Michael Pollan. Photo: Alia Malley/michaelpollan.com

Listen to the Story from KQED’s Forum:
Original Broadcast: Thursday, May 16, 2013 — 10:00 AM

Host: Michael Krasny

Guest:

• Michael Pollan, professor of journalism at UC Berkeley and author of “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation”

More info:

• MichaelPollan.com
• Some of My Best Friends Are Germs : NYTimes.com
• Fire, Water, Air, Earth: Michael Pollan Gets Elemental In ‘Cooked’ : NPRFood via BAB
• ‘Cooked’ by Michael Pollan : BostonGlobe.com
• Senate Agriculture Panel Approves Farm Bill : TheHill.com

Excerpted from COOKED by Michael Pollan. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) Michael Pollan, 2013.

Crew members unload a catch of sockeye salmon at Craig, Alaska, in 2005. Researchers say fish are being found in new areas because of changing ocean temperatures. Photo: Melissa Farlow/National Geographic/Getty Images

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Post by Richard Harris, The Salt at NPR Food (5/15/13)

Climate change is gradually altering the fish that end up on ice in seafood counters around the world, according to a new study.

“The composition of the [global] fish catch includes more and more fish from the warmer areas, and cold-water fish are getting more rare, because the temperatures are increasing,” says Daniel Pauly at the University of British Columbia, a co-author of the study.

As oceans warm — a result of climate change — fish maintain their preferred water temperature by moving away from the equator and toward the poles.

So, for example, people in Denmark are now encountering swordfish, which you’d normally find in the Mediterranean and off the coast of Africa.

“In British Columbia, where I live, we have Humboldt squid, giant squid from Mexico,” Pauly says. “They eat all the herrings and stuff, and people don’t know them. They are stranded on the beach, and people think they are sea monsters.”

And fishermen have scuffled over Atlantic mackerel quotas, as the fish moves north to new grounds around Iceland.

The new study in Nature shows these anecdotes aren’t simply a fluke. Data from fish catches from around the world show it’s happening everywhere the ocean is warming — which is just about everywhere.

This trend isn’t obvious at American fish counters. That’s because 80 percent of our seafood is imported, and we don’t know whether fishermen are catching our swordfish in the tropics or the North Atlantic. Also, half of all seafood is now produced in enclosures — not caught in the wild.

But if it’s invisible to us, that’s not the case for many people who rely on their local fisherman for protein.

“In the tropics, there are lots of developing countries’ fisheries where their ability to adapt to changes in the resources is much lower,” says William Cheung, the report’s lead author. Like Pauly, he’s at the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Center in Vancouver.

The paper documents a migration of some species out of the tropics, as they seek cooler waters. But there are no fish to replace the ones that are leaving. As a result, “these fisheries in the tropics will be most vulnerable to climate change impacts,” Cheung says.

The United States will gradually feel the effects as well.

“Imagine a reef fish that is driven by temperature into North Carolina or the Delaware coast,” Pauly says. “That reef fish will not find reefs. It’s like you having to move, but you cannot take your furniture with you, or your house. That is the problem.”

Many fish will have a hard time adapting to this very rapid change, he says.

Mark Payne at the National Institute for Aquatic Resources in Denmark was not involved in the research, but he’s impressed by the result.

“This is suddenly a wake-up call,” he says. “It’s a strong suggestion that climate change is here. It’s real, and it’s really starting to affect what we catch and, therefore, what we eat.”

Copyright 2013 NPR.

A farmer holds Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” soybean seeds at his family farm in Bunceton, Mo. Photo: Dan Gill/AP

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Post by Nina Totenberg, The Salt at NPR Food (5/13/13)

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that when farmers use patented seed for more than one planting in violation of their licensing agreements, they are liable for damages.

Billed as David vs. Goliath, the case pitted an Indiana farmer against the agribusiness behemoth Monsanto.

