FDA Allows Corporations to ‘Recondition’ Old Food

Susanne Posel, Contributor

In order to save money, some corporations will repackage older food into new packaging and resell it. One public school lunch supplier tried this with moldy apple sauce re-canned and was reprimanded to never try that “stunt” again.

The FDA was contacted by Snokist Growers of Yakima, Washington. This is just one group trying to ensure “reworking” food is not a normal practice.

“I was appalled that there were actually human beings that were OK with this,” said Kantha Shelke, a food scientist and spokeswoman for the Institute of Food Technologists. “This is a case of unsafe food. They are trying to salvage that to make a buck.”

Shockingly, Jay Cole, former federal inspector who works with the FDA Group, says, “Any food can be reconditioned.”

Perhaps pieces of pasta will be re-ground into semolina.

Mislabeled blueberry ice cream mixed with chocolate to avoid waste.

Insect parts discovered in cocoa beans.

Live bugs “left behind” in dried fruits packages.

Or salmonella bacteria found in hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP) which is a flavor enhancer used in gravy mix, snack foods, dairy products, spices and soups (just to name a few).

“This is how people do their business,” says Shelke.

The FDA allowed food producers like Basic Food Flavors, Inc (BFF) to recondition their recalled items in 2010 by heat-treating their products to remove salmonella. BFF then reprocessed the food and distributed them for sale to the public.

The FDA justifies this unsafe practice by stating that it reduces water and saves money. Yet this occurs at the expense of public safety and health.

If the processes approved by the FDA were redering food safe for consumption, there would be less of an issue.

The Snokist officials found that the process the FDA permitted as safe for the reconditioning of the applesauce rendered the food sterile and effectively worthless as a nutritional substance by a common toxin produced by the mold in the apple sauce.

The FDA stands by its thermal process even though it does not protect against mycotoxins in the food.

“Mold is not an easily reconditionable product,” says William Correll, the FDA’s acting director of compliance.

The FDA admits they expect a certain level of contaminants and toxins to enter food during the processing process because they claim a zero-tolerance policy would be too difficult to achieve.

The FDA relies on defect action levels to define how dangerous a contaminant is in the food and how much enforcement of their policies they should engage the manufacturer in.

Basically, if making the food safe is too difficult, the FDA does not bother enforcing their safety policies.

Here are a few examples of allowable contaminants:

• In 8 ounces of macaroni there could be 225 insect fragments or 4.5 rodent hairs
• In 3.5 oz of canned mushrooms 20 or more maggots is ok
• In canned cranberry sauce there could be an average of 15% mold

The FDA finds these levels acceptable because there would be too much stress on food producers to adhere to a more stringent policy for food safety.

Correll plainly says, “You can’t cook the poop out of [food].”

The FDA begun the Reportable Food Registry in 2009 to handle the overwhelming notifications to human health hazards their relaxed policies produced.

The problems were hard to decipher with domestic food processing corporations, but foreign import food corporations added a cog in the wheel. These corporations generally go to greater lengths to preserve the safety of their food; more so than the FDA.

As it stands, the FDA reconditions food that we purchase in grocery stores.

There is no way to know what foods are genuine and which have been reconditioned.

On top of the already shocking list we can add the ammonia pink slime in beef:

High Pay Beef Industry Job For Official Who Approved Ammonia Treated “Pink Slime”

The official who approved the use of an ammonia treated sludge, found in 70% of supermarket ground beef and 7 million pounds of beef headed for school cafeterias, went onto take a high paying industry job.

An ABC News report reveals that the Under Secretary of Agriculture, Joann Smith, who approved the use of ammonia treated sludge in ground beef products as a substitute to counter skyrocketing costs of beef later received a high paying job in the beef industry.

To add insult to injury, the latest reports also reveal that over 7 million pounds of the sludge is headed to school cafeterias nationwide following the voluntary discontinuance of the product by many companies in the nationwide.

And arsenic in chicken feed:

FDA finally admits chicken meat contains cancer-causing arsenic

The New 6 Piece Chicken McArsenic — With FDA Approved Arsenic In Your Chicken

For the last 60 years the FDA has played dumb claiming that they did not realize that Arsenic deliberately added to chicken feed posed a threat to human life, claiming instead they believe the arsenic in the feed is excreted from the chicken before being consumed by humans. The chicken feed in question is voluntarily being pulled off US shelves by Pfizer, one of the manufacturers of the feed, after research showed that a dangerous form arsenic stays inside the chicken and does indeed pose a threat to human life.

The arsenic in question is actually fed to the chickens based on claims that it provides benefits such as promoting growth which helps to maximize the profits of the corporations who sell the chicken to consumers.

But even as Pfizer voluntarily pulls their own product off the shelves, the FDA continues its campaign of denial. In fact the FDA has stopped short of banning the product or even putting into effect any type of regulation to stop future sale or use of the product or similar products.

Ironically, Pfizer, says they will need to contact regulators in other nations to decide if there is a health risk to humans in those countries before they decide whether it will pull the product off shelves in those nations.

NaturalNews writes:

After years of sweeping the issue under the rug and hoping no one would notice, the FDA has now finally admitted that chicken meat sold in the USA contains arsenic, a cancer-causing toxic chemical that’s fatal in high doses. But the real story is where this arsenic comes from: It’s added to the chicken feed on purpose!

