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By Fred, February 9, 2010 8:00 am

On February 5, 2010, the NY Times ran a piece outlining thoughts at the FDA of re-evaluating the portion sizes found on food labels.

For those of us who follow a specialty diet; the issues with food labels are no surprise.  While we are all hunting through to understand what items may indicate wheat, gluten, shellfish, peanuts, tree-nuts, dairy or soy, most of us have learned to ignore the seemingly random aspect of portion size.  One bag of chips may be 2 servings, another 1, another may be fractional.  Bags from within a product family may have different portion sizes by weight and not be internally consistent.

One other item that is near and dear to those of us who await any gluten-labeling guidelines is that the FDA is no better at dealing with this issue than any other.  The article states midway through, that;

The F.D.A. has vowed to re-evaluate serving sizes before. Amid concern over obesity, it said in 2005 that it was considering changes. That effort languished, but has now been revived by the Obama administration.

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By Fred, June 19, 2009 8:37 pm

Dr. John Floros, head of the Department of Food Science at Penn State University and a member of the FDA’s advisory board, served as a moderator on a Nanotechnology in Food conference that we attended.

He made some interesting comments about Nanotechnology in food, which I will attempt to paraphrase:

Microbiology existed before we knew about it. We found out about these microbes 100 years ago, they caused a great debate in how we look at food but we did not stop eating. Food science is quantifying something that we already do every day, which is very different than information technology or other areas of study. Nanostructures exist in food already, how do we regulate and study new ones? How do we regulate their introduction?

This feels like a grandfathering issue. We are studying about something that we do every day. We learn more, but how do we apply that knowledge to practices that have existed for so long that they are part of our cultural wisdom? Should we challenge that conventional wisdom? These are significant cultural issues that are not easily addressed.