The report itself[†] blames the pesticide residue on a "boomerang effect" from EU countries: EU countries export these banned pesticides to third countries, those countries use the banned pesticides on the food they grow, and then the EU countries import that food. In effect, EU companies are still profiting off of the sale and use of banned pesticides on food that Europeans will eat.
I know someone close who grows oranges in Spain. He has to go through hell, had to rework multiple times the fields so that they pass the strict Spanish regulation for organic produce. They get evaluated not only on the final product being pesticide free, but also on the full process being compliant, with heavy fines for non compliance.
This is fine-ish, except that the imported oranges get checked only seldomly (if that) and are given a lot of leeway, making it very hard to compete if you grow them locally. Last couple of years saw some profit for growing them locally, but it's been times where there was literally no profit at all for 5+ years.
Funny story: he requested a permit to build a well, and ofc it takes forever so he just waited. After 4-5 years waiting, having even forgotten about it, someone called him: "we're here to inspect the well". What well? You haven't given me permission yet. "yes, we know, but people build them anyway before getting permission so we thought you'd do the same".
There is an official eu organic label. It’s not compulsory of course, but it’s the baseline for organic food production in and for Europe. Other (private) labels have stricter rules and are usually certified in addition to the EU label.
Unfortunately this is an all too common pattern in the history of pesticides. In 1979 DBCP was banned in the US after factory workers became sterile. Dow Chemical happily shipped tons of it to be sprayed directly on banana workers in banana republics[0] by Dole/Chiquita/Del Monte. To this day Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, and Nicaragua have some of the highest rates of infertility, birth defects, and chronic illnesses in the world
This was just after the Gros Michel had gone basically extinct because of monocropping. The banana companies hired scientists to figure out what to do that almost universally recommended diversifying the crop. But they calculated that it'd actually be cheaper to just double down on pesticide application and start again with another monocrop.
There's an incredible documentary about the banana industry history (and practices that continue to this day like banana companies paying gangs to assassinate local labor leaders) called Bananaland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoRmtQht8-E
All but 2 countries in South America have had the experience of democratically electing a leader only to have them overthrown in a US-backed coup. The US/CIA started with this obsession with the 1954 Guatemalan Coup specifically to maintain Guatemala as a banana republic. Chiquita owned most land in Guatemala and left is uncultivated to stifle competition. Jacobo Árbenz wanted to (slightly) tax this land to reduce poverty. Chiquita hired Edward Bernays (yes, that guy. The father of modern public relations, nephew of Freud, etc) for an influence campaign and eventually got CIA to launch Operation PBSuccess in 1953. The CIA/Chiquita gave very extensive lists of political opponents to murder during the coup.
More banana varieties. The reason Panama Disease was so successful is because of the practice of cloning. Every single crop is the same genetics. Researchers warned that starting over with the Cavendish would result in the exact same thing again and the clear solution was to stop cloning the exact same plant and grow more types of bananas (there are more than 1,000 species of banana and tens of thousands of varieties around the world).
Now we're dealing with TR4 because of the Cavendish being grown in the exact same way but with an even heavier reliance on pesticides, slavery, and violent control over local power.
Only if you see the world in black and white and those pesticides being an absolute evil. But if you see it as a complicated tradeoff where whats right for one country can be wrong for another then it's unproblematic.
You cannot blame like this the administration when you make any regulatory mistake such as not knowing a rule or not being able to enforce it in practice.
It is amazing that we have regulations for everything and that when they cannot enforce it, they blame someone else.
Different way of dealing with people depending on who, not what.
That is one reason why I, at least try to, check the label and avoid products with non-EU ingredients.
Also one of my worries with the mercusour trade deal. And any deal that involves meat imports from the US, with specific laxer regulation requirements (at least what Trump would like).
They were never used in EU, what happened was that EU exports the pesticides and then they are used in other countries and then those food products are imported into EU.
So EU makes pesticides that itself bans from being used on their own fields. Which isn't that weird, it isn't the chemical that is banned it is using it as a pesticide that is banned.
More relevant is that 14 out of 64 samples had levels above the legally allowed limit (MRL), of which 12 pesticides that are not approved in the EU (page 12 of report). This is more severe than products 'containing' pesticides, which could as well be advancements in measurement.
The worrying part is not just that banned substances show up at trace levels, but that a non-trivial number of products were apparently over the legal limit
It's strange to me that this isn't the emphasis of the article.
