Reading List for August 23-27

1. "Calorie Counts Are Coming to the Menu" from NPR

Earlier this year the FDA tackled the problem of misleading serving sizes on packaged foods: "[O]fficial serving sizes for many packaged foods are just too small. And that means the calorie counts that go with them are often misleading," wrote The New York Times in February. Now the FDA has released draft guidelines that would require chain restaurants and vending machines to display calorie counts in the same font size as the item name or price, whichever is larger.

2. "A School Fight over Chocolate Milk" from the NYTimes

" 'Saying we need to add sugar and flavoring to milk to get kids to drink it is like saying we need to feed kids apple pie if they don’t like apples,' said Ann Cooper, who runs the Boulder, Colo., school food program and a national Web site, chefann.com, aimed at reforming school lunch. She’s not opposed to chocolate milk, but she is opposed to teaching children it is part of a healthy daily diet."

I drank a lot of milk as a kid, both plain 2% and chocolate. As an adult, I drink mostly plain skim milk, but also soy milk and almond milk. The fact that my parents allowed me to drink chocolate milk as a kid got me in the habit of drinking milk (instead of tea or soda) with meals. I'm gonna fall on the "milk is milk" side of this debate.

3. "Math Lessons for Locavores" from the NYTimes

"Eating locally grown produce is a fine thing in many ways. But it is not an end in itself, nor is it a virtue in itself. The relative pittance of our energy budget that we spend on modern farming is one of the wisest energy investments we can make, when we honestly look at what it returns to our land, our economy, our environment and our well-being."

This author doesn't argue that local food is bad, but he does offer some interesting figures that made me reconsider the pros & cons of eating a variety of healthy food that's shipped and trucked from all over the world.

4. "Seeing a Time (Soon) When We'll All Be Dieting" from the NYTimes

Columnist Mark Bittman reviews The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It by Julian Cribb.

"Mr. Cribb is reporting on the fate of a planet whose resources have, in the last 200 years, been carelessly, even ruthlessly exploited for the benefit of the minority. Now that the majority is beginning to demand - or at least crave - the same kind of existence, it’s clear that, population boom or not, there simply isn’t enough of the Euro-American way of life to go around. And while there is a sky-is-falling tone to his relatively brief (just over 200 pages) thesis ... the book does offer sensible ways to help alleviate the 'global feeding frenzy.' "

5. "Egg recall points up need for Senate action on food safety" from the Washington Post

If there's a silver lining in the massive recall, it is that this latest outbreak of food-borne illness (remember peanuts, peppers, tomatoes, spinach, etc.) appears to have sparked action in the Senate, where comprehensive food-safety legislation has languished since July 2009. The bill would give the FDA the power to initiate a mandatory recall of contaminated products. And it would set up systems to trace food from farm to fork, thus making it easier and faster to pinpoint sources of contamination. A vote by the full Senate is expected as soon as it returns Sept. 13.

To find out if your eggs are part of the recall, check out the FDA website.