Buying food that is produced as safely and healthy as possible isn’t always easy. In an evolving market crowded with claims, it’s hard to always know whether you are making the right choice. Some questions on people’s minds–How was my food grown? Where was it grown? Were there lots of chemical and drug inputs? Are there lots of food additives? Are there things that aren’t disclosed? Do the farmworkers who produced the food make a living wage? Did the animals raised for meat, dairy and eggs lead a clean and healthy life? Knowing which labels can truly help make better food purchases and which ones don’t is key to translating our expectations of better food into true marketplace demand which feeds back to better supply chains and sometimes, even better government policies.
Additional Clips of Consumer Report’s Food Work:
Better Beef
https://www.wnyc.org/story/one-more-reason-avoid-conventional-ground-beef/
Food Labels
https://www.wnyc.org/story/please-explain-food-labels-and-what-natural-really-means/
Consumer Reports Natural Label Campaign
Speaker: Dr. Urvashi Rangan, Director of Consumer Safety and Sustainability at Consumers Reports
About Dr. Urvashi Rangan
Urvashi leads the Consumer Reports Consumer Safety and Sustainability Group. She is also the Executive Director of CR’s Food Safety and Sustainability Center and its website greenerchoices.org. She manages a team of public health based scientists in testing, research, risk assessment, analysis, and advocacy/lobby work for safety and food sustainability. She also manages ratings and related advocacy work for food eco-labels. Under her direction, over the past two years, Consumer Reports released several reports on food safety and food labeling including arsenic in grains part 2, 4-MEI cancer risk from caramel color in sodas, GMOs in processed foods, shrimp safety and production, chicken, beef, antibiotics in meat production and the results of national polling on food labeling and campaign to ban the “natural” label on food. She also led strategic efforts on detergent pod safety including Consumer Reports’ current position to not recommend liquid laundry pods for households with children under age 6. She is a national spokesperson and scientific expert for the organization and currently serves on the FDA Food Advisory Committee as well as on the Board of the American National Standards Institute. She has a Ph.D. in Environmental Health from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and has been at Consumer Reports for 16 years.