane asserts, "For example, a third of the seniors living on food stamps also get Supplemental Security Income (SSI)", which is a means tested program, the question arises, what about the other two thirds?

The fundamental objection to SNAP is not that it doesn't help the categories of people, "low-income people who are either working, jobless through no fault of their own, elderly or disabled", whom Lane sees as the "deserving poor" - although of itself, that assertion makes it appear that part of Lane's goal in this proposal is to reduce benefits to people he sees as "jobless through [some] fault of their own" - it's the notion that "they" are taking from "us". That can be a nebulous population of "undeserving poor", the apparent actual target's of Lane's proposal, but let's not understate the degree to which the opposition is driven by demagoguery involving confabulated "Cadillac-driving welfare queens" and "Young bucks buying T-bone steaks". You can easily find opponents of any number of means-tested government programs who object that other people don't deserve the same benefits, with no thought given to the fact that most critics of the same programs would place them squarely in the "undeserving" category.

If Lane wants to propose that aid to the poor be simplified, and transitioned into more of a cash-based system, I can get on board with that. We certainly have the technology to distribute cash aid efficiently, and could consolidate what are presently monthly payments of cash through a variety of social welfare programs into weekly or even daily transfers - no more waiting until the next month rolls around to buy the groceries, you'll have money in the morning. We could add to that a "tough lesssons" provision - that the government can vendor rent and utility payments on behalf of somebody who receives public assistance but if they choose instead to take the cash and then fail to pay their bills they're "on their own". Of course, as a society we're generally too paternalistic to do the former, which is why we have programs like SNAP in the first place - so people can't spend money on the "wrong things" - and are generally not willing to do the latter because we don't like the specter of people on public assistance, and even less households full of children, living without heat or water, or evicted for nonpayment of rent. Frankly, most recipients of public assistance can handle the responsibility, and while we do have to be cautious about the fallout on families when, say, dad spends the household budget on crack, we don't do much to inculcate responsibility in the rest of the recipients when we insulate the adults in a household from the consequences of their bad financial choices.

Lane seems to be proposing an odd, circuitous path to take money from a population he sees as the undeserving poor, and transferring that money to the more deserving poor. The biggest problem with his proposal is that both groups need to eat, and starving one group to give the other a larger annual tax credit won't help either of them.

The Wrong Two Words to Keep Sick Food Service Workers at Home

I have sympathy for the argument presented in the Post, that food service workers should receive sick time:

Woong Chang was working as a bartender in an upscale Washington restaurant in 2009 when he started feeling symptoms of what turned out to be H1N1, or swine flu. Despite having a fever, a swollen throat and congestion that made it hard to breathe, he went to work. “Looking back on it now, I most definitely should not have gone into work, but I literally could not afford to miss a day,” he explains....

One way to limit the transmission of viruses is to keep sick people at home and out of their workplaces. Individuals with paid sick leave are more likely to stay home to recuperate, sparing their co-workers and the public from exposure to their illnesses....

Why don’t servers and bartenders just stay home when they’re sick? With the national median earnings for wait staff at less than $9 an hour, many can’t afford to.

I think it's safe to say that nobody eating at a restaurant wants to be served by a sick employee. And granting sick time to low-wage food service workers may seem like an easy way to avoid that from happening. But alas, it's not that simple.

First, it is routine in many places of work to treat a sick day as a personal day or paid holiday. There is no reason to believe that food service workers are going to behave differently than workers in other fields of employment. Employers can place a check on sick days - requiring, for example, a doctor's note - but the cost of seeing a doctor can easily exceed the wages that would be earned during the missed day of work. Prohibit doctor's notes and you guarantee that what you're really providing to most employees are paid vacation days, which can be taken without notice or concern for the employer's schedule.

Second, if employees treat the sick days as vacation days, you're back in the same situation you were in to begin with - they won't have any sic time remaining when they actually get sick. They're back to choosing between giving up a day's wages or working while ill. Many will continue to work while ill.