Almost all the soybean farmers in the U.S. use seed that is genetically altered to be resistant to weed killers like Roundup. That allows farmers to spray for weeds without killing the soybeans. But the seed is three times more expensive than regular unpatented seed, so some farmers have tried to use regenerated seed to save money.

Case in point, 75-year-old farmer Hugh Bowman, who regularly bought Monsanto’s Roundup-resistant soybean seed for his first growth and signed a licensing agreement promising to use all the seed and not to use any regenerated seed for future use. But Bowman also had other riskier, lower-yield plantings, and for those, he wanted “a cheap source of seed.”

So he went to the local grain elevator where farmers drop off their harvested soybeans, and he bought and planted some of those, knowing that those beans would likely also be Roundup-resistant.

He eventually produced eight separate crop yields using the second and third generations of the grain elevator seed, and he was quite open about what he was doing.

“I couldn’t imagine that they’d give a rat’s behind,” he said.

But they — namely, Monsanto — did. The company sued Bowman, as it has sued other farmers. Bowman lost in the lower courts and was ordered to pay $84,000 in damages to Monsanto. He appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

There the question before the justices pitted two legal doctrines against each other. One doctrine, known technically as patent exhaustion, says that once you buy a product — say, a cellphone — you can do with it whatever you want. You can use it, sell it, give it to your kids, whatever. But a second patent doctrine says you are forbidden to copy it.

So which rule applied in Bowman’s case? The Supreme Court said unanimously that Bowman’s actions amounted to illegal copying of a patented product, a sort of farming piracy.

Writing for the high court, Justice Elena Kagan said that Bowman is perfectly free to purchase grain elevator beans to eat or feed to livestock, or even to resell, but he could not do what he, in fact, did: plant the beans from the grain elevator in his own fields, test them for weed resistance, and then harvest, re-harvest and re-harvest multiple times, without paying Monsanto for use of its patented product.

Without this protection for Monsanto, said Kagan, the company would get “scant benefit” from its invention, and Bowman and other farmers would reap great rewards from the weed-resistant seed without paying for it.

Kagan also rejected Bowman’s argument that since soybeans naturally self-replicate by sprouting, it was the soybean, not Bowman himself, that made replications of the Monsanto’s patented invention.

“We think the blame-the-bean defense tough to credit,” said Kagan. Bowman, she noted, “was not a passive observer of his soybeans multiplication.” Instead, Bowman himself produced eight separate crop yields using the grain elevator beans to maximize regeneration of the beans.

Monsanto and other agribusiness enterprises were predictably pleased by the decision.

“The court’s ruling today ensures that long-standing principles of patent law apply to breakthrough 21st century technologies,” said David Snively, Monsanto’s executive vice president and general counsel. “The ruling also provides assurance to all inventors throughout the public and private sectors that they can and should continue to invest in innovation that feeds people, improves lives, creates jobs and allows America to keep its competitive edge.”

Meanwhile, critics of the industry were just as predictably disappointed. Andrew Kimbrell, director of the Center for Food Safety, called the decision a “disaster” for farmers and consumers, because it ensures that Monsanto’s soybean seed patent will dominate the market even more, meaning that prices for both farmers and consumers will soar.

The court’s decision, however, was explicitly limited to cases like Bowman’s, where an individual takes steps to replicate a patented product. Justice Kagan said the court was not deciding how to handle all self-replicating products — products that range from patented DNA molecules to computer software.

Or as John Whelan, George Washington University associate dean of intellectual property law put it, the court has “left for another day” the question of how to treat a product that “automatically reproduces itself with no intervention.” In the modern world of complex new inventions, it seems the court is not eager to get ahead of itself.

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Eat less salt, but not too much less. Photo: iStockPhoto.com

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Post by Allison Aubrey, The Salt at NPR Food (5/15/13)

Americans are repeatedly told to cut back on salt to reduce the risk of heart disease. But there are new questions being raised about the possible risks of reducing sodium too much.

