Food, in brief

Fewer people doing the checking

US inspections of food sites abroad are down nearly 35% since 2019 [1]; Michigan pulled restaurant inspectors off inspections to phone patients [2]; a Colombian meat product reached shops with no import mark and was found by a shopper [5]

Heat arriving before the calendar

Croatia's grape harvest came weeks early [21]; the sea at Christmas Island was at least 2C above average in August with the reef bleaching [28]

Money moving into meat grown without animals

China has written cultivated meat into its national food strategy [10]; barley-grown growth factors have cut one key cost 50 to 100 times [11]; Beyond Meat launched a range that stops imitating beef [12]

Gene work reaching the field

engineered corn and soybeans show steadier yields across four decades [14]; a screen in China found a rice gene resisting blast [15]; biologists are working to return the American chestnut [24]

One pressure seen across the day runs through Food too.

• Repairs and inspections that nobody carried outBuilding ↑ · seen in 2 beats→

1. 1US inspectors had not visited the Mexican lettuce farm since 2019. Checks on food from abroad are down 35%.
2. 2Salmonella found in broccoli sprouts
3. 3Colombian pork found in shops by a shopper
4. 4Listeria caught in Italian pork at the port
5. 5Meat inspection pushed toward the states

US inspectors reached the Mexican lettuce farm blamed for this summer's parasite outbreak in mid-August, about four weeks after the recall. [1]

Watch whether the rule that would put a code on every batch of produce, so a bad lot can be traced quickly, gets a firm start date, or is delayed again after industry objections. [1]

Also seen in Cyber.

The US Food and Drug Administration said on Wednesday it is investigating 22 salmonella cases across four states, with two people in hospital and nobody dead. [4]

Tracing points to Evergreen Fresh Sprouts of Moyie Springs, Idaho, as the grower whose sprouts every patient had eaten. [4]

The company recalled broccoli sprouts on 4 September, after Montana state officials collected a sample and their laboratory found salmonella in it. [4]

All 19 patients interviewed said they had eaten sprouts. [4]

Sprouts are grown warm and damp for days, which is what the bacteria need too, so one bad seed batch can carry through a whole crop.

This is the third produce outbreak the agency is running at once, alongside lettuce and jalapenos. [4]

Checking food means somebody travelling to it, so with fewer people doing that the problem gets found later, often by whoever eats it.

The inspections fell anyway, because they are about 420 people's jobs and the agency cut the staff who used to book their flights.

the last step of the chain: no inspector anywhere saw this meat, and it was found because the person who bought it rang up to complain

the same step, one link earlier: the positive sample was collected and tested by Montana state officials, not by the federal agency that announced it

the same slide, made deliberate: two executive orders tell the federal meat inspectors to grow the state-run programmes instead

the step that still works, so you can see what it looks like: a routine test at the border pulled the meat before anyone ate it

Nobody can taste a parasite.

The person eating the food is at the end of that chain, and usually finds out by getting ill.

Montana's officials found the salmonella in the sprouts, and Michigan issued its own food warning on 4 July, twelve days before the national one. [4][2]

El Eden Import Distributor Corp of Long Island City, New York, is recalling about 264 pounds of potato-chip packets containing chicharron, or fried pork skin, the US meat inspection service said on Wednesday. [5]

The pork came from Colombia, which is not on the list of countries allowed to send meat or poultry to the United States at all. [5]

The packets carry no import mark. [5] They were found because a customer complained about them. [5]

They went to shops in New Jersey and Utah. [5]

No inspector saw this meat, in Colombia or at the American border.

The only reason anyone knows it was on sale is one phone call from the person who bought it. [5]

Prime Line Distributors of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Ferrarini USA of Hoboken, New Jersey, are recalling about 1,513 pounds of Italian cured pork jowl, sold as guanciale, over possible listeria. [6]

Listeria is a bacterium that survives refrigeration and is dangerous to pregnant women, newborns and older people. The meat was made in Italy on 21 May and imported during July. [6]

A routine re-inspection test at the American border came back positive, and no illnesses have been reported. [6]

This is the check working as designed: a sample pulled at the port before anybody ate the product.

In the same week, a Colombian meat product reached shops with no import mark at all. [5][6]

Two executive orders signed on 4 September direct the US Food Safety and Inspection Service, which inspects American meat plants, to expand state-run inspection programmes and support small processors. [7]

They sit under a plan the US agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, calls Ranchers First, aimed at rebuilding the national cattle herd. [7]

The department also pushed the closing date for its grants to small and mid-sized beef plants back to 30 September. [7][8]

State programmes inspect meat that never crosses a state line.