Third, assuming he saves his sick days for actual illness, somebody like Mr. Chang will have to consider, "Should I take my sick time now, or later"? Mr. Chang might call in sick, miss a day or two, and... then what? He will have to consider, up-front, whether he would be better off working while feeling a little bit sick or risk missing shifts after his sick time is exhausted if his condition worsens or if he gets more seriously ill on a future date before he accrues additional sick time.

But wait a second. Have you ever worked with somebody who is coming down with the flu? Did they look healthy to you? Did they sound healthy? Were they working with their traditional level of energy and enthusiasm? I doubt it. And that's where the following two words come into play: "Go home."

The fact that nobody told Mr. Chang to go home suggests to me that his co-workers and supervisor preferred to have a sick employee working that night than to scramble to cover his shift or work short-handed.

In a 2009-10 D.C. Restaurant Opportunities Center survey of restaurant workers, 79 percent said they lacked paid sick days and 59 percent reported preparing, cooking or serving food while sick. That’s a lot of servers potentially sneezing into your salad.

Do you believe that no co-worker or supervisor noticed that any of those workers were sick? Yes, it can seem a bit unfair to send somebody home when they really need their $9/hour, particularly if they need the money and don't have or have exhausted their sick time, but that is true in any work setting and for pretty much everybody else on the planet it beats the alternative.

Ever Since Charleton Heston Gave Soylent Green a Bad Name....

It was healthy, nutritious, and people seemed to like it, but then Heston got all bent out of shape about it....

In the New York Times, Philip Boffey asks what would happen if "pink slime" meat were called something other than "pink slime". You know, like the industry's preferred "lean finely textured beef", but certainly not an objectively fair name such as "ammonia-washed meat scraps". He argues,

At first consideration, lean finely textured beef is admittedly not all that appetizing. It is derived from the fatty scraps that remain after steaks and roasts are carved out of a beef carcass. The fat is spun off and any pathogens in the remnant are killed off with that small amount of ammonia. But the truth is this product does not differ greatly from the rest of ground beef, which is also mostly scraps and remnants.

As for how it tastes, we conducted a test at the Times cafeteria and in my home kitchen of ground beef patties, some in which pink slime made up 15 percent and others without it. Four of our testers, including me, preferred the burgers with pink slime. I found it more tender. Three others preferred the burgers without. No one found any of the burgers slimy.

The first part of the argument is not unreasonable, but it's fair to ask how contaminated, fatty, and meat-free a scrap should be before he would argue that it should no longer be considered appropriate for having the fat "spun off", being rinsed in ammonia, and being mixed into other food of less ignoble origins. But for the fact that repurposing that near-waste material for people is more profitable than other uses, it would likely be used in animal feed or pet food. And when you look at the origins and processing of "pink slime" meat, the answer of those who advocate its (preferably secret) inclusion in human food products would presumably be "never" - as long as the ammonia rinse were sufficient to kill the pathogens, they are fine with its inclusion in products intended for human consumption.

The question of how it tastes is peripheral to the reason people object to its inclusion in their food. As some have pointed out, there are products that are part of foods we often eat that are every bit as disgusting, and in some cases much more disgusting, than ammonia-rinsed, finely ground beef scraps. Mechanically separated chicken comes to mind - and has a taste and texture that is harder to hide. The author's implication that at a 15% mix, most people won't notice the inclusion of "lean finely textured beef" in their burgers, and might even prefer it, is fair, but that's not really why people object. When people learn that offal-tainted cutting room scraps are being ammonia-washed and put back into their food, the reaction of disgust comes from that part of the brain that tries to keep us safe and healthy. "But some amount of dung makes its way into all ground beef, and the ammonia wash makes this safer," isn't the sort of argument that is apt to overcome the natural revulsion. A more likely reaction is, "How about we try to clean up the production so that don't need to have this discussion about comparative levels of dung contamination in our food supply," or perhaps just, "Ew."

Frankly, in terms of the preservation of the species, I think that the natural reaction people have to "pink slime beef" is a more healthy one than "As long as the ammonia wash kills off the E. coli it's fine by me."