So, how low should we go? Currently, the government recommends that Americans should aim for 2,300 milligrams per day. And people older than 50, as well as those with high blood pressure, diabetes or kidney disease are advised to reduce sodium even further, down to 1,500 mg per day.

But a panel of experts convened by the Institute of Medicine concludes in a new report that “the evidence on direct health outcomes does not support recommendations to lower sodium intake … to or even below 1,500 mg per day.”

Why? We asked the committee chairman, Brian Strom, a dean and professor of public health at the University of Pennsylvania, to summarize the panel’s findings for us. “The net conclusion is that people who are eating too much sodium should lower their sodium, but it is possible that if you lower it too much you may do harm.”

Strom says a lot more research is needed to better understand how ultra-low-sodium diets may be beneficial or harmful. Strom pointed to an Italian study of people with congestive heart failure as an example of research that has hinted that diets too low in sodium may be problematic for certain people.

“The people on the low-sodium diet actually did worse [compared to those on medium-sodium diets],” says Strom. “They had more hospital re-admissions and they had a higher mortality rate.” He says it’s unclear if the results would be the same for Americans with congestive heart failure, since treatments here are different than they are in Italy. But, he says, the findings raise questions.

The American Heart Association, which recommends a low-sodium (1,500 mg) diet for all Americans, released a statement stating that it disagrees with the key findings of the new report.

And some preventive health experts are critical, too. The World Health Organization has concluded that elevated blood pressure is the leading cause of preventable death, which suggests that staving off high blood pressure with low-sodium diets is an important strategy.

“Sodium reduction remains a critically important component of public health efforts designed to … prevent cardiovascular disease,” Lawrence Appel of Johns Hopkins University writes in an email.

Appel points out that the studies that suggest that low-sodium diets are harmful tend to focus on “sick populations in which illness leads to low sodium intake rather than the reverse.”

Some groups of Americans, including older adults and African-Americans, are especially sensitive to the blood-pressure lowering effects of cutting sodium, Appel says. So the strategy of aiming for low-salt diets has “tremendous potential to reduce racial disparities in blood pressure-related cardiovascular disease.”

The bottom line, according to Bonnie Liebman, director of nutrition for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, is that Americans are eating way too much salt, on average about 3,400 milligrams a day.

“And we know that too much is harmful,” she says. “It increases blood pressure, which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke.”

And she says focusing on the potential risks of a very-low-sodium diet distracts from the more important conversation about how to get Americans to start consuming less.

To better understand just how much salt is found in the typical lunch out, I met Liebman at a food court.

Our first stop was McDonalds, where it turns out burgers have about twice as much salt as the fries: 1,000 mg, and up to 2,000 if you get the Angus bacon burger, Liebman says.

Put the burger and fries together and you’ve already reached the recommended daily sodium intake. Liebman says it’s a similar story at every chain, from Subway to Chipotle to Pizzeria Uno. (McDonalds has pledged to reduce sodium 15 percent across its menu by 2015.)

So even though the new study raises questions about potential harms of ultra-low-sodium diets, with a food supply like ours, most of us consume way too much salt, not too little.

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Microscopic bugs called cheese mites are responsible for giving Mimolette its distinctive rind and flavor. Photo: Chris Waits/Flickr

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Post by Deena Prichep, The Salt at NPR Food (5/11/13)

The Food and Drug Administration is currently embroiled in a surprisingly heated culinary standoff — pitting French cheese-makers (and American cheese-lovers) against regulators, all because of one very small problem: cheese mites.

Cheese mites are microscopic little bugs that live on the surfaces of aged cheeses, munching the microscopic molds that grow there. For many aged cheeses, they’re something of an industry nuisance, gently brushed off the cheeses. But for Mimolette, a bright orange French cheese, they’re actually encouraged.

