Food roundup

  • Warnings dismissed at time: FDA rules implementing FSMA (Food Safety Modernization Act) of 2011 imperil practices common to organic, small growers, “such as using house-made fertilizers and irrigating from creeks” [Los Angeles Times] Oh, how D.C.’s “public-interest” establishment and its co-thinkers in the press jeered when we and others tried to raise such concerns before the bill passed!
  • Related: pursuit of locally grown/artisanal meat options collides with USDA regs that put squeeze on small slaughterhouses, overbroad recalls also a problem [Baylen Linnekin, earlier here, here, and here]
  • “America’s Obesity Problem: Legal Mechanisms for Prevention,” Duke Law School conference I spoke at (but did not write a paper for) last year, now online [Duke Forum for Law and Social Change].
  • Related: “Wellness programs addressing obesity could lead to litigation, lawyers say” [ABA Journal]
  • Looser regulation of microbrewing has already proved boon to Maryland, lawmakers now consider extending it further [Beth Rodgers, Frederick News-Post]
  • “Bill introduced to undo California’s ‘glove law’ for food preparers” [KPCC; earlier]
  • Sorry, I’ll stay home and thumb through old cookbooks instead: recent American Studies Association Food Studies Caucus program included “Food, Debt, and the Anti-Capitalist Imagination,” “Archives of Domesticity and Dissent: Cookbooks, Cooking Culture, and the Limits of Culinary Exchange,” and “Pedagogies of Food and Eating: Teaching Debt, Dissent, and Identity through Food” [Mary Grabar, Pope Center on “food studies” fad]

One Comment

  • ‘Wellness programs addressing obesity could lead to litigation, lawyers say’ ABA Jr.:

    “The Wall Street Journal’s Risk & Compliance Journal spoke with several lawyers who saw an increased liability risk.
    ***
    [Jeff] Weintraub [of Fisher & Phillips] also told thethat wellness programs dealing with obesity could be a litigation risk. “If a wellness program puts an employer in the position of inquiring about obesity and if the obesity is deemed to be a covered disability then I see the possibility that corporate wellness programs themselves could lead to litigation,” he said.
    ***
    [Claudia Center, director of the disability rights program at the Legal Aid Society-Employment Law Center in San Francisco] also saw the possibility of disparate-impact litigation over employment practices that target obesity, based on differing obesity rates among racial or ethnic groups.”

    It’s statements like these that give me confidence that T-shirt sloganeers will never be unemployed:

    “My fat is your fault”
    “Supersize that – I’m off to see my lawyer”
    “Judge Not – unless you can get a big settlement”