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.

What we know about diets hasn't changed. It still makes sense to eat lots of fruits and vegetables, balance calories from other foods, and keep calories under control. That, however, does not make front-page news.

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.

The standard four food groups are based on American agricultural lobbies. Why do we have a milk group? Because we have a National Dairy Council. Why do we have a meat group? Because we have an extremely powerful meat lobby.

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.

FDA, which regulates the safety of vegetables, doesn't have those kinds of rules because Congress doesn't want it to. It's not that the vegetables themselves have anything wrong with them; it's that they're contaminated with animal manure. One of the rationales for a single food safety agency is that you can't separate animals from vegetables.

The chef has kids complaining to their parents the food they get in school is better than what they get at home. He's turned this group of kids into curious, adventurous eaters.