The Year in Food: 2010's Best, Worst and Most Delicious Food Stories

Some will argue that 2010 was the year that homemade sausage finally came of age, or the year the school garden movement exploded. Others will remember 2010 as the year KFC's Double Down sandwich made its glorious debut. With so many food preferences and priorities, you can hardly make an end-of-year food list to please everyone, so lets start with what the people think. Some of them, anyway.  

A market research firm called Wakefield surveyed 1,000 Americans on what they felt was "the most significant food story of 2010." Interestingly, the top three stories were threats to food safety: The impact of the BP oil spill on the seafood industry, the nationwide egg recall, and the recall of 35,000 pounds of beef when E. coli was detected at a Southern California distributor. (Story #4 was "Calorie count on menus goes national.")  

This public perception makes the current food safety bill especially timely. The bill finally got though Congress a few weeks ago before being sent back on a technicality as part of a Republican endgame on tax cuts. To the surprise of many, it was revived by the Senate again and then passed by the House in the waning days of the congressional session and now will be signed by Obama. Following closely on the food safety bill's heels, the landmark Child Nutrition Act suffered no such snags and is was just signed by Obama.  

Another important policy move went down in February, when USDA modified its organic standards for beef and dairy. The new "Access to Pasture" rule, named after an infamous longstanding loophole in the organic standards, finally specified a minimum number of days per year that organic cattle must spend on pasture to qualify as organic. The requirement raises the bar especially for the large producers trying to qualify as organic, forcing them to more truly live up to organic principles. For small milk and meat producers, and the consumers who are willing to pay a little extra for their product, this clarity in the law is welcome.  

In other bovine product related developments, USDA has apparently gotten serious about investigating the many ways that unregulated pharmaceuticals are getting into our meat and dairy. An April report by the USDA's Office of the Inspector General called out its own agency for its near total lack of oversight in recent, decades, and made recommendations for reform.  

In other livestock pharmaceutical news, the FDA finally released estimates, in December, for the first time ever, of total antibiotic use in the nation's livestock industry. In 2009, that figure was 29 million pounds, most of it for non-therapeutic use -- to expedite weight gain, for instance. Such use is partly why there's an epidemic of antibiotic-resistant staph, or MRSA, in feedlots. The report expresses FDA's newfound intention to curb antibiotic use in agriculture.  

Amid this climate of agency self-examination, my pick for the sleeper story of the year was broken by a Colorado beekeeper named Tom Theobald. Concerned about annual losses in his colonies that had grown to 40 percent, he began to suspect an agricultural chemical called clothianidin that is used in area corn fields. The Bayer-patented neurotoxin has been used in seed coatings since 2003, though Bayer's permission to market it was granted conditionally, dependent on the submission of evidence that it was safe for bees.  

Theobald tracked down a lengthy correspondence between Bayer and the EPA in which Bayer repeatedly stalled and EPA granted numerous extensions until Bayer finally conducted a study. That study was never released, and lay buried for years until Theobald, just trying to figure out what happened to his bees, finally found it online.