Mouth-watering meals see test tubes, not plates

BELTON, Mo. (AP) -- Thirteen cooks bustle in a steam-filled church kitchen, filleting catfish, frying lamb chops, roasting eggplant and stirring up soup -- 250 pounds of food, all bought with federal tax dollars.
Despite the tantalizing smells, nobody gets to eat these meals: Food and Drug Administration scientists will pull them apart, hunting for pesticides and other contaminants lurking in the food supply, and counting the nutrients.
This is the backbone of the nation's patchwork food-safety system, a massive yet little-known program that monitors Americans' favorite menus -- from Oreo cookies to tuna casserole, Budweiser to home-brewed iced tea -- for a long list of chemicals, bad and good.
And it hinges largely on one group of retired women, many in their 70s and 80s, in this rural spot of middle America. The women, all volunteers, gather in the tiny basement kitchen of Belton United Methodist Church on 16 Friday mornings a year to whip up feasts that land in test tubes instead of on dinner plates.
"Bacon, hot bacon," comes the warning cry, and Margaret Kershaw sidesteps the sizzling tray passing by. She deftly cuts squishy beef livers and drops them into pans of oil, a pink gingham apron catching spatters.
No-frills cooking
The amateur chefs learned quickly not to add secret spices or ice the cakes too elegantly -- the scientists neither taste nor admire before dissecting. The cooks must precisely follow FDA's recipes, carefully mixing ingredients bought in different cities for a nationally representative sample of meals.
"It's painting a picture of the American diet," explains FDA chemist Chris Sack, who heads the pesticide-hunting branch of the program, called the Total Diet Study.
The U.S. food-safety system consists of a hodgepodge of agencies that mostly monitor fields, factories and shipping ports to ensure food makers and sellers follow quality and safety rules. When the Environmental Protection Agency checks pesticide levels, for instance, it tests a watermelon's rind to see if the farmer sprayed the right kind and amount.
But people don't eat the rind, so that testing says little about what chemicals we actually absorb.
Enter the Total Diet Study. It measures traces of chemicals in the average diet -- levels some 20 times lower than other food-monitoring programs can detect -- both in packaged foods and after consumers wash produce, mix up ingredients and properly cook a meal.
This year-in, year-out monitoring enables health officials to spot whether changes in food production or the environment affect food quality. In response, they can launch medical research, alter regulations or, if a problem is bad enough, recall a brand.
And ever wonder why cereal always comes in plastic bags inside the box? Because this testing once uncovered PCBs leaching into wheat cereal by contact with its package, a box made of recycled paper that contained the cancer-causing pollutant.
This year's results
So far this year, FDA has discovered traces of illegal pesticides on some grapefruit, tomatoes and collard greens, not enough for a health risk but a mystery yet to be solved.
What started 40 years ago as checking a few foods for fallout from nuclear testing today is a $5 million canvassing of the food supply.
Four times a year, FDA employees enter grocery stores in three different cities with identical lists so long -- 9 dozen eggs, 6 pounds of bacon, gallons of soda, cases of baby food -- they dare not shop on crowded coupon days. With a few stops at fast-food restaurants to round out the menu, they can spend $3,000 per city.
They quick-ship purchases to an FDA laboratory in Lenexa, Kan., where workers sort the food, sending ingredients that need cooking on to the nearby Belton church ladies.
Inside the lab, giant blenders grind foods into mush so scientists can test for more than 300 pesticides, cancer-causing dioxins and industrial chemicals. This year, for the first time, they're also hunting acrylamide, a possibly cancer-causing chemical formed when foods are cooked at high temperatures.
Nutrients
They count nutrients, too. Soon, FDA will learn how much folate, which prevents birth defects, women eat -- the first evidence of whether recent fortification of bread and cereal is working well enough.
One rule of thumb: More processing typically means less pesticide residue. A raw peach, even washed and peeled, usually has more than a canned peach, says FDA's Sack.
Second rule of thumb: The fattier a food, the more chemicals from the environment or processing can cling to it. With stick butter or margarine, for example, "you eat a bucketload of industrial compounds from that wrapper," Sack says, adding, "They're probably harmless."