Word: usda
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...instead by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Food advertising, meanwhile, falls within the bailiwick of the Federal Trade Commission. To see how muddled it gets, consider the case of frozen pizza. Cheese pizza and its packaging belongs to the FDA, while pepperoni pizza and its labeling rests with the USDA. The FTC approves ads for both. Contributing to the chaos: the agencies often don't use the same rules, standards or even definitions in regulating food...
...influence of politics on food policy is most clearly visible at the Agriculture Department. Written into its charter is a conflict of interest wider than a side of beef. Unlike its sister regulatory agencies, the USDA is obliged to promote as well as police agricultural products. Nutritionists are quick to point out that the department is responsible for regulating most of the fattier -- unhealthier -- elements of the diet. But its mandate to promote the consumption of beef, pork, dairy products and eggs gets in the way of its concerns for American health. "There's no David Kessler heading the USDA...
...most glaring example of this bias involves a foiled attempt to revise the USDA's dietary guidelines. In 1958 the department introduced its "basic four" food-group chart, which divided food into four major categories: milk, meat, vegetables and fruits, and bread and cereals. The groups were quickly branded into the brain of every American schoolchild as of equal importance...
...their male peers, perhaps the mildest of which was "I'd like to get in bed with that." The offending photos, many of which came from calendars provided by tool-supply companies, included a nude woman bending over with her buttocks and genitals exposed, a nude female torso with USDA CHOICE written on it and a dart board that displayed a drawing of a woman's breast, with her nipple as the bull...
...weed killers. More ambitious projects are envisioned, among them adding protein to staples like corn and changing the type of oil produced by soybeans. Pigs that grow faster and leaner and cows that manufacture medicine in their milk are other goals. Observes Arnold Foudin, a biotechnology specialist at the USDA: "Ideas that a short while ago might have been dismissed as harebrained Buck Rogers are now being taken quite seriously." It was only in 1983 that scientists inserted the first foreign genes into tobacco and petunias, the "white mice" of the plant world. In the years since, similar work...