Even worse, the FDA says its own research shows that the arsenic added to the chicken feed ends up in the chicken meat where it is consumed by humans. So for the last sixty years, American consumers who eat conventional chicken have been swallowing arsenic, a known cancer-causing chemical. (http://www.phillyburbs.com/news/loc…)

Until this new study, both the poultry industry and the FDA denied that arsenic fed to chickens ended up in their meat. The fairytale excuse story we’ve all been fed for sixty years is that “the arsenic is excreted in the chicken feces.” There’s no scientific basis for making such a claim… it’s just what the poultry industry wanted everybody to believe.

But now the evidence is so undeniable that the manufacturer of the chicken feed product known as Roxarsone has decided to pull the product off the shelves (http://www.grist.org/food-safety/20…). And what’s the name of this manufacturer that has been putting arsenic in the chicken feed for all these years? Pfizer, of course — the very same company that makes vaccines containing chemical adjuvants that are injected into children.

Technically, the company making the Roxarsone chicken feed is a subsidiary of Pfizer, called Alpharma LLC. Even though Alpharma now has agreed to pull this toxic feed chemical off the shelves in the United States, it says it won’t necessarily remove it from feed products in other countries unless it is forced by regulators to do so. As reported by AP:

“Scott Brown of Pfizer Animal Health’s Veterinary Medicine Research and Development division said the company also sells the ingredient in about a dozen other countries. He said Pfizer is reaching out to regulatory authorities in those countries and will decide whether to sell it on an individual basis.” (http://www.usatoday.com/money/indus…)

Arsenic? Eat more!

But even as its arsenic-containing product is pulled off the shelves, the FDA continues its campaign of denial, claiming arsenic in chickens is at such a low level that it’s still safe to eat. This is even as the FDA says arsenic is a carcinogen, meaning it increases the risk of cancer.

The National Chicken Council agrees with the FDA. In a statement issued in response to the news that Roxarsone would be pulled from feed store shelves, it stated, “Chicken is safe to eat” even while admitting arsenic was used in many flocks grown and sold as chicken meat in the United States.

What’s astonishing about all this is that the FDA tells consumers it’s safe to eat cancer-causing arsenic but it’s dangerous to drink elderberry juice! The FDA recently conducted an armed raid in an elderberry juice manufacturer, accusing it of the “crime” of selling “unapproved drugs.” (http://www.naturalnews.com/032631_e…) Which drugs would those be? The elderberry juice, explains the FDA. You see, the elderberry juice magically becomes a “drug” if you tell people how it can help support good health.

The FDA has also gone after dozens of other companies for selling natural herbal products or nutritional products that enhance and support health. Plus, it’s waging a war on raw milk which it says is dangerous. So now in America, we have a food and drug regulatory agency that says it’s okay to eat arsenic, but dangerous to drink elderberry juice or raw milk.

Eat more poison, in other words, but don’t consume any healing foods. That’s the FDA, killing off Americans one meal at a time while protecting the profits of the very companies that are poisoning us with their deadly ingredients.

Oh, by the way, here’s another sweet little disturbing fact you probably didn’t know about hamburgers and conventional beef: Chicken litter containing arsenic is fed to cows in factory beef operations. So the arsenic that’s pooped out by the chickens gets consumed and concentrated in the tissues of cows, which is then ground into hamburger to be consumed by the clueless masses who don’t even know they’re eating second-hand chicken sh*t. (http://www.naturalnews.com/027414_c…)

The Science Daily writes:

Arsenic In Chicken Feed May Pose Health Risks To Human

[…]

Roxarsone, the most common arsenic-based additive used in chicken feed, is used to promote growth, kill parasites and improve pigmentation of chicken meat. In its original form, roxarsone is relatively benign. But under certain anaerobic conditions, within live chickens and on farm land, the compound is converted into more toxic forms of inorganic arsenic. Arsenic has been linked to bladder, lung, skin, kidney and colon cancer, while low-level exposures can lead to partial paralysis and diabetes, the article notes.

Use of roxarsone has become a topic of increasing controversy. A growing number of food suppliers have stopped using the compound, including the nation’s largest poultry producer, Tyson Foods, according to the article. Still, about 70 percent of the 9 billion broiler chickens produced annually in the U.S. are fed a diet containing roxarsone, the article points out.

Complicating the issue is the fact that no one knows the exact amount of arsenic found in chicken meat or ingested by consumers who frequently eat chicken. “Neither the Food and Drug Administration nor the Department of Agriculture has actually measured the level of arsenic in the poultry meat that most people consume,” according to the article.

The National Chicken Council, a trade association that represents the U.S. chicken industry, claims there is “no reason to believe there are any human health hazards” associated with the use of roxarsone.

[…]

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WTF? The National Chicken Council, representing the Chick industry deliberately covering up the fact that arsenic in our food is a health hazard. Sickening. We trust these people on a daily basis to assure that the food we eat and feed to our children is safe. Of course our politicians and bureaucrats have been paid off to keep silent and in the meantime we have all being repeatedly dosed with arsenic for the last 60 years. Then doctors and scientists turn around and say they have no idea why a vast array of brain and mental diseases such as Alzheimer’s and autism has become so widespread.