The Real 'Test' Kitchen

Pesticides, toxic metals, industrial chemicals: If it's in your kitchen, they hope to find it in food concocted in theirs.

BELTON, Mo. - Thirteen cooks bustle in a steam-filled church kitchen, filleting catfish, frying lamb chops and roasting eggplant - 250 pounds of food, all bought with federal tax dollars.

Despite tantalizing smells, nobody gets to eat these meals: Food and Drug Administration scientists pull them apart, hunting for contaminants lurking in the food supply and counting nutrients.

The backbone of the nation's patchwork food-safety system, this massive yet little-known program monitors Americans' favorite menu items - from Oreo cookies to tuna casserole, Budweiser to home-brewed tea - for chemicals, bad and good.

And it hinges largely on one group of retired women, many in their 70s and 80s, who gather in the tiny basement kitchen of Belton United Methodist Church on 16 Friday mornings a year to whip up feasts that land in test tubes.

"Bacon, hot bacon," comes the warning cry, and Margaret Kershaw sidesteps the sizzling tray. The previous week she cut up "I don't know how many pounds of cabbage."

"Sometimes you think to yourself, "Well, this is a waste of food,' " says the briskly practical Kershaw, a retired nurse. " "Why do they need all those pans of bacon?' . . . But with all the tests they do, I guess they need that much."

The volunteer chefs precisely follow FDA's recipes, carefully mixing ingredients bought in different cities for a nationally representative sample of meals.

"It's painting a picture of the American diet," explains chemist Chris Sack, pesticide chief for FDA's Total Diet Study.

The Total Diet Study measures what contaminants we actually absorb - levels about 1/20th of what other food-monitoring programs can detect - both from packaged foods and after washing produce, mixing ingredients and properly cooking meals.

Bad contamination is rare. But it happens.

A pesticide sprayer was jailed after the FDA discovered he used an illegal bug-killer on 19-million bushels of oats headed for top-selling breakfast cereals.

And ever wonder why cereal always comes in plastic bags inside the box? This testing once uncovered cancer-causing PCBs leaching into cereal through the recycled paper in its box.

What started 40 years ago as checking a few foods for fallout from nuclear testing today is a $5-million canvassing of the food supply.

Four times a year, FDA employees enter grocery stores in three different cities with identical lists so long - 9 dozen eggs, 6 pounds of bacon, gallons of soda, cases of baby food - they can spend $3,000 per city.

Purchases are quick-shipped to an FDA laboratory in Lenexa, Kan., where workers send ingredients for cooking to the nearby Belton church ladies.

Inside the lab, giant blenders grind foods into mush to be tested for more than 300 pesticides, cancer-causing dioxins, toxic metals like mercury, and industrial chemicals. This year, for the first time, FDA also is hunting acrylamide, a possibly cancer-causing chemical formed by high-temperature cooking.

They count nutrients, too. Soon, the FDA will learn how much folate, which prevents birth defects, women eat - telling whether bread and cereal are fortified enough.

Finding contamination is painstaking.

Holding a flask filled with smushed yellow cake, Sack adds alcohols, solvents and salts - "pesticides hate salt" - and boils and siphons the mixture. A faintly yellow, oily skin rises to the top.

A sophisticated machine then isolates chemical molecules, identifying traces of methyl chlorpyrifos, an insecticide found in virtually any wheat-containing product "unless it's organic, and then there's no guarantee," Sack says.

The church ladies cook carefully to avoid tainting FDA's findings. They use a specially cleansed water supply to avoid contaminants from the local tap. They can't just wipe off a dropped biscuit.

They shrug off the sweaty work's national importance. "We're cooking for the federal government," they say, and earning their church $2,000 a year.

"It's wonderful fellowship," says Martha McKarnin, waving aside smoke from frying pork chops. "You go home and have to take a shower - you smell." But, she adds, "I'm an old farm gal, I'm used to hard work."

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