The mites munch on the rind for a few years and then are removed — usually with a blast of compressed air and a bit of hand-brushing — before Mimolette is sold. But there are always a few hiding behind. And now the FDA is cracking down.

According to the FDA’s Patricia El-Hinnawy, there’s no official limit, but the target is no more than six mites per square inch. For Mimolette, that’s a near impossible standard.

Benoit de Vitton is the North American representative for Isigny, one of the largest producers of Mimolette. In March, de Vitton began receiving letters from each of the dozen importers he works with, saying that their Mimolette shipments had been detained.

De Vitton estimates that he now has about a ton of cheese sitting in FDA warehouses in New Jersey. “They say the product, because of the mites, it is not proper for human consumption,” de Vitton sighs.

Ironically, de Vitton notes that Mimolette itself is rumored to have been created because of import issues in the 17th century. “The French were at war with Holland, and the king didn’t want any more Dutch Gouda coming to France. So he asked to create kind of the same cheese.”

But in the 21st century, do we need a cheese ban? Microbiologist Rachel Dutton runs a cheese lab at Harvard University, and we checked in with her about the dangers of mites. Dutton notes that there have been some reports of mite allergies, but they seem to be restricted to people who have come into contact with large numbers of mites.

And Dutton says that while we may not like to think about bugs, they’re a part of what makes cheese so delicious.

“Cheese is absolutely alive,” Dutton laughs. And all of that life — the molds, bacteria, yeasts and mites — help make cheese what it is. Dutton says that the mites on Mimolette can contribute flavors of their own (they have a somewhat earthy smell), and by eating into the rind, they can also increase aeration — and the surface area in which the other microbes can do their work.

Dutton understands that this doesn’t sound appealing, but implores people to realize the good work of these bugs. “There definitely are microbes that can spoil food and make either it bad for you to eat or just sort of gross. But any time you eat a piece of cheese or a bite of yogurt, have a piece of bread or a glass of wine — these are all examples of foods fermented by different types of microbes.”

Throughout France, cheese lovers have been rallying in support of Mimolette. There are radio stories, YouTube videos — there’s even an ex-pat Save the Mimolette Facebook campaign (of course).

In America, the response is a bit more subdued. Some cheesemongers are buying up the limited supply, but most are content to shrug it off. Sasha Davies, of Cyril’s cheese/wine bar in Portland, is nervous about what the mite crackdown could mean for other aged cheeses, but in general is fine reaching for an aged Gouda instead of Mimolette.

“I find I can scratch the itch I feel for Mimolette with a lot of other cheeses,” she admits.

Davies says that the fervor for Mimolette isn’t just about its caramel notes or lactic tang or bright orange color.

“There are cheeses that — even though I think they taste delicious, they tug at my heartstrings, either because I love the person that makes them, or I have this great memory of being in a special place,” she says. “Food is never really just food.”

And for many French people, Mimolette brings a taste of memory, family and home — as well as mites.

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Vegetables. Photo: Getty Images

Six years ago, Mark Bittman was a full-time omnivore. But then a doctor told him to turn vegan for health reasons, and suddenly Mark found himself facing a world void of meat, dairy, or processed foods. So the New York Times food writer decided to personalize his vegan diet and allow for some cheating. He called it “Vegan Before 6,” or “VB6,” and says it helped him improve his health and focus on cooking at home. Mark Bittman talks about his new book, and how a full-time meat lover adapted to part-time veganism.

Host: Michael Krasny

Guest:

• Mark Bittman, food writer, columnist for The New York Times, and author of books including “VB6: Eating Vegan Before 6,” “Food Matters” and “How to Cook Everything.”

More info:
• Next Meal: Engineering Food : A half-hour documentary from KQED Science
• VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good : amazon.com

A bee inspector checks on a frame of bees to assess the colony strength near Turlock, Calif., in February. More than 30 percent of America’s bee colonies died off over the winter. Photo: Gosia Wozniacka/AP

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Post by Dan Charles, The Salt at NPR Food (5/7/13)

According to a new survey of America’s beekeepers, almost a third of the country’s honeybee colonies did not make it through the winter.