Sugar, Food and the Nanny State

That seems to be the gist of this argument in support of regulating sugar:

When Ronda Storms, a Republican state senator in Florida, is accused of nanny-state-ism for her efforts on behalf of a sane diet, it’s worth noting. When she introduced a bill to prevent people in Florida from spending food stamps on unhealthy items like candy, chips and soda, she broke ranks: few of her party have taken on Big Food....

To some, dictating what recipients of benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program can eat seems unfair. But when the program began in 1939 it aimed both to feed the unemployed and to aid farm recovery. Participants received $1.50 in stamps for every cash dollar spent, 50 cents of which was designated for purchase of agricultural surplus. That’s already a directive on spending, but perhaps more important is that nearly three-quarters of a century ago almost the only thing you could buy — with or without regulation — was real food. Since then Big Food has moved our diet in the wrong direction, and now we have a surplus of empty calories.

The argument for limiting the use of food stamps to actual food is consistent with established policy. They’re already disallowed for tobacco, alcohol,vitamins, pet foods, household supplies and (with some exceptions) food meant to be eaten on premises. Payments have been based on the cost of a “nutritionally adequate diet.”

First, most products include sugar. How do you create a meaningful regulation? Sugar is okay as long as the food isn't "too sweet" by some arbitrary measure? Raisins are okay, but not chocolate-covered raisins - even if the chocolate is less sweet than the raisins? No "craisins" or other dried fruits that have sugar added? What about sugar substitutes, some of which may be no more healthy than sugar and some of which may pose other health consequences? Also, if we're trying to ban "unhealthy foods", aren't we opening the door to a non-fallacious slippery slope argument: what about foods that are too fatty? What about foods that contain tropical oils? Salt? Nitrates?

The author cites a study that is particularly critical of fructose:

The authors specifically target “any sweetener containing the molecule fructose (which makes sugar sweet) that is added to food in processing” as the key problem in our current diet, and correlate the rise in consumption of sugar with a rise in disease, listing the many ways in which sugar’s effects on the body are similar to those of alcohol.

The authors also distinguish naturally occurring fructose from the addition of processed fructose to food products - a distinction that appears t be supported by science but again complicates the issue of regulation. You can't buy product X because it's sweetened with high fructose corn syrup, but you can buy product Y because it's sweetened with white grape juice?

Also, isn't it a bit simplistic to say that fructose "makes sugar sweet" when we also sweeten with glucose (high fructose corn syrup is about 55% fructose and about 42% glucose) or sucrose (in which the fructose is bound to glucose at a molecular level, rather than being free)? If the problem is an excess of fructose, and fructose is markedly worse for the health than other sugars, why not work on reducing the food industry's reliance on high fructose corn syrup instead of targeting sugars that are, well, less unhealthy?

Fundamentally, though, I think the idea of trying to regulate poor people in this fashion is ill-considered. It's fairly described as nanny-statism becuase tht's exactly what it is. If I had my druthers, although an initial lump sum would be included on a newly issued card, we would charge EBT cards by an equal increment each day (so nobody could completely run out of food money for more than a day) but otherwise let individual recipients decide how to use that money. I don't see much point to creating a context in which some recipients trade their EBT card for a cash payment of half of its value, or buy groceries that they intend to trade for what they really want. Let people make mistakes, let people learn from those mistakes. (I would extend this to other aid for which the recipient doesn't want bills to be vendored - if you want a cash allotment to pay your heating bill and you choose to spend it on something else, you should face the consequences of that choice and can subsequently either manage the money properly, have the bill vendored, or again deal with the consequences of a possible shutoff when you don't pay your bill).