Growing them puts more of the checking in state hands, in the same month that Michigan's state health department said it had taken on far more federal work than it can staff. [2][7]

The Marine Management Organisation, which regulates fishing in English waters, has approved its highest ever bluefin tuna quota and the largest number of permits it has issued. [9]

The population off Britain collapsed by the mid-1960s after heavy catches of young fish that had never bred, said Lucy Hawkes, an ecologist at the University of Exeter. [9]

Her project, Thunnus UK, tags the fish with help from working fishermen. [9] A Newlyn skipper says numbers have roughly doubled every year for fourteen years. [9]

A collapsed fish stock can rebuild if enough adults survive long enough to spawn.

Britain's environment department called the return one of the most exciting developments in its fisheries for decades. [9]

China has written cultivated meat, grown from animal cells in a tank rather than cut from a slaughtered animal, into its national food strategy. [10]

A key policy document last year called for a diversified food supply system and for developing novel food resources. [10]

China eats close to a third of the world's meat and is the largest importer of meat and dairy, so its government treats the shortfall as a security question. [10]

A report in April suggested that by 2050 cultivated meat could supply around half of the meat China eats. [10]

China made solar panels and electric cars cheap enough to create demand that did not exist before.

Cheaper fermentation tanks would cut costs for everyone else building this, wherever they are. [10]

Growth factors are the nutrient proteins that feed animal cells in a tank, and they are one of the largest costs in growing meat this way. [11]

They are normally made in steel bioreactors built for medicines. [11]

ORF Genetics, an Icelandic company, grows them in genetically engineered barley seed instead, which its science chief Bjorn Orvar says has cut the cost of growth factors by 50 to 100 times in recent years. [11]

It supplies producers including Mosa Meat and Vow. [11]

Cultivated meat has never failed on the biology.

It has failed on price, and taking a hundredfold off one input is the size of change that decides whether any of it reaches a shelf. [11]

Beyond Meat, which built its name on a burger that bleeds like beef, has launched a range that stops pretending to be meat. [12]

The Beyond Veggie burger puts ten fruits and vegetables, legumes and seeds in front, with 12 grams of protein and 6 grams of fibre a patty. [12]

The line also has a jerky-style bar made with mycelium, the root-like part of fungi, a protein powder and a sparkling protein drink. [12]

Daring Foods and Impossible Foods are moving into new eating occasions too. [12]

Copying meat put these products into a direct test against meat on taste and price, which they kept losing.

Selling a vegetable that is openly a vegetable is a different bet on the same shelf. [12]

Mars, the confectionery company behind Snickers and M&Ms, has given more than $13m in grants to six organisations through its Impact Fund. [13]

The largest, $2.07m to a group called Elucid, is meant to get up to 12,750 cocoa-farming households in Ivory Coast into the national health insurance scheme. [13]

Other recipients include the Worldwide Veterinary Service and the Pratham Education Foundation. [13]

The fund began in February with $3m to Save the Children for village savings groups in Indonesian cocoa areas. [13]

Chocolate makers have spent three years learning they cannot buy cheap cocoa from farmers who cannot afford to keep farming.

A hospital bill is one of the costs that pushes a cocoa household off the land. [13]

A study in Nature Climate Change mapped forty years of genetically engineered crop planting across the United States against the yields that followed. [14]

It found higher yields and smaller year-to-year swings for corn and soybeans, with part of the damage from heat and rainfall extremes taken off. [14]

The effect on upland cotton was more modest. [14] The authors also found that engineered varieties slowed the northward drift of where American crops can be grown. [14]

The case for engineered seed has always been made on productivity.

Measuring it as protection against weather is a different claim, and it is the one that matters as the weather moves. [14]

Researchers in China switched rice genes on one at a time using CRISPR activation, a method that turns a gene up rather than cutting it out. [15]

They found a receptor kinase, a kind of sensor protein, that sits in the papillae, the small bumps a plant raises where a fungus tries to push in. [15]

Turning it up gave broad resistance to rice blast. [15] Blast is the fungal disease that does more damage to the world's rice than any other.

The work, in Nature Plants, included field trials. [15]

Most resistance genes work against one strain of a fungus and stop working when the fungus changes.

Resistance across many strains from one gene would last longer in a real field. [15]

Applegate, an American organic meat company, found that telling shoppers its beef came from regenerated grassland did not persuade them to buy it. [16]

It has now joined scientists and institutes investigating whether regenerative farming, which avoids ploughing and chemical disturbance so that soil rebuilds itself, changes the nutrition in the food grown on it. [16][17]

The company put that claim on a hot dog pack in 2021, and its own research a year later showed shoppers did not act on it. [16]

An environmental claim asks a shopper to pay for something that happens to a field. A nutrition claim asks them to pay for something that happens to their own body.