That’s been the case, in fact, almost every year since the U.S. Department of Agriculture began this annual survey, six years ago.

Over the past six years, on average, 30 percent of all the honeybee colonies in the U.S. died off over the winter. The worst year was five years ago. Last year was the best: Just 22 percent of the colonies died.

“Last year gave us some hope,” says Jeffrey Pettis, research leader of the Agriculture Department’s Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md.

But this year, the death rate was up again: 31 percent.

Six years ago, beekeepers were talking a lot about “colony collapse disorder” — colonies that seemed pretty healthy, but suddenly collapsed. The bees appeared to have flown away, abandoning their hives.

Beekeepers aren’t seeing that so much anymore, Pettis says. They’re mostly seeing colonies that just dwindle. As the crowd of bees gets smaller, it gets weaker.

“They can’t generate heat very well in the spring to rear brood. They can’t generate heat to fly,” he says.

Farmers who grow crops like almonds, blueberries and apples rely on commercial beekeepers to make sure their crops get pollinated.

But the number of honeybees has now dwindled to the point where there may not be enough to pollinate those crops.

Pettis says that this year, farmers came closer than ever to a true pollination crisis. The only thing that saved part of the almond crop in California was some lovely weather at pollination time.

“We got incredibly good flight weather,” Pettis says. “So even those small colonies that can’t fly very well in cool weather, they were able to fly because of good weather.”

A bee collects nectar from a fruit tree in West Bath, Maine. The number of honeybees has now dwindled to the point where there may not be enough to pollinate some major U.S. crops. Photo: Pat Wellenbach/AP

“It’s just something that gets in your blood, so you don’t want to give up. [You say,] ‘OK, it’s 30 percent this year; I’ll do better next year.’ We’re very much optimists,” he says.

Beekeepers have a whole list of reasons for why so many colonies are dying. There’s a nasty parasite called the Varroa Mite, which they can’t get rid of. There are also bee-killing pesticides. And there are just fewer places in the country where a bee can find plenty of flowering plants that provide nectar and pollen.

That was especially true this past year. The same drought that left Midwestern corn fields parched and wilting also dried up wildflowers and starved the bees.

That was a natural disaster. But May Berenbaum, who chairs the Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says that most of the changes in the landscape are the result of people’s decisions about what to do with their land.

“I just wish there were more incentives for people — not just farmers — to plant a more diversified landscape that provides nutritional resources for all kinds of pollinators,” she says. “Plant more flowers! And be a little more tolerant of the weeds in the garden.”

More controversial is the role of pesticides. Some beekeepers and environmentalists are calling for tighter restrictions on the use of one particular class of pesticides called neonicotinoids. Europe is about to ban some uses of these pesticides. But U.S. farmers and pesticide companies are opposed to any such move here, and the Environmental Protection Agency says it’s not yet convinced that this would help bees very much.

Copyright 2013 NPR.

Chef Edward Lee moved to Louisville, Ky., 10 years ago to take over a restaurant called 610 Magnolia. There, he mixes the sweet of Southern food with the salt and umami of Asian cuisine. Photo: Dan Dry/Artisan Books.

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Post by Lydia Zuraw, The Salt at NPR Food (05/03/13)

Korean and Southern food may not seem like a natural pair. But now it’s one more example of traditions emulsifying in the great American melting pot. Korean-American chef Edward Lee makes that case with his new cookbook Smoke and Pickles: Recipes and Stories From a New Southern Kitchen.

Fusion cooking comes naturally to Lee: He grew up in an immigrant neighborhood of Brooklyn surrounded by Jamaicans, Indians, Iranians and Jews.

