News Update
March 8, 2010

Ohio Program to Help Expand Food Producers’ Businesses

A national program connecting food producers to local restaurants, grocery stores and wholesale buyers is being launched in Ohio. The first training workshop takes place March 9. Retail Ready is supported by the Ohio Direct Marketing Team, which includes leadership from Ohio State University (OSU) Extension and representatives from the Ohio Department of Agriculture (ODA), as well as other state and local partners.

“ODA is helping launch this initial rollout, and the program is evolving with support from the national MarketMaker network, the Ohio Food Policy Council, Market Connections Task Force and others,” said Julie Fox, OSU Extension direct marketing and tourism development state specialist. “A number of Extension personnel have also been involved in the development of the program and the plans for this initial rollout.”

Retail Ready is designed to prepare Ohio food producers in taking the next steps to expand their business, as well as increase business relationships with existing customers. University of Kentucky (UK) developed the national program and Ohio is one of the first states to provide the educational training sessions to producers throughout the state.

“Growth in demand for local foods, together with the growth in direct marketing by small- and medium-scale producers amplifies the need for grower training on what buyers need to more readily fit into their buying conventions,” said Tim Wood of UK. “Most buyers are anxious to work with local growers to market their local products, but have also expressed frustration at the lack of grower awareness of their preferred buying practices. This training should help growers and retailers build more successful market relationships.”

The inaugural March 9 training program will be at the Nationwide & Ohio Farm Bureau 4-H Center from 8:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. The 4-H Center is located at 2201 Fred Taylor Drive in Columbus, Ohio. For more information, contact Lori Panda at 614-466-8798.

Other training sessions scheduled include:

• Peninsula, March 17, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.; Contact: Christy Eckstein, 614-728-6438 or Amalie Lipstreu, 614-466-6198.
  
• Xenia, March 23, 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.; Contact: Beth Bridgeman, 937-372-9971 or Brian Raison, 937-440-3945.
  
• Athens, April 5, 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.; Contact: Leslie Schaller, 740-592-3854.
  
• Bowling Green, April 13, 4-7 p.m.; Contact: Paula Ray, 419-823-3099.
  

To request a registration form or to receive more information, contact the Ohio Proud office at 1-800-467-7683 or by e-mail at ohioproud@agri.ohio.gov. Retail Ready program information is also available by visiting http://directmarketing.osu.edu.

— by Candace Pollock, OSU News and Media Relations.

BestFoodFacts.org — Food, Fiber and Fuel Questions Answered

Consumers these days have questions about where their food, fiber and some renewable fuels originate. The United Soybean Board is encouraging them to access a new resource to find answers to their questions. Developed by the Center for Food Integrity, BestFoodFacts.org, hosts a venue for experts from universities across the country to weigh in on what’s true, plausible, unknown, misguided or just plain false.

Some topics being discussed now include:

• technology’s role in feeding the expanding global population;
  
• animal welfare on modern farms;
  
• the price of food around the world; and
  
• truths about organic and nonorganic food.
  

— Adapted from news release provided by the United Soybean Board.

Food Labels With Microbial Data Could Help Manage Physical, and Possibly Mental, Health

Just as food labels now tell the content of fat, fiber, vitamins and minerals, food scientists believe the information one day will include all bacteria and fungi in the product.

“Like a nutritional profile, we are creating a microbial profile,” said Suresh Pillai, Texas AgriLife Research food microbiologist and director of the National Center for Electron Beam Research at Texas A&M University. “We are very interested in how microorganisms behave in food, and we treat all microorganisms as opportunistic pathogens.”

Knowing what microbes are in foods could become increasingly important as researchers continue to discover ways the tiny organisms affect human mental and physical health, he noted.

“Every part of the human body is colonized by very unique microorganisms that are providing functionality to humans. It’s not that they are contaminants. If you removed them, then there would be physiological effects in humans,” said Pillai, who has presented the findings with graduate student Katherine McElhany at the American Society for Microbiology meeting.

He pointed out that microbes predate humans by millions of years. If the history of the Earth was compared to months in a year, he said, microbes would have developed by Feb. 28 and humans would have come along on Dec. 31.

“We are never going to rule the microbes,” Pillai said.

Further, he said, for every one human cell in the world, there are 10 microbes.

With that ratio of bacteria to people, Pillai and colleagues have been studying how these organisms behave in the human body.

One thing that is known, he said, is that bacterial cells communicate via autoinducer or “signaling” molecules that communicate a variety of messages between cells.

“We’re also using a lot of our effort looking at how these organisms communicate with one another in the food,” Pillai said. “For example, if you have two or three cells of salmonella in orange juice, will all the protein expression in these bacterial cells be similar if the same salmonella cells were present in apple juice or in ground beef or chicken meat? We really do not have a clear understanding about that.”

One signaling molecule in particular — the AI-2 molecule — has been shown in Pillai’s lab to control a pathogen such as salmonella, causing it to behave differently when the organism is in different products — in ground beef vs. poultry meat, for example.

AI-2 is associated with salmonella, E. coli, streptococcus, clostridium and other such pathogenic bacteria.

Different fatty acids in the products influence AI-2 activity, Pillai pointed out, as did the method in which the food was processed or prepared.

“The poultry meat and ground beef have certain fatty acids in them that actually would moderate the level of AI-2,” he said. “We also found out that the virulence genes respond differently based on how meats are processed — if it’s cooked, uncooked, etc.

“In other words, the food material the organisms reside in will have a differential effect whether the microbe survives and how virulent it is,” Pillai said.

He said the study implies that the virulence of a potentially pathogenic microorganism can be modified in different foods and substrates.

“Infective doses could vary for the same organism in different foods and substrates and this has important ramifications for microbial risk assessment,” Pillai added.

Not only is this information important for daily food consumption, he said, but it potentially could have impact over the lifelong development of people from infancy.

“A question we have is ‘What is the net result of these interactions in terms of how the gastrointestinal tract develops in infants, what happens in adults, how does this impact chronic ailments like obesity’?” he said. “At what age are we sentenced to a particular microbiome, or environment of microbes in our systems?”

Information the researchers have gleaned from the study may ultimately help “fingerprint” foods for microbial data, which could be relayed to people for choosing foods that are best for their conditions.

— by Kathleen Phillips, Texas AgriLife Extension News.

— Compiled by Shauna Rose Hermel, editor, Angus Productions Inc.