The evidence for the second does not exist yet. [16]

The European Union has not committed to defining ultra-processed food, but in July it published a scoping paper and asked its chief scientific advisers and its ethics group to assess the case. [18]

Ultra-processed food is a category for products rebuilt from industrial ingredients rather than cooked from recognisable ones, and no regulator anywhere has yet written a legal test for it. [18]

California has passed a certification bill that defines such foods largely by the additives they contain, and it awaits the governor's signature. [18]

Whoever writes the definition decides which products carry the label and which escape it, and every large food company knows that. Europe is watching California go first. [18]

The New York Times has assessed the first year of Make Our Children Healthy Again, the plan published last September by the US health department under its secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr. [19]

The report set more than 100 goals across four areas: poor diet, chemical exposure, physical activity and what it called overmedicalisation. [19]

The paper documented actions by the same administration that contradicted some of those goals. [19] A department spokeswoman said its record speaks for itself. [19]

One of the diet promises was a federal definition of ultra-processed food, the same job Europe has just started scoping. A year on, it has not arrived. [18][19]

Indian farmers are planting avocados as coffee and pepper suffer under changing weather. [20]

India imports about 15,000 tonnes of avocados a year and grows only 8,000 to 9,000, said Manilal Palliyath, who promotes the industry there. [20]

One estate that first planted avocado as a shade tree for its coffee now has 40 acres of it and harvested 10 to 15 tonnes last year. [20]

Growers rebuilt their method with South African advice, using raised beds and wider spacing, because avocado roots rot easily. [20]

Restaurants in Mumbai still buy imported fruit, because Indian supply varies too much in size and ripening. A kitchen is paying for sameness, not for quality. [20]

Extreme heat and drought across Croatia this summer pushed the grape harvest weeks ahead of its normal date. [21] An early harvest is a problem rather than a bonus.

Heat drives the sugar up faster than the acids and aromas develop, so the fruit that comes off the vine is not finished. One variety is coping.

Skrlet, a rare white grape found almost nowhere else in the world, is handling the changed climate well, and growers are reviving it after decades of neglect. [21]

Vineyards are planted with varieties chosen for the weather of fifty years ago, and a new vine takes three or four years to fruit.

A grape nobody bothered to export may be the one that keeps working. [21]

Scientists and investors are restoring a 23-square-mile tract of peatland at Belhaven in eastern North Carolina, where the peat runs up to 15 feet deep. [22]

Peat is waterlogged ground where dead plants pile up for thousands of years without rotting, which locks carbon underground.

Drained for farming it dries out, releases that carbon and can burn underground for weeks. The tract sits among fields of cotton, soybeans and corn. [22]

Draining peat is how this became farmland in the first place, so wetting it again takes fields out of production.

The people doing it describe a race to get there before the peat dries out or burns. [22]

David and Fiona Young run a 300-acre organic livestock farm north of Whitchurch in Shropshire, England, with 600 sheep and more than 25 cattle. [23]

Eight years ago they started Rooted and Booted, a day service where young adults with learning disabilities grow vegetables and deliver the boxes to local customers. [23]

They set it up because of their daughter Tara, who has severe learning disabilities and moved from a hospitality course to horticulture. [23] The work runs from sowing to delivery. [23]

Local customers get the vegetable boxes. The day service is what the farm is actually paid to run, and it has been going for eight years. [23]

The American chestnut once dominated the woodlands of the eastern United States. [24]

Andrew Newhouse, an environmental biologist, described on NPR the effort to bring the tree back from the brink of extinction by genetic means. [24]

The species was killed off in the first half of the twentieth century by a bark fungus carried in on imported nursery stock.

Old root systems still send up shoots, and the shoots still die before they can seed.

Almost every restoration project protects something that is still alive.

This one is trying to put a tree back into a forest that has been without it for three human lifetimes. [24]

The FAO, the United Nations food and agriculture agency, has changed how it counts the world's fish. [25]

Its 2025 review broke the 531 lumped stocks used in the previous edition into 2,570 separate ones, and added a tiered system saying how good the evidence behind each is. [25]

Kenya told the agency's fisheries committee in Rome this week that the share of marine stocks fished sustainably has fallen to 62.4%, and that fish biomass could drop by more than a tenth by 2050. [26]

The agency's own estimate is that about one fish in five worldwide is caught outside any reporting system at all. [27]

Kenya also said fewer than half of member states have a legal definition of small-scale fishing, though small boats land more than half the catch and jobs in its region. [26]