“When they immigrated to America, my parents deliberately decided they weren’t going to live in the big Korean enclaves,” Lee tells Morning Edition host David Greene. “They wanted to spread out and be amongst other people. That education in cuisine, ranging from so many different immigrant groups probably left more of a lasting impression on me in cuisine than anything else.

“Their whole thing was ‘You’re an American. Be an American,’ ” Lee says.

But Korean food was a way Lee connected with his grandmother. She rarely spoke of Korea because she didn’t have very happy memories, he says, but “food was the one thing that was kind of sacred and pure and hadn’t been torn apart.”

Photo: Artisan Books” width=”250″ class=”size-full wp-image-61229″ /> Edward Lee’s first cookbook, Smoke and Pickles: Recipes and Stories From a New Southern Kitchen, features Korean-southern comfort food.
Photo: Artisan Books.

As a kid, Lee says he would hang out with her in the kitchen, and at first, she ignored him. “I would, little by little, start helping her with things,” he says. “She got very annoyed by that at first. She’s like, ‘You’re a man. You’re not supposed to be here learning how to make kimchi — that’s women’s work.’ ”

Over the years, he says, they developed a strong bond that relied on few words.

Korean food was also how Lee established himself as a chef. In 1998 he opened a restaurant in Manhattan called Clay, which attracted a clientele that included plenty of celebrities. But the excitement wore off quickly.

“Everything seemed right on paper: Korean kid opens Korean restaurant,” he says. “But it just didn’t feel right to me, and I wasn’t incredibly proud of the food. I felt like it was just an extension of what I thought people wanted me to cook.”

He started to re-evaluate things and decided to travel around the country. The farthest his family had traveled in his childhood was New Jersey. “That was huge for us,” he says. “Although I grew up in America and I was influenced by all of the things that other Americans are, I had no idea what America was. It was this vast unknown beyond New Jersey.”

So in 2001 Lee went to places like Wisconsin and Washington, D.C., for the first time. And it was in Louisville at the Kentucky Derby that he fell in love with the South.

Within a year he had moved there to take over a restaurant called 610 Magnolia and the fusion instinct kicked in. He started mixing Korean spice with Southern comfort food.

“Southern food tends to be a little bit on the sweeter side. Asian food tends to be a little bit on the saltier, kind of umami side,” Lee says. “When they work and you put them together, they are actually are a wonderful marriage.”

Grits, for example, reminded Lee of congee, a rice porridge Koreans usually eat with soy sauce and seafood. So Lee came up with a recipe for lamb braised in soy sauce and served over grits, transforming the sweet taste of the corn into something new.

Or take fried chicken. Koreans actually have a long tradition of frying chicken, Lee says. They just have a slightly different method of preparing the chicken for frying. “The results are almost similar, but it’s just different pathways to the same place,” he says. “And I find that a lot in Asian cuisine and Southern cuisine.”

Related Stories
• Recipes from Smoke & Pickles

Copyright 2013 NPR.

The four cuts at the top of this skull “are clear chops to the forehead,” says Smithsonian forensic anthropologist Douglas Owsley. Based on forensic evidence, researchers think the blows were made after the person died.
Photo: Donald E. Hurlbert/Smithsonian

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Post by Christopher Joyce, The Salt at NPR Food (05/02/13)

“First they ate their horses, and then fed upon their dogs and cats, as well as rats, mice and snakes.”

So says James Horn of the historical group Colonial Williamsburg, paraphrasing an account by colony leader George Percy of what conditions were like for the hundreds of men and women stranded in Jamestown, Va., with little food in the dead of winter in 1609.

They even ate their shoes. And, apparently, at least one person.

Scientists who have recovered human bones from the English colony at Jamestown announced Wednesday that they show the marks of cannibalism.

It’s long been debated whether the colonists resorted to eating each other during “the starving time” of 1609 to 1610. The weather was harsh, and the hostile Indians were even harsher. Only 60 colonists survived that winter. This new finding would be the first hard evidence of cannibalism.

Last summer, Jamestown’s chief archaeologist, William Kelso, dug up a human skull and a few other bones, along with some food remains. But these bones were different from others he’d found.

This forensic facial reconstruction shows what the 14-year-old, nicknamed “Jane,” may have looked like. Scientists say the remains found at Jamestown are evidence of cannibalism over the winter of 1609-1610. Photo: Donald E. Hurlbert/Smithsonian

“The damage to the skull, and finding it with the other food remains, brought on serious thoughts that this was, indeed, evidence of survival cannibalism,” Kelso says.

Kelso took the bones to the Smithsonian’s Douglas Owsley, a renowned forensic anthropologist who has solved numerous criminal cases, as well as archaeological mysteries, based on human bones. Owsley determined that the Jamestown bones belonged to a girl, aged 14. They don’t know anything about her, but have given her a name: Jane.

Owsley found numerous cut marks on the cranium and jaw, all apparently done after the girl had died. “There are clear chops to the forehead. They are very closely spaced,” Owsley says.

These vertical cuts are evenly spaced and regular, and thus, he says, not the kind of wound you see in a struggle, but more likely made on a corpse. “There are four chops to the back of the cranium,” Owsley says — apparently, they were made as the assailant was trying to open her skull. It was done in a very unskillful way, Owsley notes. Then, there was a final chop that completely fractured the skull open.

Owsley also found marks on the jaw that looked like the result of sawing with a sharp object, and also compression fractures made by a knife point. On the only fragment of leg bone the researchers had, there were more cut marks.

Markings on the lower side of the jaw look like they were sawed with a sharp object, says forensic anthropologist Douglas Owsley. Photo: Donald E. Hurlbert/Smithsonian

Forensic scientists usually can differentiate marks left by gnawing animals from those made by sharp instruments. Along with the written accounts, Owsley says the evidence points to cannibalism. “Given the context of all of this put together, and the multiple, multiple cuts,” he says, “this is not anything that is done out of spite or vengeance or anything like that. It is, I think, a very clear intent.”

The team has glued the skull back together and also sculpted a re-creation of what Jane would have looked like in the flesh, which they displayed today at the press conference: English, high cheekbones, regular features, pretty.

Smithsonian anthropologist Kari Bruwelheide was on the team. “When you have evidence of an event that’s written down and recorded and talked about by survivors 400 years ago, it added weight to history. I mean, it truly is kind of a special kind of case,” she said.

It’s special also because archaeologists are skeptical about claims of cannibalism. Jonathan Haas at the Field Museum in Chicago says “cannibalism science” demands several types of evidence. The opening of the skull and the historical accounts are two good ones, but he says the other cut marks don’t prove cannibalism, but only severe violence done to a girl’s body.

Haas says scientists need a suite of several lines of evidence, all pointing to the same conclusion. “If I find cut marks showing the defleshing from the long bones, if I see cracking of the long bones, if I see cooking, then I can begin to much more definitively say that there was cannibalism being practiced,” Haas says. He says archaeologically, more proof is still needed.

Given that this was England’s first successful colony in the New World, and the nature of the claim, it’s likely that the cannibalism finding will generate a lively scientific debate.

Copyright 2013 NPR.

A truckload of live turkeys arrives at the Cargill plant in Springdale, Ark., Thursday, Aug. 4, 2011. Photo: Danny Johnston/AP

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Post by Allison Aubrey and Eliza Barclay, The Salt at NPR (05/01/13)

Consumer groups are stepping up pressure on animal producers and their practice of giving antibiotics to healthy animals to prevent disease. In two new reports, the groups say they’re worried that the preventive use of antibiotics is contributing to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which get harder to treat in humans and animals over time.

This week, Consumer Reports released a report looking at bacteria on turkey meat that are resistant to medicines used for humans. Scientists there tested 257 samples of raw ground turkey meat that they purchased at grocery stores around the country. They conclude that turkey meat that came from turkeys raised organically without antibiotics was significantly less likely to harbor resistant bacteria compared with meat from conventional turkeys that were given antibiotics.

