"Louisiana" news and stories

There are plenty of signs that chefs and seafood lovers continue to wrestle with whether to serve and eat fish from the Gulf of Mexico. Many consumers have safety concerns, despite repeated assurances by the federal government and seafood promotion officials. Stories of illegal fishing haven't helped to bolster confidence either. According to FoodSafetyNews.com, more than a dozen catches have been dumped at sea because fishing had been taking place in closed waters. The result? Once bustling restaurants like Snapper's Seafood in Biloxi, Miss. are now painfully short on customers.

But many say that Thursday's move by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association will go a long way to ease the safety concerns of eaters.

NOAA announced it was reopening over 26,000 square miles of the closed Gulf area to commercial and recreational fishing. Why? Because according to their data, no oil spill has been observed in the area since mid-June. Additionally, fish caught in the area and tested by experts have shown no signs of contamination. The reopened area is approximately 190 miles southeast of the Deepwater/BP well, with most fishing occurring 220 miles from the BP site.

The big question: Is Gulf seafood safe? There seems to be many layers to this answer.

On the one hand, 35% of the Gulf waters have been deemed tainted and therefore have been closed to fishing, as last reported by The New York Times. This means that 65% of the waters are still open, and this area, officials say, is where the testing for food safety is being done; no tainted seafood has entered the market. So unless your purveyor illegally dove into red-taped waters to catch your dinner, trust that it's already gone through extensive testing.

But to the bigger question -- is the Gulf safe? Can its waters bounce back, its market survive? There's no telling yet how the spill will affect the Gulf's entire ecosystem, especially as the spill has yet to be capped, and the oil has affected different species in different ways. Oysters, the Times notes, can't move through oil and have been crippled against the spill, as evidenced by the last shucking of P&J's Oyster House.

Legislators in Louisiana, where the statewide obesity rate stands at 29 percent, recently rejected two measures designed to improve residents' eating and drinking habits. But Rep. Patrick Williams, who authored one of the bills, is optimistic that the state will soon adopt a more proactive approach to citizen wellness.

"Everyone wants to be more healthy," Williams says. "And that's not just going to happen by itself."

Williams' original bill would have banned households enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program from using food stamps to purchase "unhealthy foods." Retailers including Wal-Mart loudly protested the plan, arguing they shouldn't have to police their customers' shopping carts. Williams says he anticipated the outcry.

On Sunday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) closed fishing in federal waters affected by the massive oil spill in the Gulf, which continues to drift towards Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

This area of the Gulf is prized for its shrimp, oyster and blue-crab fisheries, currently at their peak spawning period. While approximately 80 percent of the seafood consumed in the U.S. is imported -- meaning most seafood lover's dinner plates will not be directly impacted by the spill -- the area's fishery is significant. In 2008, more than 1 billion pounds of finfish and shellfish were harvested from the Gulf region. Experts predict that Louisiana's fishing industry alone could face a $2.5 billion loss.

"This is iconic American seafood," says Gavin Gibbons, spokesman for the National Fisheries Institute. "When you get past looking at the volume of seafood affected, you start looking at the lives impacted, and it's a tough row to hoe for those fishermen."

Jasmine rice is soft, fragrant and – much to the consternation of U.S. rice growers – impossible to grow in the nation's rice-producing regions.

"Maybe you could grow it in South Florida or South Texas," theorizes Steve Linscombe, senior rice breeder and director of Louisiana State University's rice research station. "But even if you could, the yield potential is very low."

Linscombe's spent the better part of two decades developing a homegrown alternative to the phenomenally popular Thai strain of jasmine rice. After a successful test run in 2009, farmers are planning to plant thousands of acres of Jazzman rice this season.