I assume the MRL the lowest amount which could possibly cause harm? If so then why does it matter for the rest of the products where the levels are below that?
It could be for potential environmental harm, but then the fact that these are being exported at all should tell you that they're being used, you don't have to test consumer goods.
Their recommendations include this:
>2. Automatically lower all maximum residue levels (MRLs) of non-approved pesticides to the
limit of detection to prevent these substances from making their way back onto European
plates via a dangerous ‘boomerang effect
Cumin always shows up on these lists, whether it's with heavy metals or something else. It's to the point where I've more or less just stopped cooking with it because I don't trust it to be safe.
Get yourself a dehydrator and try making it yourself. I've started doing this with my herb garden and the catnip I grow for my cats. They much prefer the stuff I make than the stuff from the store as much as I enjoy my fresh dried (oxymoronic??) herbs. I haven't tried cumin yet. We'll see how the peppers in this years attempt at gardening goes.
I probably have a weird gene or something but cumin smells like disgusting body odour to me and any food that has any trace of it I cannot eat or I will gag
This doesn't happen to me with anything else, I'm not a picky eater and will happily eat literally anything else
You're not wrong. If you smell pure cumin (without any other spices or herbs), particularly if you grind and mix it with yogurt to make a salty lassi, you get a whiff of body odor. My kids called it "the BO drink".
It's a weird thing, but the smell becomes quite different in combination with other smells. It's an ingredient in many expensive perfumes, believe it or not! [1]
People don't even know. I had long assumed that it was only the obvious nylon pyramid tea bags that were plastic, and only recently discovered it's _all_ tea bags.
Organic is just green washing, it doesn’t mean no chemicals. Plenty of organic products contain toxic chemicals and heavy metals. Organic oats have been found to contain glyphosate. Organic spices have been found to contain heavy metals.
Organic means that no non-organic pesticides have been used in production. There are still organic ones available, which are less dangerous. Especially to the farmers who are the first ones to get exposed to the poisons we spread on the fields.
care to cite any decent research proving you point?
there's an extensive body of research on synthetics having no effect on human health, from goverment funded, private and independent research... if you access your country's official institution you'll see there's plenty of synthetics allowed in organic agriculture just because they mimic perfectly "organic" substances
interesting point too, is the lack of any extensive meta-analysis/studies on organic pesticide impact on health and plus the fact organic farm is rather poor (produce less than 2% of the global food) and usually if not always lack good machinery to spread pesticides on the recommended quantities science points out (which organic agriculture also has less literature on that too)
Why were they allowed in the first place, if "research" was enough? Science is not definitive, and what we believe to be an approximation of the truth today way be discovered to be totally wrong tomorrow. You are confusing science and religion.
Would you defend, for instance, that DDT and other organochlorine poisons are safe? They were the darling of scientists and agrobiz companies for a long time, until we discovered well that they were dangerous.
Of course, if we find a strict equivalent to a biopesticide that happens to be synthetical, it would be a good substitute. But most synthetic pesticides are not like this, unfortunately.
And what you say about the lack of studies regarding organic farming is a plain lie, it takes 30 seconds on google scholar to find it:
as many synthetic are developed... last time i was making an inventory of an exclusive corn and soybean high tech farm (selling on the hundreds millions USD) there was at least 45 different pesticides... some were distributed in a quantity of 10 mililiters! per hectare with machine with proper air filter at the cabine of the tractor never seen by the organic movement, which by the way, considering their ~ 30% increase in land, fertilizers and pesticides needs and their production totalling less than 2% of all the global food, feels quite a stretch to read author's conclusion of your last study...
your 2° cited study shows improvement on soil quality by variety/rotation, what it has to do with GMO technology? one literally can plant varied stuff while using synthetic pesticides... take a look on most health studies done in organics and health not controlling for life style factors, nor any major study even found dangerous levels of pesticides in food. don't get me wrong, there are niche cases were organic crops just make sense but when you start dismissing GMO technology for a 8 billion and growing world, which in decades will move out of the rural ambient (rural flight is an on going thing, literally no one wants to work in farms, much less in organic ones were the workload is much bigger, if not borderline on slavery (trust me, i did some WWOOF)), feels pure ignorancy out of greenwashing or small studies compared to what we rolled on science the past 30 years of GMO technology
Organic is a label which means something specific. Compliance with the definition is controlled by law, however imperfectly. It is not just greenwashing.
You are both correct. Organic means something specific. However what it means is not what most people think it means. People want healthy and good for the earth - that is not what organic gives you. Sometimes it does, but sometimes conventional ag (with all those scary chemicals) is better.
Yes, I get this argument. But everybody intuitively understands the basic proposition of organic. Namely: "We have not added anything to your food for which you don't have many thousands of years of evolutionary preparation." That is not pseudoscience, it's rational circumspection. Or, as the European Commission calls it, the "precautionary principle". Speaking for myself, I find it convincing.
Problem is we have modern science which in same cases has proven that the modern chemicals are less harmful. Remember lead was considered normal for many thousands of years
I used lead as an example only because everyone actually understands why it's harmful. There are a number of chemicals that are more harmful, common vinegar for example in the concentrations that are useful, but nobody understands it because nobody has actually read the safety information on such chemicals.
Modern science can only "prove" that something is not harmful on a timescale of a year or perhaps a decade, not a generation or more. If the precautionary principle had been applied in Roman times, lead would not have been considered safe. Nor asbestos, nor thalidomide, nor microplastics, nor a bunch of synthetic molecules - "proven safe" - that are routinely added to non-organic food in order to improve its yield or its cosmetic aspect or whatever. That was my point.
That is still better than organic, which doesn't even ask what science can show about chemicals. The obvious example is organic doesn't have GMOs, even though GMOs are the only foods we even try and prove safe. Everything else, what we just assumed, but nobody has ever actually checked.
But it is controlled for the wrong criterias.
"Natural" doesn't mean healthy or good for the environment.
It is only greenwashing and "appeal to nature" fallacy
In the UK, tea means tea bags and that normally means tea bags made of a plastic/paper mix. If I remember, the bag material is made and then they heat it up to get the plastic out, revealing the holes, needed for the bag.
Of late there has been criticism of microplastics in tea bags, and the posh organic bags have fared quite badly. Fancy sachets are not necessarily it.
As for chemicals, not one farmer spends any money than what is the bare minimum, no matter what they do. They might have to put all kinds of toxic chemicals on crops but they are not going to waste money over-doing it, because they are tight with the money, at all times, under all circumstances.
So the question has to be asked, is it worth worrying about the worrying levels of chemicals in tea when there are worrying levels of microplastics that the body really cannot get rid of with some liver-fu?
But, are there more toxins? The working class British way to have tea is with milk and two sugars. The milk is designed for baby cows, not grown men, they should be 'weaned off' because there are all kinds of things in dairy that might not be toxins, but could be considered to be. For example the cholesterol and saturated fat. Next the sugar, which is fine in moderation, so long as you don't care for your teeth, and, when combined with saturated fat, can contribute to type two diabetes.
Clearly opinions vary regarding the health aspects of milk and sugar in tea, my grandmother almost made it to a century, consuming plenty. However, you can reduce the toxic load from drinking tea by getting rid of the microplastics by using plant-based teabags (even LIDL have them), not having milk and sugar in the tea and, only then, getting concerned about buying organic.
Organic does not mean no nasty chemicals, it means no synthetic nasty chemicals. However, it is still a good nice-to-have, but, realistically, if you want to cut your exposure to toxins, there are these other huge areas that are under our control, but those things are going to be controversial lifestyle choices. Just not using cars 'could' reduce your toxic load far more than any organic teabag.
I am more worried about heavy metals and pesticide in tea than the micro plastics in the teabag. There is more tea than bag after all. Furthermore the ground tea found in teabags potentially release more pesticides/heavy metals compared to loose tea leaves you brew in a teapot.
> A 2024 meta-analysis found that odd-chain and longer-chain saturated fatty acids were negatively associated with the risk of cardiovascular disease, including stroke.
Just a note that the majority of these detections report the lowest amount chemistry can reliably quantify. Not the danger level, the known biological effect level, the smallest amount where chemistry can say they're statically confident the substance is present in a known amount.
Modern gas chromatography is ridiculously sensitive.
They don't "poison the people" unless the pesticides are found in a toxic dose (they are not).
Of course, the legal limits are purposefully designed to be well below the LOAEL, and those companies that were found to contain levels above them should face consequences. But to claim they "poison the people" isn't true.
If we really want to be precise, we should talk about parts per million (PPM). Scientific research establishes a safe level of consumption in terms of PPM, below which there are no detectable health effects. Generally when you see alarmism about "pesticides found in food" they're orders of magnitude below the PPM that would have any effect on human health.
Exactly, scientific research established that DDT was perfectly safe, too! Scientists even used to eat it to "prove" that it was safe.
In reality it depends, being biology, "safe level" is also very relative since you don't know every effect the substance has on the body.
That's why pesticides and other chemicals such as bisphenols are regularly phased out, since effects can appear long after "scientific research" established it was "safe". Or it can affect certain populations, such as farmers, who get a high dose, or children, who are more sensitive than adults.
Others, such DDT, lead or cadmium, are accumulated in the body over a long period, and then start to show effects, even when the person has stopped eating it. Or can find their way later the food chain: Inuits would get poisoned when eating polar bear's meat, that was full of DDT from fields on the other side of the globe.
We update our beliefs as we get new data. There's not much else we can do.
There's a common thought pattern among conspiracy theorists. "Some conspiracies turn out to be real" so that justifies their belief in their very specific conspiracy theory. The same pattern occurs when we talk about chemicals in our diet or the environment. "Some chemicals turn out to be dangerous" but that doesn't prove that a specific concentration of a specific chemical is doing anything, unless we have data to support the claim.
We have seen over and over again chemicals which are "safe to consume" or "not that bad" actually do have very severe effects. It's just very hard to link cause and effect. When someone dies of cancer we can't pinpoint it to coming from the pesticide on the blueberries they ate a few months ago.
We have all these terrible illnesses that we ascribe to bad luck, and then all of these new chemicals we haven't fully studied yet being sprayed on everything.
Even things we know for certain aren't "safe to consume" are harmless at small enough doses. If I drink chlorine at 1000 PPM it's going to kill me, but drinking it at 1 PPM (roughly the amount added to drinking water in many places, and well below the level in swimming pools) is considered harmless to humans and kills pathogens, so it's a net positive. It's possible that chlorine at 1 PPM causes cancer, but that's a claim that would require evidence.
The same argument applies to pesticide or any other substance. Without talking about specific numbers, it's just speculation.
Wasn't the EU fresh from a scandal that they voted all sorts of laws, sued lots of EU companies, and then allowed Chinese companies to import lots of stuff that obviously violated all those laws for 20+ years?
From safety regulations to baby toys with lead paint.
The EU has allowed large scale imports of chinese fake honey for the last 20 years.
All of the beekeeper associations complain about it, regularly conduct lab tests with honeys from supermarkets, most of them being not honey, or mixed with fake honey.
The EU of course has done nothing : the beekeepers aren't powerful enough to distribute the right bribes to the right people. Meanwhile the consumers buy glucose syrup at 15€/kg.
No, it's up to the EU to stop imports from China. It's not possible for individual countries to do it:
- Lab testing is complex, requires to identify the DNA of pollens in honey and few countries can do it at the moment.
- Honeys are mixed, so it's trivial to receive fake honey in a country that allows it, mix it, and reexport to another one that forbids it. Same happens with olive oils, no one cares.
- Many brands just lie, given that there is no enforcement regarding food traceability and safety in general in the EU (it's a meme to reassure consumers). Where I live a brand advertising "locally made honey" was found to sell glucose syrup : nothing happened.
It's one of the richest food cultures in the world. If you've never tried sichuan peppercorn on mapo tofu, or pickled mustard greens on noodle dishes, I think you're in for a real treat.
In terms of fresh meat and vegetables, it's pretty much all grown/produced in Australia. Anything canned / dried is often imported though. Things like rice or coffee beans you technically can buy Australian grown but you'd have to go out of your way to find it.
There are all kinds of toxic residues and contaminants in the US food supply because there's a lack of testing, lack of regulation, lack of enforcement, and a lack of the precautionary principle. Meanwhile, farmers will continue spraying RoundUp on oats just before harvest, rice grown in the US will contain arsenic from naturally-occurring contaminated soils, and almost all bread contains toxic crap banned in the rest of the world.
You’re the worst at everything when you’re the only one measuring it. There are parts of the world where vegetables are grown next to where factories dump toxic waste. Pretty sure no one is measuring that.
Agreed. Nobody really talks about most other countries, while the US is pretty much top of the list of nearly every topic. So we're constantly a target.
> while the US is pretty much top of the list of nearly every topic
s/is/was
The US is trying really hard to lower its position on these lists. The US has not been near the top of reading/writing/arithmetic in a long time. The US is undoing a lot of federal regulations by eliminating/reducing agencies meant to regulate things like EPA, FDA, Dept of Education.
This article is about the EU food supply, and does not appear to attribute the contaminants to US exports. Why are you bringing American cultivation practices into this?
If anything, this OP demonstrates that the EU regulations are futile (though that may be an overstatement).
The United States has far stricter labeling standards than the EU. That's why US products appear to have more ingredients, they are required to say what their ingredients are mad from, even on identical products.
Many things that are well known memes are completely false. Not everything in the EU is better regulated. Everyone always complains about chlorinated chicken, not realizing that <5% of US chicken is washed that way as chicken now uses vinegar washes, and those that did were at concentrations deemed safe by the FDA.
> The United States has far stricter labeling standards than the EU
Source for that? All I can find says EU have stricter labeling standards except for forum comments such as yours here.
Edit:
> Many things that are well known memes are completely false
To me it looks like "USA shows more additives due to harsher labeling standards" is just a meme, everything I've seen says Europe has stricter requirements on what you need to say about additives. So USA having much more additives listed comes from American products having more additives in them, not everything is better in USA.
The European approach to food additives is visible. The EFSA assigns a 3- or 4-digit code to every food additive, and that number must be included on food labels if it’s used in a product. The EFSA believes this system makes it easier for consumers to look up and memorize specific additives.
In the US, those same additives are required to be printed out in full.
EU labels are not required to list as much information about nutrients in a product as compared to US food labels. Plus, they often omit such items as saturated fat, fiber, and sugar.
> but for Food related stuff, EU standards and regulation are truly superior for consumers, relative to US and other countries
That is mostly a myth. EU and US take different approaches to setting food safety regulations, which means they have different lists of banned substances. The EU bans a lot of substances that have no evidence of actual adverse effects just out of an abundance of caution or sometimes even because of uninformed public perception, which is why their regulations seem more comprehensive, but the vast majority of that has no real positive effect on consumers.
In terms of actual food safety, the US is basically the same as the EU (it technically ranks even higher than most EU countries on the "Quality and Safety" criterion of the Global Food Security Index, but the top countries are all very close)
(Before anyone accuses me of something, I live in the EU and generally prefer EU in terms of lawmaking and regulations. It's just that food safety specifically is a point of comparison which is much less true than people usually think)
The message you respond to talks about "food stuff", which is admitedly blurry. You focus on food safety, which is very good in the US. But the EU also regulates heavily food quality and sustainability, and it usually shows IMO.
An odd exception to that trend is dairy products (thanks to the hard work of various US Dairy Councils). Ice Cream, sold as "Ice Cream" in the United States, is vastly superior to most anything you'll find in the rest of the world.
10% milk fat (more exactly 1.6 lb per pre-mixed gallon, but that's simply a bizarre way of phrasing it), no more than half air by volume. 6-10% other dairy solids (lactose, whey).
Compare with the UK: at least 5% fat (no cows need be involved)
France requires 5% milkfat, Germany at least requires the 10% milk fat, but no further requirements.
Canada pretends to be at 10%, but if you add any flavoring at all that can go down to 8%.
> If anything, this OP demonstrates that the EU regulations are futile (though that may be an overstatement).
Nothing said that EU farmers used these pesticides, its related to imports. And even most imports they tested were in the legal limit even though they are from areas where these things are legal.
I agree the situation is shitty in the US, but what does that have to do with pesticides banned in the EU? It seems entirely superfluous to this to this story.
[†] https://www.foodwatch.org/fileadmin/-INT/pesticides/banned_p...
This is fine-ish, except that the imported oranges get checked only seldomly (if that) and are given a lot of leeway, making it very hard to compete if you grow them locally. Last couple of years saw some profit for growing them locally, but it's been times where there was literally no profit at all for 5+ years.
Funny story: he requested a permit to build a well, and ofc it takes forever so he just waited. After 4-5 years waiting, having even forgotten about it, someone called him: "we're here to inspect the well". What well? You haven't given me permission yet. "yes, we know, but people build them anyway before getting permission so we thought you'd do the same".
Organic labels are a different thing than official regulation though. IMHO organic labels optimize for the wrong things.
This was just after the Gros Michel had gone basically extinct because of monocropping. The banana companies hired scientists to figure out what to do that almost universally recommended diversifying the crop. But they calculated that it'd actually be cheaper to just double down on pesticide application and start again with another monocrop.
There's an incredible documentary about the banana industry history (and practices that continue to this day like banana companies paying gangs to assassinate local labor leaders) called Bananaland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoRmtQht8-E
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic
So what's really the difference?
Now we're dealing with TR4 because of the Cavendish being grown in the exact same way but with an even heavier reliance on pesticides, slavery, and violent control over local power.
Shouldn't EU ban ideally exports of good that it bans internally?
How can anyone entertain that belief unless:
a) they think people in other countries have a different biology
b) profits matter more than the health of people in other countries (mostly former colonies of Europe)
It is amazing that we have regulations for everything and that when they cannot enforce it, they blame someone else.
Different way of dealing with people depending on who, not what.
Also one of my worries with the mercusour trade deal. And any deal that involves meat imports from the US, with specific laxer regulation requirements (at least what Trump would like).
So using these pesticides only on products for export makes utterly no sense!
So EU makes pesticides that itself bans from being used on their own fields. Which isn't that weird, it isn't the chemical that is banned it is using it as a pesticide that is banned.
Problematic products are: Peppers, dried (6x), Cumin (3x), Rice grain (2x), Tea leaves and stalks (1x), Non-fermented tea leaves (1x), Mix of spices (1x).
I assume the MRL the lowest amount which could possibly cause harm? If so then why does it matter for the rest of the products where the levels are below that?
It could be for potential environmental harm, but then the fact that these are being exported at all should tell you that they're being used, you don't have to test consumer goods.
Their recommendations include this:
>2. Automatically lower all maximum residue levels (MRLs) of non-approved pesticides to the limit of detection to prevent these substances from making their way back onto European plates via a dangerous ‘boomerang effect
But is this scientifically supported?
This doesn't happen to me with anything else, I'm not a picky eater and will happily eat literally anything else
You're not wrong. If you smell pure cumin (without any other spices or herbs), particularly if you grind and mix it with yogurt to make a salty lassi, you get a whiff of body odor. My kids called it "the BO drink".
It's a weird thing, but the smell becomes quite different in combination with other smells. It's an ingredient in many expensive perfumes, believe it or not! [1]
[1] https://www.fragrantica.com/news/CUMIN-Polarizing-Note-of-Sw...
there's an extensive body of research on synthetics having no effect on human health, from goverment funded, private and independent research... if you access your country's official institution you'll see there's plenty of synthetics allowed in organic agriculture just because they mimic perfectly "organic" substances
interesting point too, is the lack of any extensive meta-analysis/studies on organic pesticide impact on health and plus the fact organic farm is rather poor (produce less than 2% of the global food) and usually if not always lack good machinery to spread pesticides on the recommended quantities science points out (which organic agriculture also has less literature on that too)
Why were they allowed in the first place, if "research" was enough? Science is not definitive, and what we believe to be an approximation of the truth today way be discovered to be totally wrong tomorrow. You are confusing science and religion.
Would you defend, for instance, that DDT and other organochlorine poisons are safe? They were the darling of scientists and agrobiz companies for a long time, until we discovered well that they were dangerous.
Of course, if we find a strict equivalent to a biopesticide that happens to be synthetical, it would be a good substitute. But most synthetic pesticides are not like this, unfortunately.
And what you say about the lack of studies regarding organic farming is a plain lie, it takes 30 seconds on google scholar to find it:
- Farmers in organic farms are less exposed to health effects of synthetic pesticides: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784...
- Organic farming improve soils and yields: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1658077X2...
- Review on organic food quality and health effects: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s12940-017-031...
as many synthetic are developed... last time i was making an inventory of an exclusive corn and soybean high tech farm (selling on the hundreds millions USD) there was at least 45 different pesticides... some were distributed in a quantity of 10 mililiters! per hectare with machine with proper air filter at the cabine of the tractor never seen by the organic movement, which by the way, considering their ~ 30% increase in land, fertilizers and pesticides needs and their production totalling less than 2% of all the global food, feels quite a stretch to read author's conclusion of your last study...
your 2° cited study shows improvement on soil quality by variety/rotation, what it has to do with GMO technology? one literally can plant varied stuff while using synthetic pesticides... take a look on most health studies done in organics and health not controlling for life style factors, nor any major study even found dangerous levels of pesticides in food. don't get me wrong, there are niche cases were organic crops just make sense but when you start dismissing GMO technology for a 8 billion and growing world, which in decades will move out of the rural ambient (rural flight is an on going thing, literally no one wants to work in farms, much less in organic ones were the workload is much bigger, if not borderline on slavery (trust me, i did some WWOOF)), feels pure ignorancy out of greenwashing or small studies compared to what we rolled on science the past 30 years of GMO technology
https://biofortified.org/genera/independent-funding/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3367244/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7061863/
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600850
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6918800/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10814746/
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1602638
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44264-023-00009-7
"Organic" as in certified 'Organic' or as in the class of molecules?
If the former then I'd love to see the classification requirements that make a qualifying chemical safer all the ones that aren't.
If the later, that's blatantly untrue
Note that other countries may have different legislations. You are also free to eat DDT to prove that organic farming is not really safer.
Honestly curious, which of these is more harmful than the non-organic alternatives?
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-I/su...
Organic is marketing. Organic produce is more profitable.
In the UK, tea means tea bags and that normally means tea bags made of a plastic/paper mix. If I remember, the bag material is made and then they heat it up to get the plastic out, revealing the holes, needed for the bag.
Of late there has been criticism of microplastics in tea bags, and the posh organic bags have fared quite badly. Fancy sachets are not necessarily it.
As for chemicals, not one farmer spends any money than what is the bare minimum, no matter what they do. They might have to put all kinds of toxic chemicals on crops but they are not going to waste money over-doing it, because they are tight with the money, at all times, under all circumstances.
So the question has to be asked, is it worth worrying about the worrying levels of chemicals in tea when there are worrying levels of microplastics that the body really cannot get rid of with some liver-fu?
But, are there more toxins? The working class British way to have tea is with milk and two sugars. The milk is designed for baby cows, not grown men, they should be 'weaned off' because there are all kinds of things in dairy that might not be toxins, but could be considered to be. For example the cholesterol and saturated fat. Next the sugar, which is fine in moderation, so long as you don't care for your teeth, and, when combined with saturated fat, can contribute to type two diabetes.
Clearly opinions vary regarding the health aspects of milk and sugar in tea, my grandmother almost made it to a century, consuming plenty. However, you can reduce the toxic load from drinking tea by getting rid of the microplastics by using plant-based teabags (even LIDL have them), not having milk and sugar in the tea and, only then, getting concerned about buying organic.
Organic does not mean no nasty chemicals, it means no synthetic nasty chemicals. However, it is still a good nice-to-have, but, realistically, if you want to cut your exposure to toxins, there are these other huge areas that are under our control, but those things are going to be controversial lifestyle choices. Just not using cars 'could' reduce your toxic load far more than any organic teabag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat
> A 2024 meta-analysis found that odd-chain and longer-chain saturated fatty acids were negatively associated with the risk of cardiovascular disease, including stroke.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd-chain_fatty_acid
>OCFAs are found particularly in ruminant fat and milk (e.g. pentadecylic acid).
(I don't know if that means most of the saturated fatty acids in milk, it's full of different varieties.)
I'll settle for no soft apples.
Modern gas chromatography is ridiculously sensitive.
Of course, the legal limits are purposefully designed to be well below the LOAEL, and those companies that were found to contain levels above them should face consequences. But to claim they "poison the people" isn't true.
In reality it depends, being biology, "safe level" is also very relative since you don't know every effect the substance has on the body.
That's why pesticides and other chemicals such as bisphenols are regularly phased out, since effects can appear long after "scientific research" established it was "safe". Or it can affect certain populations, such as farmers, who get a high dose, or children, who are more sensitive than adults.
Others, such DDT, lead or cadmium, are accumulated in the body over a long period, and then start to show effects, even when the person has stopped eating it. Or can find their way later the food chain: Inuits would get poisoned when eating polar bear's meat, that was full of DDT from fields on the other side of the globe.