I find it interesting that the author makes no argument that sugar poses a special or unique risk to the poor, or that the poor eat a disproportionate number of desserts or candy bars as compared to other groups. Just that poor people don't need sweet foods and we should feel free to try to regulate the poor into eating healthier diets. We also overestimate the effects of the interference - money is fungible, after all, and if you provide two sources of cash aid, one with strings and one without, you don't stop somebody from purchasing cigarettes or alcohol even as you pat yourself on the back for not letting them buy it with their EBT money. There are better ways to approach this issue, and ways that should be far more effective than trying to impede the poor from buying sweetened foods. I know the poor are easy targets, easily vilified, easily treated as some form of the "undeserving other", but you would think that present times would teach us that we "responsible folk" aren't necessarily as far removed from being on food assistance as we would like to believe.

Perhaps the Most Offensive Thing Named After Rick Santorum

Even though this time it's safe for work....

Creamed chicken? Is an allegory intended?

How to Get People to Eat Better

The modern poster boy for healthier eating, Jamie Oliver, seems to be under attack from all sides. First, he's saying you can cook healthy, good tasting meals in thirty minutes? "Real cooks know better." Second, he's lecturing Americans on their diet when there are still fat people in England? The nerve!

The response to the first argument seems obvious. Sure, if you have the time, money, knowledge and resources you can create a better meal experience with a few hours of work than you're likely to get from one of Jamie's recipes. But let's be honest here: Oliver's not trying to compete with you or with a quality restaurant experience. He's trying to compete with packaged foods like Hamburger Helper and Rice-a-Roni, and take-out from places like McDonalds and KFC. By all means, take the whole day to prepare a healthy feast for your family, but let's not pretend that the majority of people have that luxury or that, even if they had the time, kitchen gadgets, ingredients and knowledge, that it would be their priority.

The second criticism represents a failure of logic, and I'll admit that I picked the low-hanging fruit from the linked article. Oliver is trying to guide British people toward healthier food choices, but even if he weren't his comments as directed toward the U.S. market wouldn't be any less valid. Besides, he's getting very rich in the process - so let's embrace his criticism as part of the American way. ;-)

The more serious argument raised in the "who's a Brit to tell us how to eat" article is that the primary cause for the change in our waistlines comes not from diet but from inactivity. I think it's fair to say that's part of the cause - even as we eliminate recess from elementary school days and open charter schools that have no athletic or exercise facilities, we complain that kids don't spend enough time playing outside. Heck - it wasn't so long ago that you had to walk your type document over to the copier, and distribute copies into co-workers' mail boxes - not a lot of exercise, but at least you had to get up and move a little bit. In most workplaces you can achieve those same tasks more quickly and efficiently without leaving your desk chair. Yes, society is a lot more sedentary than was historically possible.

But it oversimplifies things to argue that "If you're working twelve-hour shifts at the car plant, you can eat whatever you want." It's not just blue collar workers who are heavier than their historic peers. Nor were all blue collar workers historically recognized for their slim waistlines. The reality is, we've moved as a society toward packaged and prepared foods. Thanks to corn subsidies we have food that's full of corn, corn syrup, and fatty beef - and it's cheap. Restaurant portions, including fast food portions, have grown substantially in size over the years. Yes, when McDonalds introduced its fries in 1955 they weighed 68 grams, the same as a modern "small fries" - but the "small" size is what we now feed to our kids. An 1955 soda was 207 mL. A child's soda is now 354 mL. Last time I went to a movie, the large popcorn bucket was approximately the size of a battleship. (I exaggerate only slightly.) It's pretty easy to get a large soda that's a liter or more in volume - five or more times the amount offered in 1955.

There's also profit in upselling. How much money do you suppose McDonalds has taken in over the decades with its simple question, "Would you like fries with that?" How many times have you been asked a similar question - "Would you like a large? It's only 25 cents more." Meanwhile, behind the scenes, "test kitchens" that are really sophisticated laboratories attempt to determine what flavors, odors and colors are most likely to make you crave more, buy more, eat more, and your packaged, prepared and fast food purchases are engineered accordingly. We eat more than we used to eat, and it's in no small part by design. (Another example of capitalism at work.)

You want to lose weight? Eat less, exercise more. Or 'simply' eat less. But our food culture isn't going to make it easy for you.

