Food Production in the News

UK farmers are rallying to spread the word that food prices are on their way up over yonder, thanks to the European Parliament recently backing legislation to scale back the use of certain pesticides. According to this article in The Telegraph, farmers are saying that 10 per cent of chemicals will have to come off the market in the next few years and that in the UK, this "could halve potato crops, reduce wheat yields by a fifth and cause the loss of the entire carrot crop". There's an article in The Guardian about the predicted possible loss of the entire UK carrot crop. Are we supposed to believe that carrots really cannot be grown without pesticides? I buy organic carrots here in Canada and they're not a whole lot more expensive than conventionally grown carrots. Root vegetables are notorious for leaching metals and chemicals out of the soil (not to mention the contamination coming from pesticides sprayed on the plants above ground), so buying organic is always the safest bet anyway.

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The Fooducate blog had a story on Sara Lee's introducing a new labelling system for its products. In it, they included a link to a short history of food / nutrition labelling (mostly in the US). It's worth having a look, if only to see how ridiculously splintered labelling efforts have become as different companies set their own respective standards for their multitudes of products.

Why Buy Organic? Apples and Pears

According to the Environmental Working Group, apples are ranked second highest in terms of foods that carry the highest pesticide loads. Pears are ranked tenth. I've done some reading up on apples over the past few weeks and have come to the conclusion that unless getting them from a local farmer who doesn't use pesticides and whose word can be trusted, they should always be purchased from sources that are certified organic. Pears should, as well. In fact, much of what I found out about apples applies to pears, as well.

The Environmental Working Group's tests a while back found that 91% of the conventionally-grown apples it tested had pesticide residue. Most apples were contaminated with more than one pesticide and in their samples, they found up to 36 different pesticide residues. Most apples were contaminated by 1-3 different chemicals. These pesticides included substances that are known animal carcinogens, that cause birth defects, that cause neurological damage or affect the immune system and that interfere with hormones and the reproductive system. The three most common were Diphenylamine (DPA), Thiabendazole and Azinphos-methyl. Diphenylamine is a fungicide that inhibits common apple scald. Thiabendazole is a fungicide used to control mold, rot, blight, etc. and which is usually applied post-harvest. Azinphos-methyl is an insecticide. Read the test results here.

Washing apples will remove some of the surface residue, but not all. Additionally, the problem with apples is that many of the pesticides used are systemic, which means that they're absorbed into the fruit. Keep in mind when purchasing apples (or any other organic produce) that if they're located near non-organic apples and any spraying goes on around them that there may be contamination from the non-organic apples. So? So when it comes to buying apples and pears, splurge. Spend the extra little bit and opt for the organic.

Farming in the news

Grist had a decent short article this past week on the United States' urgent need for more farmers. Farmers make up 1.6 percent of the US population right now, and onlyy 5.8 percent of those farmers are under the age of 35. Richard Heinberg addressed the same issue around a year and a half ago in one of his Museletters taken from a lecture he delivered to the E.F. Schumacher Society. The situation is no doubt pretty much the same in Canada, and with food shortages becoming more and more of a concern, and as the need for less oil-reliant agriculture continues to grow as we run out of fossil fuels, we can expect to hear about this a lot more.

The USDA has recently decided to eliminate a program used by everyone from environmental groups to industry and trade groups to trace the use and risk of pesticides. Scaled back in 2007, the collection and analysis of data on food crop pesticide usage in the US was regarded as the only ''reliable, plublicly searchable database of its kind'', according to an article in The Daily Green, which also points out that this comes at a time when herbicide use in Monsanto's near-monopoly of Roundup Ready crops has been increasing.