Alyssa Atwood, a palaeoclimate scientist at Florida State University, found the sea around Christmas Island in the central Pacific at least two degrees above average in August, sitting between 30 and 30.5C, with the reef already bleaching. [28]

Christmas Island sits at the geographical centre of El Nino, the Pacific warming that reshuffles rainfall worldwide. [28] The usual peak is months away, in winter. [28]

The event has already helped make this the hottest American summer on record. [28]

Farmers and traders are planning around a peak that has not arrived. Coral bleaching in August is the earliest physical measurement of how large this one is going to be. [28]

The US agriculture department's weekly weather and crop bulletin, published on 9 September, reported a pattern change in the western United States that brought cooler air and scattered showers. [29]

The heaviest fell across parts of the Four Corners states and the north-west, where it helped crews contain wildfires and put moisture into the topsoil before winter wheat goes in. [29]

East of the Rocky Mountains, meaningful rain was scarce. [29]

Winter wheat is sown in autumn and has to germinate before the cold arrives. Where the rain did not fall, growers are drilling seed into dry ground and waiting. [29]

Shoppers are choosing price over environmental claims, but some sustainability-linked food trends are still growing, according to WGSN, a trend forecasting company. [30]

One is climate-hero ingredients: sorghum, fonio and moringa, crops that stand heat and drought and are nutritious, which manufacturers are now putting into packaged foods. [30]

Another is substitutes for ingredients under pressure, above all cocoa, where Nestle, Mars and Mondelez are all funding alternatives. [30]

Fonio and sorghum are staples across the Sahel that have never had an export market worth the name.

A trend list in a trade magazine is one of the ways a crop gets one. [30]

The US meat inspection service asked on 9 September to renew its authority to require labels on mechanically tenderised beef, with comments open until 9 November. [31]

Nothing about the requirement itself changes, and the current approval runs to June 2027. [31]

Mechanical tenderising drives blades or needles through a steak to break the fibres, which also carries any bacteria from the surface into the middle, where searing does not reach.

This is routine paperwork. It is also the only way a cook knows the steak in front of them has to be cooked through rather than served rare. [31]

The Taqi Baba intake on a river in Baraki Barak district of Logar province, Afghanistan, has been rebuilt after decades in which every flood season broke it. [32]

It supplies six villages and hundreds of hectares, where farmers grow wheat and barley in winter and tomatoes, onions, corn and beans in summer. [32]

When it failed, villagers stood on the bank with stones, bushes and sandbags pushing the water back into the canal, work that took days. [32]

Younger men had been leaving to find work elsewhere. [32]

The crop was never the problem here. One structure on one river decided whether hundreds of hectares got water at planting time or did not. [32]

The Tavush Foundation set up an Agrocenter in Berd, in Armenia's Tavush region, in 2023, with FAO support and European Union money through a project run with the UN Development Programme. [33]

It gives local farmers access to knowledge, modern practices and new markets. [33]

Its director, Lusik Aghababyan, says they did not start with technology; they started by working out what the community had and what it needed. [33]

Most farm advice arrives as a technology looking for a farm to land on.

This one was built the other way round, from what the growers in Berd said they were short of. [33]

Danes eat 57kg of sugar a head each year against 44kg in Britain, and one Dane in five has a body mass index above 30 against one Briton in three. [34]

The Conversation examined why, as part of a series comparing health in the two countries. [34]

British obesity has climbed from around 15% in 1993 to roughly 29% in England, 32% in Scotland and 26% in Wales. [34]

Denmark has health inequalities too, but smaller ones, which the authors credit to government prevention and diet policy. [34]

No single ingredient explains a national difference in weight, which is what makes the comparison useful. It points at policy, income and daily habits rather than at sugar. [34]

Farmers, indigenous leaders and policymakers from Argentina, Colombia and Costa Rica met at Palmira in Colombia this month. [35]

The meeting was a regional dialogue under SCALA, a programme run by the FAO and the UN Development Programme to turn national climate pledges into farm practice. [35]

Countries presented financing schemes, soil measurements and livestock programmes led by women. [35]

A country's climate pledge is written by a ministry and has to be carried out by farmers who never saw it. This meeting is about that gap. [35]

Lycium ruthenicum is a wild Asian shrub, also called black goji, whose fruit carries a blue pigment called petanin. [36]

Researchers report in npj Science of Plants that stressing cell cultures of the plant with salt and alkali raises how much petanin they make. [36]

The cells were first engineered to overexpress a gene called LrAN2, then put under stress, and the pigment yield rose. [36]

Natural blue is the hardest food colour to get from a plant, which is why this pigment gets attention.

This is cells in a dish, not a crop in a field. The paper does not say what it would take to make petanin at any useful scale.