Is That a Torte...

Or maybe a bombe? The sort of dessert that, one might say, takes the cake.

Soylent Green... In Reverse?

I'm skeptical of the time frame, particularly if we're talking about getting something with realistic taste and texture, but artificial ("in vitro") meat is on the horizon:

In-Vitro Meat - aka tank steak, sci fi sausage, petri pork, beaker bacon, Frankenburger, vat-grown veal, laboratory lamb, synthetic shmeat, trans-ham, factory filet, test tube tuna, cultured chicken, or any other moniker that can seduce the shopper's stomach - will appear in 3-10 years as a cheaper, healthier, "greener" protein that's easily manufactured in a metropolis.

So it's green, but not so soylent:

Humans are animals, so every hipster will try Cannibalism. Perhaps we'll just eat people we don't like, as author Iain M. Banks predicted in his short story, "The State of the Art" with diners feasting on "Stewed Idi Amin." But I imagine passionate lovers literally eating each other, growing sausages from their co-mingled tissues overnight in tabletop appliances similar to bread-making machines. And of course, masturbatory gourmands will simply gobble their own meat.

An image that would probably still have Charlton Heston shouting an alarm, although "People are made out of it" doesn't have quite the same ring.

Artisanal Kraft Foods Products?

A chocolate connoisseur lays out his hope that, should Kraft foods take over Cadbury, they won't lay waste to an artisanal chocolate maker, in the manner that Hershey's buyout has affected Scharffen Berger:

But luckily, long before this year’s announcement by Hershey that it was closing the Berkeley plant and consolidating Scharffen Berger production in Illinois, I discovered an alternative [to the discontinued 82 percent bar]. Green & Black’s, an English brand, was readily available in New York, and if its 85 percent bar didn’t have quite the flavor bouquet that Scharffen Berger 82 packed back in its heyday, it came very close, and the mouth feel was arguably better.

Interestingly, Green & Black’s had also been started by small entrepreneurs and then acquired in 2005 by a giant firm. But its new parent, Cadbury, vowed to let it operate as a stand-alone unit. Judging from my research, which has been basically confined to unwrapping the foil of countless bars and plunging in, Cadbury has been true to its word.

Here's the deal. Quite some time ago Kraft purchased another British sweets manufacturer, Callard & Bowsers. Then they killed off Callard & Bowser's dessert nougat - too complicated to make, too small a market... not worth it, right? Ultimately they killed off the remaining traditional products, such as treacle and liquorice toffee... and now, no longer in Kraft's hands, all the brand is really known for is Altoids.

If the sale goes through, my suggestion to connoisseurs: Stock up on your favorites.

Er... We Do What?

Did you know, this is how you eat your food:

Adopting the American habit of using only a fork to eat your meal, however, represents a revolution in table manners that's both seismic and deeply unwelcome.

The single-fork manoeuvre requires the diner to cut up his food into handy bite-size portions, before transferring the fork to the right hand to begin the spearing and eating. What a ghastly, babyish way of behaving – as if Nanny used to cut up your meat and potatoes in the nursery, and you never grew out of it.

The only person in my household who eats in a manner akin to that is our four-year-old, and as the author indicates that's appropriate. I've been to a lot of restaurants and eaten in various other public settings and... what is this guy talking about?

I can understand, as can he, the British rebellion against their sometimes absurd table manners.

Few domestic metal objects carry more precarious symbolism for the British than cutlery. Employing the wrong edge of the spoon to drink your soup, holding your knife like a fountain pen, putting a knife in your mouth, shovelling peas onto your fork – these are gaffes that consign you to social perdition, as surely as drinking tea out of the saucer.

Even as a child, the British rule for the proper use of a fork seemed silly to me. Let me see... rather than doing something unseemly like "shoveling" peas into my mouth or spearing them on the fork, I am to mash them to the bottom of my fork then eat with the fork, tines down. And if they don't stick very well, I can use my mashed potatoes as glue.... How attractive?

