"consumer reports" news and stories

Over the past 70 years, the U.S. has seen drastic changes in food operation, including the introduction of industrial agriculture and mass foodborne illnesses. And yet standards set by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have barely changed, save for the USDA's and FDA's joint egg inspection plan introduced on July 9th.

The outdated rules have left the FDA with insufficient funds and without authority to order recalls -- that call, believe it or not, is left to the individual companies, which often wait too long, resulting in a slew of consumer illness reports. A new bill -- the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (S. 510) -- would finally update standards and give the FDA the power it now needs to better moderate our current system, including conducting more frequent inspections of high-risk facilities. The bill was passed by the House of Representatives over a year ago, on July 30, 2009, and has been sitting with the Senate ever since.

It's been a long time since store brands were relegated to the bottom shelf of the grocery store, saddled with those generic black-and-white labels ("Ketchup," "Pickles") that made them look like provisions in a Soviet commissary.

Still, despite fancier labels, a lot of shoppers are leery of anything that doesn't sport a name brand. "That's just plain silly," your penny-pinching grandmother might have said. "You're just paying for the name."

According to the findings of a recent study by Consumer Reports, it turns out that she might have been right.

The consumer watchdog that's better known for road testing cars and troubleshooting cell phones has turned its attention to the grocery store. The group had tasters sample 21 different food products and compare national brands with their store-brand equivalents.

The results?

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Consumer Reports found samples of packaged salad greens to contain "bacteria that are common indicators of poor sanitation and fecal contamination, in some cases at rather high levels" in a study published in its March 2010 issue, the Huffington Post reported.

The magazine had an outside lab test 208 containers of 16 brands of salad greens, packaged in both clamshells and plastic bags, and purchased in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. The samples were tested for several types of bacteria including coliforms and Enterococcus, which can indicate inadequate sanitation and disease.

Consumer Reports found 39 percent of the samples exceeded the level of total coliform bacteria recommended by food consultants. Twenty-three percent of the samples exceeded recommended levels for Enterococcus.

None were found to contain the sometimes deadly bacteria E.coli O157:H7, Listeria monocytogenes or salmonella, the Huffington Post reported.

Great tasting ground coffee doesn't have to cost a bushel, according to a new taste test by Consumer Reports.

Eight O'Clock Coffee 100 percent Colombian bested Folgers and Starbucks to take the top spot in the magazine's coffee taste test of 19 ground coffees. The results can be found in the March issue of Consumer Reports.

"At the very top was Eight O'Clock -- Eight O'Clock Coffee -- your grandmother's A&P brand," Bob Markovich, the magazine's home and yard editor, tells Slashfood. "And it was also the least expensive, and by that I mean that it was like half the price of the other two that scored at the top."

We try to keep on top of the latest food recalls around these parts, but occasionally we miss one or two. However, Consumer Union, the company that publishes Consumer Reports, has made it a whole lot easier to stay on top of current consumer recalls. They've launched a website called Not In My Cart that gathers recall notices from three federal agencies and posts them for all to see. This way we'll all be able to find out easily and quickly if we need to pull cans of soup off our shelves or toss those burgers that are in the freezer.

Via The Daily Green

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