Today the nonprofit ocean protection group Oceana released the results of the largest seafood fraud survey to date. Findings indicated that consumers need to be concerned with more than just horse meat in hamburgers or meat glue in steaks and other products.

After two years of collecting more than 1,200 seafood samples from U.S. grocery stores and restaurants, researchers found that 33% of seafood products were mislabeled. Among the most common were snapper and tuna. With nearly one-third of samples mislabeled, these results clearly point to a lack of transparency and a need for improved mechanisms to trace, document, and inspect our food supply.

Mislabeled seafood poses a major health risk to vulnerable consumers. Seafood consumption is related to a variety of health problems such as allergies or digestion troubles. For mothers seeking to avoid fish containing higher levels of mercury – a substance known to harm the physical development of unborn babies and young children – these findings should be particularly poignant. Mislabeled seafood strips consumers of the right to make informed choices and avoid negative health consequences.

The battle for improved food transparency faced a devastating blow in California as election results early this morning showed the failure to pass the state ballot to label food with genetically engineered (GE) ingredients. With 53 percent voting against the hotly debated Proposition 37, and with 47 percent in favor, the initiative to make California the first state to have such labeling lost by a substantial margin.

The final vote is a big difference from polls reported back in September showing Prop 37 to be overwhelmingly popular, with 65 percent in favor. The drastic shift may have something to do with the millions of anti-Prop 37 advertising dollars spent on the “No on Prop. 37” campaign, with agribusiness giant (and top GE crop producer) Monsanto leading the way. Monsanto alone contributed over $8 million to stop the proposition. Joined by other entities (including Pepsico, Kraft Foods, Nestle, Coca-Cola, Kellogg, etc.) whose products would require labeling as a result of the law, the industry spent nearly $46 million to defeat the measure. Meanwhile, the "Yes on Prop. 37" campaign spent $8.9 million to support the pro-labeling initiative. 

Yikes! It's not looking good for Canadian beef right now, and a worrisome process unknown to many consumers may have made things worse.

Alberta-based XL Foods has recalled more than 1,500 beef products that are potentially contaminated with E. coli (890,000 pounds of which was sent to at least 40 U.S. states). The recall has been expanded 13 times as the company continues to add new products to the list, including ground beef and various whole and tenderized cuts.

We're less than two months away from the November election – when California's Proposition 37 could become the country's first law mandating the labeling of genetically engineered (GE). But the law won’t happen if Monsanto or other Big Ag companies have anything to say about it.

According to the California Right to Know campaign, Monsanto added another $2.89 million last Friday to defeat Proposition 37, making the GE crop producer's contributions against the labeling measure total $7.1 million.

High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) continues to be a hotly debated topic in how it is portrayed on food packaging and how forthright the industry is in its usage. According to the consumer group Citizens for Health, some food producers use HFCS with fructose concentrations above FDA-approved levels.

Mechanically tenderized steaks have been implicated in multiple E. coli outbreaks in the last decade, but a labeling requirement distinguishing them from intact steaks has yet to occur despite a rule being "in the works" at USDA since 2009.

The Government Accountability Project (GAP) and several of our coalition partners that care about food system transparency recently sent a letter to the USDA, calling on the agency to move forward on a proposed rule to label mechanically tenderized meat – a non-intact product that has been punctured with needles or blades to make the meat more tender. Alarmingly, the process allows for topical bacteria to penetrate the surface. Without sufficient labeling, consumers won't know to cook the meat at a higher temperature to kill all the potential pathogens.

Recently in Australia, a news outlet featured a dairy industry whistleblower exposing the controversial use of permeate – previously considered a waste product of milk processing, but now routinely being used as an additive (in milk) to save money.

From Today Tonight:

What the major companies are doing is that after milking, solids that are separated out, pasteurized, homogenized, reduced, and refined are then mixed back. The big secret that's kept from the public is they also mix in a lot of the cheap, filler additive consisting mainly of lactose. The left-overs of milk production called permeate.

...

Normal milk from the farmer is around 50 cents a litre, while permeate's about fifteen cents - 35 cents a litre cheaper. A large milk processing company produces around 1.64 million litres of milk a day, 600 million litres a year. Substituting twelve per cent of that milk with permeate, saves $69,000 a day, or $25 million a year.