Bottle Bill & Food Safety On The Go

Bottle Bill & Food Safety On The Go plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

Users of some of the latest mobile devices can now get instant answers to food safety questions with a new smartphone application. Under Secretary of Agriculture Dr. Elisabeth Hagen talks about the new mobile version of the USDA's food safety site called Ask Karen.

HAGEN: Some people will just have a specific question and so they’ll go to Ask Karen and they can either look at frequently asked questions or they’ll enter a question on their own. Again, these are usually questions about what’s the right temperature, how do I defrost food safely in the microwave, any kind of question like that that you might have about food safety we want to be able to answer for you. We know that people are on their phones and their mobile devices all the time and they rely on the more and more to get quick information about everything they need to know about during their day so we’re just very excited that they can now have Karen on their phone as well.

The Oregon House voted Wednesday to overhaul their bottle deposit system that is credited with significantly boosting recycling and spawning similar systems around the world. The vagaries of the bottle bill mean a plastic water or soda bottle would require a deposit, but a nearly identical iced tea bottle would not. Proponents said it's time to modernize the law so it applies to energy drinks, bottled coffee and other beverages that weren't around when the measure was first created in 1971.

Now with today’s Food Forethought, here’s Lacy Gray.

As I grow older, I find myself repeating the same things I often heard my Grandmother say when I was a child. Sayings that didn’t make much sense to me at age seven make great sense to me now, such as, “For Pete and pity sake”, which is exactly what I said when I read about sugar producers suing corn sugar producers over their new advertising campaign. Apparently, the sugar industry doesn’t care for the corn industry marketing “the product formerly known as corn syrup” as a natural product equivalent to sugar. Never mind we’ve just been through all this same nit picking with the food police, or that the majority of health experts agree that sugar and corn sugar are nutritionally the same. In other words, sugar is sugar, is sugar. What’s quite obvious is that the sugar industry was enjoying the large boost in sales they received at the height of the high fructose corn syrup bashing frenzy. Now that HFCS is being marketed for what it is, another form of natural sugar, sugar producers have seen their previous gain in the sugar market go down, resulting in lost profits. And what happens when you have a loss in sales? Evidently, you sue.

Thanks Lacy. That’s today’s Northwest Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.