1989-1993 Safe Food

Roger’s work as director of Americans for Safe Food initiative included responsibility for liaison with more than sixty local Safe Food organizations, and for political and media work on the full range of food safety and organic farming issues.

Article published in “NUTRITION ACTION: Health Newsletter” – Signed, Certified…& Organic -1992

November 1992, by Roger Blobaum Q: Is organic food completely free of pesticides? A: Not necessarily. It sometimes contains trace amounts of synthetic chemicals. Q: How can that happen? A: There are lots of ways. Pesticides can be carried to organic fields by irrigation water, rain, wind-blown dust, fog, and drift from spray that has been applied elsewhere. And even if that doesn’t happen, the soil in which organic foods are grown could contain traces of chemicals that were used years ago. There is so much “background” chemical pollution on our farmland that it’s impossible to make a claim for absolutely residue-free food. In some soils the contamination is so bad that it could take years for all the chemicals to disappear.

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Presentation on Food Safety at the National IPM Forum 1992

Presentation by Roger Blobaum, Blobaum and Associates, At The National IPM Forum, Washington, D.C., June 19, 1992 I appreciate very much the opportunity to participate in this forum. I am impressed by the amount of preparatory work that was done. I have been part of a national food safety dialogue the last two years and am especially pleased to see several of the participants here. We encountered each other initially in an adversarial setting. I have learned a lot from them about pest management and value them now as professional colleagues and friends. I was surprised at how many speakers the first day felt compelled to declare that our food supply is safe. Most Americans don’t believe that.

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Article published in “The Environmental Magazine” – Eating As If the Earth Mattered 1992

The Environmental Magazine | Eating As If the Earth Mattered Click for pdf file: January/February 1992 | Eating as if the Earth Mattered By Roger Blobaum and Lisa Lefferts January/February 1992 Environmentally savvy consumers steer clear of toxic cleaners, bleached coffee filters and plastic bags at the supermarket, and fret about the recyclability of containers. But most of us barely give the environment a second thought when it comes to choosing food, the product we buy most often at the grocery store.  But besides profoundly affecting our health, our food choices greatly affect the environment.

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Presentation on the Food Safety Panel to the Western Association of State Departments of Agriculture | 1989

Roger Blobaum speaking on the Food Safety Panel, Western Association of State Departments of Agriculture, Seattle, Washington, August 14, 1989 We were pleased to accept your invitation to participate in this food safety panel and want to thank you for giving it a prominent place on your program.  Consumer pressure, as you know, is pushing the safe food issue higher on the political agenda in state capitals and in Washington.

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Speech titled Nutrition And How Food Is Grown 1970s

By Roger Blobaum, exact date unknown – written in the 1970s We think of nutrition as a personal responsibility.  Or, perhaps more accurately, as the responsibility of the mothers of the family. We might assume, then, that bad nutrition is simply the result of bad mothering and that it can be corrected by the education of mothers. I want to question this common assumption and to suggest that problems of bad nutrition reflect bad public policy rather than unin­formed

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