Kitchen Table Tidbits #10: Plastic in Fish, Amazon Sells Recalls, Coffee is Good, Meatless Meat Contains Mold, Eat More Armadillo

1. IF YOU EAT FISH YOU PROBABLY EAT PLASTIC TOO: More than 50 species of fish have been found to consume plastic trash at sea, according to a researcher writing in The Washington Post. These include mackerel, striped bass and Pacific oysters. The plastic is called “toxic.” There is a ripple: For example, your fresh sea salt contains microplastics, as studies have demonstrated.

But wait, there’s more. Testing of bottled, natural and tapwater in the U.S. showed 94
percent contaminated by plastics. Plastic fibers were found in tap water coming from places like Congress buildings, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters, and Trump Tower in New York. Water treatment systems don’t filter drinking water to the degree that microplastics would be caught. 

2. AMAZON SELLING RECALLED FOOD: Last week, Amazon.com was still selling I.M. Healthy soy nut butter that was recalled in March when federal officials traced an E. coli outbreak to the product. Apparently it was finally pulled following a call from Food Safety News. The product had sickened a confirmed 32 people across a dozen states. It is against federal law for anyone to sell or resell recalled products.

3. TODAY COFFEE IS OKAY: Seems a new study comes along every few days, coffee is good, coffee is bad. The latest is a European study with nearly 20,000 participants concluding that higher coffee consumption lowers the risk of death. The researchers found that participants who consumed at least four cups of coffee per day had a 64 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality than those who never or almost never consumed coffee. Moreover, there was a 22 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality for each two additional cups of coffee per day. 

4. MEATLESS MEAT CONTAINS MOLD: A U.S. District Court judge has ruled that a company producing meatless meats must label its product as containing mold. One such case was filed in 2015 by the parents of an 11-year-old California boy who died June 19, 2013, the morning after he ate a Quorn “Turk’y Burger” his mother prepared for supper. The boy was allergic to mold, but his parents had no idea that Quorn’s trademarked term “mycoprotein” was the corporation’s label shorthand for its website statement: “we take a natural nutritious fungus from the soil and ferment it to produce a dough called Mycoprotein™.”Myco is Greek for fungi.

The order requiring the label language is partly the result of work by the nonprofit watchdog organization the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI.)  “Consumers deserve to know that Quorn comes from mold, which sometimes causes serious gastrointestinal and breathing problems,” CSPI litigation director Maia Kats said in the release.

5. EAT MORE ARMADILLO? I used to live in an area where it was common to see road-killed armadillo, not too far from Hamburg, AR, where they hold an annual armadillo cookout festival. I never realized the critters were so valuable. That discovery came from viewing the Exotic Meat Market web site. We are told: “Armadillo Meat is a fabulous tasting red meat. In many areas of Central and South America, armadillo meat is often used as part of an average diet. Armadillo meat is a traditional ingredient in Oaxaca, Mexico.” Well, stew meat about $50 lb. plus shipping. For the whole beastie, a six or seven pounder goes for around $200 and a thirteen to fifteen lb. critter is yours at about $350. Exotic Meat Market features all sorts of wild meats – beaver, coyote, iguana, lion, yak, you name it. Shipping is calculated at purchase.