Here we have the great irony of modern nutrition: at a time when hundreds of millions of people do not have enough to eat, hundreds of millions more are eating too much and are overweight or obese.

One can only be in awe of the creativity of chocolate marketers. My take is that if there is a health benefit, it is small.

These days the biggest issue is how many calories you consume. So all of this stuff distracts people from thinking about calories.

Here we have the great irony of modern nutrition: at a time when hundreds of millions of people do not have enough to eat, hundreds of millions more are eating too much and are overweight or obese.

Food safety oversight is largely, but not exclusively, divided between two agencies, the FDA and the USDA. The USDA mostly oversees meat and poultry; the FDA mostly handles everything else, including pet food and animal feed. Although this division of responsibility means that the FDA is responsible for 80% of the food supply, it only gets 20% of the federal budget for this purpose. In contrast, the USDA gets 80% of the budget for 20% of the foods. This uneven distribution is the result of a little history and a lot of politics.

There are loopholes big enough to drive trucks through. And Congress needs to take a look at those laws and make sure that they're much more rigorous.

You need to identify the steps at which contamination can occur - those are the critical control points. You take steps to make sure that that doesn't happen. And you monitor and evaluate and test to make sure that your system is working properly. And if it's done diligently and done faithfully and monitored carefully, then they're producing safe food. And no astronaut of which I'm aware has ever gotten food poisoning in outer space.