I picked up a jar of Bolani Sweet Jalapeno condiment the other day. Instead of the usual expiration warning found on condiments I noticed the label said no refrigeration necessary and that it “keeps for multiple years” with natural preservatives. It has only Bell Pepper, Jalapeno, Pepper, Vinegar, Sugar and Spice. Impressive. My jar is almost empty after just a few days but it still got me thinking about food security again.

The fact is only baby food and infant formula are required by federal law to have expiration dates. Spoiled food is of course a risk but expiration date stamps seems to appear everywhere now in America. This is echoed by sites like Slashfood when they report ketchup will go bad in just one month! It then suggests that high levels of sugar, often found in ketchup, can help preserve a food. Well, which is it? Something doesn’t smell right.

The obvious first counter-point is that sugar does not preserve food; mold and yeast thrive on sugar. Second, restaurants leave their ketchup out for more than a month. How can the usual hamburger and fry shop offer room temperature condiment without starting riots in the streets? Further explanation comes from Answers.com

My name is mike and i have worked for the FDA for 10 years. Rarely do we have someone die from expired ketchup. Normally we get around 50-100 cases of severe food poisoning a year from this food, but only 2 deaths have been linked to expired ketchup, specifically Heinz, over the past 5 years. Both cases were also linked to tomatoes grown in central California. The best way to prevent this is to throw away any food that expires within the same month being used. However, since the acidic properties of tomatoes that have gone bad work directly against the colon, a half cup of vinegar is highly effective in combating any sickness from the expired food product.

The acidity in tomatoes and vinegar are the preservatives. It perhaps can be said that high levels of salt, alcohol and oil were used traditionally to keep food from going bad. In some cultures the condiment was actually meant as the preservative for the food to which it was added. Condiments basically need no refrigeration; yet it still feels like a surprise to see a condiment label in America with so few ingredients also boast it will not spoil.

The bottom line seems to be that refrigeration of condiments is thought to be useful for flavor, not health, but health is an easier pitch. A look at other countries and cultures that do not depend on refrigeration (temperature control) reveals a lot about our own perceptions of security.

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Update: Slashfood expired in 2011.

AOL Axes Slashfood, Its Six-Year-Old Food Blog

A researcher from Stellenbosch University in South Africa claims to have developed a water filter the size of a tea bag. It thus can be fitted under the cap of a bottle. This significantly reduces the cost and inconvenience of water quality, as reported by BBC News

“We cover the tea bag material with nano-structured fibres, and instead of tea inside the tea bag, we incorporate activated carbon.

“The function of the activated carbon is to remove most of the dangerous chemicals that you would find in water.”

He says that the function of the fibres is to create a filter where harmful bacteria is physically filtered out and killed.

The BBC does not mention what quantity and speed of water can be filtered by a single bag. Those are the usual metrics but each bag is meant to be used only for a single serving just like tea.

The inventor, “past executive vice-president of global network of water professionals the International Water Association and a member of Coca-Cola’s global panel of water experts”, emphasizes the importance of decentralized solutions to help those most in need of water security.

A water security risk index of 165 nations, released by UK-based risk consultancy firm Maplecroft in June found that African and Asian nations had the most vulnerable water supplies, judged by factors such as availability of drinking water, demand per capita and dependence on rivers that flow through other countries. [Professor Eugene] Cloete adds that more than 90% of all cholera cases are reported in Africa, and 300-million people on the continent do not have access to safe drinking water.

“The ‘tea bag’ filter can show the way forward, as it represents decentralised, point-of-use technology. “It can assist in meeting the needs of people who live or travel in remote areas, or people whose regular water supply is not treated to potable standards. “As it is impossible to build purification infrastructure at every polluted stream, we have to take the solution to the people,” he notes.

A video on EuroNews says there is a process called “geographical provincing” that detects an element signature of plants — identifies the dirt where it was grown.

Apparently this type of research is being done (funded?) to trace drugs like heroin and marijuana. Science Daily has a detailed story on how this started and the goals of law enforcement — police in Alaska wanted to see if they could prove that marijuana seized in raids was grown at lower latitudes, and to see if they could defeat a “grown for personal use” argument.

The drug issues are interesting but the title and script of the EuroNews video raises a whole new debate. It suggests that someone is thinking about using these signatures for other types of plants. They give the example of Darjeeling Tea, which has at least three times the amount of tea labeled Darjeeling than is actually grown.

Almost 40 million kg is sold as “Darjeeling Tea” when the actual production capacity is just 10 million. Most of this teas comes from Sri Lanka and Kenya and in an effort to stop this market a logotype is developed. Some of the fake tea is called Lanka Darjeeling or Hamburg Darjeeling but most of the time it’s called Pure Darjeeling.

Is there demand for authenticity? Most people eat unauthentic meals without worry. Consider Wisconsin cheddar in America. Cheddar is the name of a village in England where the cheese is supposed to be from. Courts have ruled however that the name is now generic due to use by imitators so you can basically call anything you want a cheddar. Feta cheese, which has been far less copied, can keep its protected status. With this in mind it turns out that America has formally opposed the use of geographical indicators:

The stakes for the United States are high not only because of the potential loss of generic names, but also because the country uses certain marks–under U.S. trademark law–to protect geographical indications. U.S. agricultural product exports are potentially threatened because U.S. certification marks would not be protected. GI protection would take precedence over certification marks, as indicated in the EU proposal.

Harm from loss of generic names? Wine and Spirits, under Article 23 of TRIPS from the WTO, seems to be the only category supported by the US but even that is not safe, as I have written before here and here. Budweiser, for example, was a name copied from a company in the Czech Republic that used it for five hundred years before America even existed.

Thus, while element signatures and authenticity of a product sounds great for consumers it probably will be tied up in a complicated international legal battle over generics and imitations. It could be fun to imagine tea kettles that would test and only brew authentic leaves, or coffee pots that would alarm on unauthentic grounds (pun not intended), but history says the market will drive more innovation in imitation rather than warm up to tools that detect what is “real”. Maybe if they marketed it as a tool to detect what is safe? Nobody wants a potato from Chernobyl soil. Then again it might make more sense just to detect contaminants instead of geographic location.