Come to think of it, I can't remember the last time I was served peas while in England. Perhaps that's the solution? When proper table manners make eating a particular food item completely unattractive, don't serve it in public?

Debenhams' Civilised Dining Campaign is a welcome attempt to halt the Americanising of table manners, before we're required to abandon cutlery altogether and behave like the cowboys eating beans with their fingers, in the campfire scene in Blazing Saddles...

How about a Sensible Dining Campaign? You know, a happy compromise where you can at times eat with a fork, tines up, or where it's more important that you food neatly reach your mouth than that you filled your soup spoon "back to front" or that you're sipping from from the front of your spoon instead of the side?

Corn, Corn, Everywhere....

An analysis of fast food shows that corn is an enormous component of virtually all fast food products. No surprise there. For goodness sake, I'm eating a raw carrot right now but, with the amount of corn in our food supply, I wouldn't be surprise to find out it's somehow made out of corn.

The part that might surprise you, though:

By analyzing the biochemical makeup of the food, the researchers found that 100 percent and 93 percent of the cows responsible for the hamburgers and chicken sandwiches had lived on exclusively corn-based diets.

Let's hope that was intended to be "cows and chickens", because otherwise I really don't want to know how McNuggets are made....

Restaurant Innovation and the Health Code

It sounds like New York has very stringent requirements for restaurant hygiene, and, as one would expect, that can interfere with innovative cooking techniques and the quality of food produced. A chef comments,

While the inspector is mandated to have a single-minded focus on the Department of Health's taste-killing rules, a good chef is driven by many concerns — the health and well-being of her customer paramount among them — and it is in her hands that I would rather entrust my eating experiences.

While I agree with the chef that "serious chefs are compulsively clean by nature" and Not one of us would serve a customer something that we ourselves would not relish to eat, and also with his observation that sanitarians would regulate a range of delicacies and specialty foods out of existence, the health code is not just about what happens inside the restaurant. No matter how carefully food is selected, there is a chance that it will have been contaminated prior to its introduction to the restaurant kitchen.

The temperature requirements imposed across this nation ensure that most bacteria are killed in the cooking process, and that hot food is maintained at a high enough temperature that it does not become a breeding ground for bacteria. It also prevents certain innovative food preparation techniques, and limits the ability of restaurants to preserve hot food in a palatable form. Under a heat lamp or on a warming tray, even the best of food is quickly reduced to cafeteria fare.

That said, I think that professional chefs should be able to experiment with innovations such as sous vide - but they should first propose a set of health regulations to govern the innovation and have them passed by the health department. The consumer should also be made aware of any additional danger posed by the food preparation technique. Warnings about raw and undercooked food haven't scared customers away from the sushi bar. After all, the greatest danger is not so much that the best chefs in the best restaurants, working with the highest quality and most carefully selected ingredients, will put their patrons at undue risk. The greatest danger is that the same cooking techniques will be applied by chefs and restaurants which don't act with such care. There's a reason that health regulations are aimed at the lowest common denominator.

Mallaby on DDT

Today, Sebastian Mallably argues that the E.U. needs to give Uganda room to implement a DDT program.

DDT also helped to eliminate malaria in Europe and parts of Asia, and in 1970 the National Academy of Sciences estimated that the chemical had prevented 500 million deaths. And yet, despite that astounding number, DDT has all but disappeared from the malaria arsenal. Some 500 million people still get the disease annually, and at least 1 million die, but the World Health Organization refuses to recommend DDT spraying. The U.S. government's development programs don't purchase any of the chemical. In June President Bush made a great show of announcing a new five-year push against malaria; DDT appears to play no part in his plans.

But the worst culprit is the European Union. It not only refuses to fund DDT spraying: In the case of at least one country, it has also threatened to punish DDT use with import restrictions.