“We think these findings underscore a very important [government] recommendation that we don’t need to feed healthy animals antibiotics every day to promote their growth and prevent disease,” says Urvashi Rangan, director of the food safety and sustainability group at Consumer Reports.

The findings came on the heels of a report from another consumer advocacy organization, the Environmental Working Group, which analyzed data collected by the federal government’s National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System. It also documented high levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in store-bought meats.

The Food and Drug Administration took issue with this EWG analysis, saying it came to “misleading conclusions.” But meanwhile, the agency has weighed in on the complex problem of antibiotic resistance by calling for the judicious use of antibiotics in food-producing animals.

“One way FDA is working to address this issue [of resistance] is to phase out the use of antibiotics in food animals for growth promotion and feed efficiency,” says Jalil Isa, a spokesman for the agency. “FDA believes these drugs should be used only in situations where they are necessary for ensuring animal health, and done so under the oversight of a veterinarian.”

The most recent data from the FDA show that about 30 million pounds of antibiotics each year are purchased for use in farm animals. That’s about four times more than what doctors prescribe to people.

Around 74 percent of those drugs aren’t used to treat sick animals. Instead, farmers administer them at low doses to help animals grow faster and prevent infections.

Diana Goodpasture of Akron, Ohio, knows what it’s like to be sickened by a strain of salmonella bacteria that’s resistant to antibiotic treatment. In June 2011, after she ate a turkey burger that she had grilled, she became so sick that she was hospitalized for five days.

“It was terrible; it was the worst thing I ever experienced in my life,” Goodpasture tells The Salt. She was infected with salmonella Heidelberg that was resistant to three types of antibiotics: ampicillin, streptomycin and tetracycline. The tainted meat was part of a massive ground turkey recall.

Consumer Reports briefed several government agencies on its findings, which were released April 30, on bacteria in ground turkey meat. In an email, the FDA’s Isa says the report leaves out information that would have been helpful, such as “details about which types of bacteria were found to be resistant to which antibiotics.”

UPDATE, Wednesday, May 1, 12:30 p.m.

The FDA acknowledges that it overlooked a table in the report that does include the details on which bacteria were resistant to individual antibiotics.

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The National Turkey Federation, meanwhile, says it believes turkey producers are using antibiotics judiciously — and that their practices help keep turkey flocks healthy. They point out that in general, the antibiotics used most in raising turkeys are not the same antibiotics that are relied upon to treat people.

NTF President Joel Brandenberger says animal agriculture is only one piece of the puzzle in the problem of antibiotic resistance, but he recognizes FDA’s efforts to work with producers to restrict their use of the drugs.

“The National Turkey Federation has been cautiously supportive of FDA’s strategy,” says Brandenberger.

According to poultry scientist Michael Hulet at Penn State University, the poultry industry has already stopped using a lot of the drugs that are still used to treat infections in humans, like ciprofloxacin. And, he says, when the industry does use the same drugs that doctors prescribe to sick people — drugs like tetracycline — it’s usually only to treat animals that are truly sick, not to prevent disease.

“The industry has really cut back on the number of drugs used [for routine prevention of disease in healthy animals] because of some of the concern about resistance,” Hulet says.

But Gail Hansen with the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming says it’s impossible to confirm whether the poultry industry’s claims are true, because there are no publicly available data on how the drugs are actually used. “So far, all we really have is ‘trust’ and no way to verify,” says Hansen.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have proposed new legislation that would restrict the use of antibiotics in food animals and eight classes of antibiotics for human use only.

“We need to take action to confront this growing public health crisis before routine infections like strep throat become fatal,” Democratic New York Rep. Louise Slaughter, author of the legislation, said in a statement.

Copyright 2013 NPR.