There's a common thought pattern among conspiracy theorists. "Some conspiracies turn out to be real" so that justifies their belief in their very specific conspiracy theory. The same pattern occurs when we talk about chemicals in our diet or the environment. "Some chemicals turn out to be dangerous" but that doesn't prove that a specific concentration of a specific chemical is doing anything, unless we have data to support the claim.
We have all these terrible illnesses that we ascribe to bad luck, and then all of these new chemicals we haven't fully studied yet being sprayed on everything.
The same argument applies to pesticide or any other substance. Without talking about specific numbers, it's just speculation.
From safety regulations to baby toys with lead paint.
The EU will probably do nothing again.
All of the beekeeper associations complain about it, regularly conduct lab tests with honeys from supermarkets, most of them being not honey, or mixed with fake honey.
The EU of course has done nothing : the beekeepers aren't powerful enough to distribute the right bribes to the right people. Meanwhile the consumers buy glucose syrup at 15€/kg.
But hey, we have USB-C! It evenS out, right?
- Lab testing is complex, requires to identify the DNA of pollens in honey and few countries can do it at the moment.
- Honeys are mixed, so it's trivial to receive fake honey in a country that allows it, mix it, and reexport to another one that forbids it. Same happens with olive oils, no one cares.
- Many brands just lie, given that there is no enforcement regarding food traceability and safety in general in the EU (it's a meme to reassure consumers). Where I live a brand advertising "locally made honey" was found to sell glucose syrup : nothing happened.
The downvotes aren't surprising, people who have spent enough time on this orange site tend to lose the plot
I never buy any food ever from China.
Ever been to Innisfail? Have you seen them fly small Cessna's over the banana fields and absolutely drench them with pesticides?
They do this with all the crop fields in Aus.
These do involve foods from China though..
Better keep pushing the farmers in the EU away for more of these great “trade deals”
Believe me, the majority of “The rest of the world” does not protect its citizens from harmful food contamination.
s/is/was
The US is trying really hard to lower its position on these lists. The US has not been near the top of reading/writing/arithmetic in a long time. The US is undoing a lot of federal regulations by eliminating/reducing agencies meant to regulate things like EPA, FDA, Dept of Education.
If anything, this OP demonstrates that the EU regulations are futile (though that may be an overstatement).
but for Food related stuff, EU standards and regulation are truly superior for consumers, relative to US and other countries
Many things that are well known memes are completely false. Not everything in the EU is better regulated. Everyone always complains about chlorinated chicken, not realizing that <5% of US chicken is washed that way as chicken now uses vinegar washes, and those that did were at concentrations deemed safe by the FDA.
Source for that? All I can find says EU have stricter labeling standards except for forum comments such as yours here.
Edit: > Many things that are well known memes are completely false
To me it looks like "USA shows more additives due to harsher labeling standards" is just a meme, everything I've seen says Europe has stricter requirements on what you need to say about additives. So USA having much more additives listed comes from American products having more additives in them, not everything is better in USA.
https://www.daymarksafety.com/news/some-fundamental-differen...
That is mostly a myth. EU and US take different approaches to setting food safety regulations, which means they have different lists of banned substances. The EU bans a lot of substances that have no evidence of actual adverse effects just out of an abundance of caution or sometimes even because of uninformed public perception, which is why their regulations seem more comprehensive, but the vast majority of that has no real positive effect on consumers.
https://blog.ansi.org/ansi/differences-between-eu-and-us-foo...
In terms of actual food safety, the US is basically the same as the EU (it technically ranks even higher than most EU countries on the "Quality and Safety" criterion of the Global Food Security Index, but the top countries are all very close)
https://insights.economistenterprise.com/sustainability/proj...
(Before anyone accuses me of something, I live in the EU and generally prefer EU in terms of lawmaking and regulations. It's just that food safety specifically is a point of comparison which is much less true than people usually think)
10% milk fat (more exactly 1.6 lb per pre-mixed gallon, but that's simply a bizarre way of phrasing it), no more than half air by volume. 6-10% other dairy solids (lactose, whey).
Compare with the UK: at least 5% fat (no cows need be involved)
France requires 5% milkfat, Germany at least requires the 10% milk fat, but no further requirements.
Canada pretends to be at 10%, but if you add any flavoring at all that can go down to 8%.
Nothing said that EU farmers used these pesticides, its related to imports. And even most imports they tested were in the legal limit even though they are from areas where these things are legal.