My initial reaction to this editorial was to be, well, skeptical. Four years ago when I was in Thailand not only was the country full of tourists from E.U. nations, many of the buildings in which I stayed were clearly marked with the last date they had been sprayed with DDT. What makes Uganda different, such that Thailand can spray residential structures but Uganda supposedly cannot - given that Mallaby purports this debate to be over "the limited spraying of houses" and not widespread agricultural spraying? It didn't take much Googling to find first that this is something of an old story, breaking in February, and second that the issue is not about DDT spraying of itself, but of residue on food exports:

Unless proper safety measures are put in place, the spraying of DDT to kill malaria-carrying mosquitos could severely hurt Ugandan exports of fruit, produce and other flora to EU countries, officials said.

"If Uganda is to use DDT for malaria control, it is advisable to do so under strictly controlled circumstances and in consultation with other countries in the region which may be affected," the EU said in statement released here.

It said that if Kampala began DDT spraying, it would be forced to set up a monitoring system to test for the presence of the pesticide in exports.

The chief of the EU mission in Uganda, Sigurd Illing, said there could be dire consequences for outgoing trade with Europe -- which accounts for more than 30 percent of Uganda's total exports -- if DDT was detected in such goods.

So the E.U. has warned Uganda not that it faces a ban on imports if it implements DDT, but that it should coordinate its spraying with neighboring countries, and that if its spraying raised DDT levels above certain limits its produce would not be permitted into E.U. markets. Now Mallaby may well believe that concerns about DDT in the food supply are overblown, but there's a world of difference between threatening a country with trade sanctions if it uses DDT and applying the same standards to that country's exports as presently apply to every other nation which chooses to use DDT. The U.S. has limits on DDT residue on food imports - what's the difference, other than the fact that we don't import appreciable quantities of Ugandan produce?

The vehemence of Mallaby's position would seem to suggest that DDT is a miracle cure for Malaria, and that no alternative is available. DDT is, to put it simply, a pesticide. There are many alternative pesticides available and, even accepting that many concerns about DDT are overblown, many of those present significantly lower environmental concerns than those acknowledged to result from widespread DDT use. But DDT is cheap - and as long as cost is an option it will remain the only viable pesticide in parts of the developing world. Mallaby does not claim that the E.U. doesn't subsidize spraying programs involving alternative insecticides, despite the relevance of that question to his overall claim. Personally, Idon't think he bothered to look into the issue in sufficient depth to either know that there are alternatives or what the E.U.'s policies are toward mosquito spraying programs that don't involve DDT.

As for Mallaby's notion that it is unfair for western "food-safety paranoia" to get in the way of the developing world's ability to export what the west deems to be contaminated food? I think if he pressed that issue he would find that food safety isn't just a "liberal" or "environmentalist" issue, but crosses the political spectrum. We regulate a lot of chemicals, and arguably many of the limits we impose are arbitrarily low - but it's either naive or dishonest (perhaps in Mallaby's case, a little of both) to confuse "erring on the side of safety" with "paranoia". (A "libertarian" solution might be to have DDT content labels on fruit, such that consumers can make their own decision - but Mallaby presumably would insist that consumers be kept in the dark on the basis that their concerns are "paranoid" and thus need not be respected.)

A Feast Fit For A King

Today, the London Guardian speaks somewhat critically of the fortune expended by the Queen to support her various households - £36 million, or $65,823,000.00. The article notes,

The £500,000 a year that the Queen spends on these occasions is, apparently, partly due to the gluttony of the guests - each of whom, on average, consumes 14 buns, bridge rolls and ice creams. A spokesman, demonstrating a grasp of arithmetic that is beyond question, pointed out that if the average is 14, some people ate even more. One of the ways of cutting the royal budget is, as Marie Antoinette failed to recognise, "let them eat less cake".

I would venture that the issue is not that the guests eat, on average, "14 buns, bridge rolls and ice creams. I would venture that the issue is that the Queen's caterers order that many "buns, bridge rolls and ice creams" per guest to ensure that no guest ever has to hear the words, "I'm sorry - we're out of buns. Will a bridge roll do instead?"

Whatever the case, I do hope that the Queen permits her staff to enjoy the leftovers, rather than having the surplusage go to waste.