Apologies in advance, but you're just going to have to bear with me as I learn how to build awesome visualizations. It's my new thing. Behold, trends in the popularity of different cheese varieties from 1970-2007, based on data from the USDA Economic Research Service.

What's with that blue cheese spike in 1973?

Michael Pollan makes an interesting point about how we deal with food safety in the U.S. that I don't think I've heard articulated before. (You know, I think that fella is going places. Mark my words.) The context is a regional-based food system, which Pollan argues in favor of. You've likely heard some of the debates over whether the carbon footprint of local foods is really all that much smaller than foods trucked/flown/shipped in from elsewhere. But trying to eat foods within the same general range in which you might take a long weekend road trip has a lot going for it on other fronts. Pollan:

Food eaten closer to where it is grown is fresher and requires less processing, making it more nutritious, and whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience; regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks.

All well and good. But the part that caught my attention is that Pollan argues that one straightforward way of advancing regional eating would be to tweak our food safety regulations so that they're actually sensative to differences in scale. So, imagine a farmer raising and butchering a few dozen chickens for sale on her farm. Under this model, she'd be given a softer touch than a national processor sucking up chickens from near and far and spitting them back out across the country. Jane Farmer's ability to wreak havoc is simply less than Perdue's. Size is a factor, and so is location.

So you could develop a food regulation algorithm (I don't think it would need to be that complicated — I just like saying "algorithm") that takes them into account. The resources we'd save on regulating small producers could go to getting the FDA, USDA, and other responsible agencies to actually do the oversight many of us probably already expect that they're doing. You could even imagine that producers might find it worthwhile to go the route of inputting and outputting foods more regionally than they currently do. It's the sort of gentle nudge that might seem right up Obama's alley.

From his weekly address a few weeks back, which I happened to miss:

Obama certainly seems to have the contours of the food oversight debate down cold. Why, it's almost as if he's read this piece.

Seriously, though, without making any claim as to the quality of a piece of my own writing, I did hear from people that it was a relatively painless introduction to the details of how our federal food system in the United States currently works. So, if you're interested, hope you have a read. You might also check out the Safe Food Act long championed by Rep. DeLauro and Sen. Durbin.

Well, it's certainly reassuring to know that the New York Times thought it was a good story idea. Kim Severson and Andrew Martin cover some of the same ground on organic peanuts as I did yesterday.

You might have noticed that included in the salmonella-inspired peanut butter recall weren't just bargain-basement mass-market foods, but big-name organics like CLIF Kids bars and the like. That might not be all that surprising to us savvy (and disenchanted) modern eaters. But when you think back to the roots of the American organic movement — an handshake, literal or figurative, between farmer and eater that said the food passed between them was grown with a certain amount of care — you can start to think that we are a loooong way from what our 60s forebears meant for organics to be. Over at Science Progress, I took a look at the path of organics through the peanut butter recall situation, and hope you might have a look. (Photo by Robert Couse-Baker)

You see the dude shear the hair off his forearm like it was nothing?

For one brief, horrifying moment, I really did think that they somehow automagically cooked up in the shape of Mickey's head: