It is forbidden to use Chlorpyrifos in the EU, but in Morocco it's used. Recently, imports of olives contaminated with high levels of this chemical have been detected, but they have entered into the EU.
Oftopic but related, In Morocco, too, strawberries are irrigated with sewage water, and several times this year consignments of strawberries contaminated with hepatitis virus have been detected, but unfortunately they have also entered the EU.
The point is that if health is at risk, then it should be banned at each of its sources, importation included.
Morocco is preparing a major import hub through the Canary Islands, which is expected to "un-label" the source of products, I guess.
Yes, of course the EU is aware of this. Health and Food regulations apply to the products grown inside the EU. There may be partial import restrictions on GMO products and hormone-boosted meat, but other food products are generally allowed in.
This is even more true with organic products, that are subjected to stringent norms and checks in the EU, but absolutely no checks when coming from outside the EU.
So when buying organic bananas, from say, Africa, the probability of them actually not being organic is close to 1. Organic olive oil from Turkey? Well, let's say you can be happy if it is olive oil at all. Honey from China? Hmm.. Well.. Let's say that with 150'000 tons exported a year, their counterfeiting labs are better funded and equipped than the fraud-detection labs on the EU side.
So, if you want a quality product with a relative certainty you're not being defrauded (or worse, poisoned), you buy European. Anything else? You're on your own.
> which is expected to "un-label" the source of products
That is not legal. But, of course, fraud exists everywhere, unfortunately.
The problem is that it's not always that easy to buy European.
At least in Spain, it's common to see strawberries with unmarked origin or, even worse, "Origin: Spain" but it happens to be a Spanish company that brings them from Morocco and only does the packaging.
(BTW, not sure if each of these things is legal or not. But the fact is that they happen. I would be happy with actually enforced laws that mandated specifying the actual origin of everything).
> which I always interpret to mean probably 100% non-EU
They still need some of the product to come from the EU to be able to claim "EU", but if they don't go through the effort to write on the packaging which parts come from where, the product is possibly mostly non-EU, yes.. :-P
And you can put your money on it that they have lobbied hard so as not to have to put the exact countries of origin on their packages. All under the "That would make the packaging confusing for consumers" guise. Or the "Our product chain is too complex, and that would be very inconvenient" guise..
> At least in Spain, it's common to see strawberries with unmarked origin or, even worse, "Origin: Spain" but it happens to be a Spanish company that brings them from Morocco
The import switch trick exists, but is nonetheless illegal. So is mislabeling food origin (even from within the EU). For instance, I know that the health authorities in France go to open-air markets and road-side stalls to check that produces have labels, and that the country of origin is correct. (EU onions, as an example, is not an appropriate labeling. Nor is labeling Italian onions as regional onions..)
Of course, the local authorities might not have the will or incentives to strictly enforce your consumer rights..
Maybe it's a Nordic thing, but I (like many others) buy strawberries and raspberries straight from a nearby farm during the (short) summer season. Freeze enough of the berries and they last until the next summer.
Blueberries, same thing, but they are free from the forest.
Of course, strawberries won't be whole and firm once they are frozen with some sugar, but the taste of summer is there.
I'm from Washington State (land of the invasively delicious blackberry) and have come to realize that people who didn't grow up doing this need to be told it's something they can do.
Depending on your location there's a decent list of plants you can grow for practically zero maintenance that will produce more of that food than one family can consume, forever. Some of them are way more work to remove than introduce.
Spain produces generally very little high quality food, and vast quantities of hydroponic bland tasting god-knows-whats-inside stuff that looks like vegetables grown by masses cheap labor with highly questionable residence status.
Its harder and harder, but if one really cares in Europe, you have to focus on well-known brands (or whole supermarket chains if you have those) that have long term reputation to uphold.
Here in Switzerland its a bit easier (and EU food products are generally viewed as subpar), but you pay, and you pay a lot.
At the end, you get what you pay for, and there is not that much room for too-good deals which are not scams in some way. And prepare to just don't buy stuff if you don't find suitable things, and replace with something else. And focus on seasonal local stuff as much as possible (I guess residents of say Trondheim are casting a dark look on this)
I can confirm as a Spaniard that sadly, what you say is true. There is very good Spanish fruit, but the overwhelming majority is really low quality: whichever breed produces more at the cheapest cost, picked too early, and kept refrigerated for too long. And probably what you have tasted is better than what we typically get inside the country. The best commercial cherries I've ever tasted were the Spanish cherries I bought at Sainsbury's when I lived in the UK. I have never been able to find such quality for sale in Spain.
However, in spite of the blandness and the working conditions problem you mention, I do trust Spanish fruit to generally not have hepatitis A or EU-banned pesticides, so I'd still take it over Moroccan imports any day, at least if I am given the information to choose.
None much, to be honest. I buy at Gadis and Eroski as the lesser evils (also Lidl for some processed stuff, but not for fresh products). But if I want good fruit, I go to a small fruit store, which is more expensive, but I find to have much better and more consistent quality fruit.
(Not that you can trust any small fruit store either... but some are good).
If by chance you go to an street market and you don't see or trust labelling you can go or ask. Any other place origin is properly labeled. Of course not only for vegetables and fruits but also for fish, seafood and meat.
In practice, the supermarket where I typically buy (because it's closest to home) is hit and miss. Sometimes they specify the origin, sometimes they don't. I'm sure if I asked they would tell me, but the process would probably involve an overworked cashier asking an equally overworked manager, plenty of waiting, making other customers wait as well, and being seen as the nitpicky guy who is always asking. Ideally it's what we all should do, but in practice I and most people I know have no time or willpower for that.
On the other hand, in small fruit stores and markets, the overwhelming majority of the fruit doesn't specify origin. I can ask and at those places I will probably get an immediate answer, of course. But then I have to trust the word of someone whose primary motivation is to sell me the fruit. My bet is that many wouldn't acknowledge it's from Morocco. And it's not like I can check.
If it were so easy, newspapers wouldn't be publishing "tricks" to try to identify Spanish fruit:
strawberries are especially filled with pesticides: that one really tops the list for pesticides, etc. personally i have like 4 beds of strawberries at home from which I get most of them from.
It is crazy that we (Spain) are importing olives from Morocco into the EU when we are the largest producer of olives in the world, more than doubling the second.
Same here. I am surrounded by orchards but it's rare to see a local apple in any of the local supermarkets. We get Argentinian, Tyrolean, etc., but rarely Norwegian.
Similarly it was always surprising to find garlic in San Francisco and Oakland grocery stores that didn’t come from just down the road in Gilroy, the “Garlic Capital of the World”[0].
EU is aware, but are too afraid to enforce it that way. See all the protest from farmers in the last months, one of their main demands is that imported foods are also subject to same rules they are.
Source on "Morocco is preparing a major import hub through the Canary Islands, which is expected to "un-label" the source of products, I guess."?
The legislation is pretty clear imho. Raw food needs to be labelled when it comes to the origin. Even processed food needs to state the origin of their main ingredient.
Good point on moroccan stuff, will try to avoid it in the future.
For instance to circumvent the embargo of fruit trees in Russia, Dutch farmers use Belarus to relabel the origin their products and continue selling. This was before the war, but probably still going on.
Olive Oil is also a fun one:
"Operation Golden Oil (2008, Italy): In March 2008, 400 Italian police officers conducted “Operation Golden Oil,” arresting 23 people and confiscating 85 farms after uncovering a large-scale scheme to relabel oils from other Mediterranean nations as Italian ."
> In Morocco, too, strawberries are irrigated with sewage water, and several times this year consignments of strawberries contaminated with hepatitis virus
Hepatitis A contamination of frozen fruits happens from time to time all around the world, but I thought it was usually linked to the picking process and processing plants. Not that irrigation can’t be blamed, but some single digit hours of sunlight exposure should inactivate viruses (even the non-enveloped kind).
Why is Hepatitis A vaccination coverage so spotty in Europe (according to the WHO vaccination data)? The US has given it as part of the standard pediatric vaccination schedule for decades.
Good question. In Canada it’s something you’d have to pay for (or have private benefits for) because it was seen as only necessary for international travel. If you ask for it, no doctor is going to say no (if you’re willing to pay for the drug).
Maybe US recommends more because the people making the recommendations know they won’t have to pay for it and take the lowest-risk approach regardless of cost.
Largely you didn’t need it if your food handling/hygiene standards are good, but when you flash freeze foods from anywhere, you dial up the freshness and risk.
I doubt most of the savings are passed on to the consumer. Companies will typically charge consumers as much as they can get away with no matter what their costs are and will happily poison people with shitty contaminated fruit if the lower costs mean they can stuff their pockets with more money while continuing to keep consumer prices as high as possible.
Morocco just doesn't seem to place the same importance in food cleanliness as the rest of the world. For example, they display, store and sell food directly touching the floor.
Buy a kilo of flour from a seller in Morocco, and he probably was storing that flour on the street. Directly on the street - not on a plastic bag or anything. He'll literally shovel the flour from his pile on the street into your bag.
Mediterranean product came from Mediterranean!. Having clementines cultured on Canada would be less probable.
All this news are linked directly, with the current farmers protests. Farmers that are being manipulated very obviously by political agents on parties that in turn are puppets supported (and probably directed) by "outer group" in a divide-and-conquer mode, with their own agendas to promote".
So French farmers were incited to destroy Spanish fruits, and then Spanish farmers where wipped up against Morocco farmers; and then angry Polish farmers started to destroy Ukrainian grain exports (a incredibly stupid move for Poland interests). All at the same time, veery curious.
Good if they solve part of the problems, but this path is a double-edged sword. We like it or not, we live in a globalized world. "Qatar announce that will not export diesel for Spanish tractors anymore", and the Morocco strawberries will became a "clean as snow" new superfood overnight. Trust me.
Each EU member is responsible for analyze the food that is imported crossing its borders, and they just report the results to destination. The destination of one of those consignments of contaminated strawberries from Morocco was the Netherlands; the destination was warned of the analysis, and what happened next, who knows.
What you are suggesting is to use coaction, blackmailing, to stop analyzing imports into the EU, or to hide the results, that cross the EU's southern borders.
You didn't understood anything it seems. I'm not suggesting, I'm telling you how this will end.
Don't you think that we are extremely tired of seeing French vandals --again-- assaulting and destroying Spanish fruit trucks while the gendarmerie just watch the cargo burn?. This people is attacking legal EU companies and the French police act as necessary accomplices that allow it. French government couldn't care less; they even do jokes on TV about it. Is the same stupid stunt since 70's, each time they need a scapegoat to divert the attention.
Do you think that this will increase the appetite of Spaniards for French products in the near future?. I seriously doubt it. Each action triggers a reaction
Second. Quality controls on EU is not a new thing. A lot of people works detecting and stopping dangerous products since decades. Thousands of this products are silently stopped and removed each year so, why do you think that this is suddenly breaking news? Have you heard about the recent scandal of Spanish strawberry farmers stealing water and sucking dry the Doñana National park?
It's always a cat and mouse game, isn't it? Industry thinking they can optimize nature's chemistry, then something else always pops out on the other end. When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle?
Is there a possibility that if things could have been more optimal for the delicate balance of different life forms on Earth, nature would have done it all by itself?
Is there even a way to get back to natural state of things? Can the food we produce be considered "natural" at all, or we have altered the chemistry of the whole chain so much that we are now all doomed on this planet to shuffle diseases around different social classes and species ad eternum?
Pesticides scale really well. The alternative would be to control the environment more, but that does not scale so well. Maybe with increased automation we could do some inroads in this direction.
Consumers are to blame too. They won't accept blemished produce, but a potato with some insect larvae in it, is really not that much of an issue. You just remove around the larvae and cook as per usual, and that is much healthier than dosing your produce with pesticides, that cannot easily be washed off.
It is actually possible to produce healthier food from healthy plants in good soils, getting good yields with reduced costs. A plant that is healthy has a functioning immune system and is capable of warding of most, if not all pests (except for mammals and birds). You can only do this without pesticides, because the pesticides and fungicides are (mostly) what creates bad soils. And contrary to what a lot of people assume, this can be scaled as well.
Why is not everybody doing this at scale? Mostly I think because it requires advanced, state of the art knowledge and goes against current practice in some ways. We are only just finding out how plants actually take up nutrition (which is wild to me), and barely have uncovered the life in the soil. A lot of farmers are old, and their teachers espoused the view that soil life is literally irrelevant to farming and everything comes down to soluble fertilizers + pesticides, herbicides, fungicides. Crudely simplified it is the agricultural equivalent of putting someone on an intensive care bed, feeding them liquid food with a tube and killing every germ with antibiotics. It works and is not too hard, but the results aren't that good actually. Now try becoming a healthy person overcoming illness in the wild, its a bit more complex than feeding through a tube and taking antibiotics.
Creating healthy food in a healthy way requires much more knowledge and sometimes (not always) a bit more labor, and a lot of it is going against what people know. Agriculture doesn't like to take risks. A lot of money depends on things staying as they are. A couple of big failures and you are out. Its not as easily disrupted as software.
I have a friend who farms organic walnuts, and who turned me on to all of these ideas. I agree with you (and him) that all of this should be done at scale. The obstacle, as I understand it, is that yields aren't as high as "conventional" farming, so while it is possible to scale perma-culture ag, meeting world food requirements will require more land under cultivation. Food prices will rise. That's probably still not enough to grow enough for everyone, so we'd have to significantly reduce food waste, and / or reduce meat production and consumption, as well.
Those are all good ideas! If I had a magic wand to wave to create that world, I would. But, in the world as it exists, it's really, really difficult to persuade enough people to change behavior (and legislation) enough to make all that happen quickly.
Barring disaster, of course. Which may be where "conventional" agriculture is taking us.
I find the whole subject, and many others of modernity, depressing: we know what has to be done, but see no way of achieving it.
Not sure if I am a harbinger of cheerfulness exactly, but I believe I can see hope in the long-term trajectory. The idea that everything needs to be sustainable is slowly gaining traction. Too slowly, obviously, but the momentum is there nonetheless.
The notion that we need to have a fraction cheaper foodstuffs at the expense of poisoning the environment and ourselves is already dead, the job now is primarily to document the havoc and point to viable solutions.
Yeah I have something, I think its basically not true that yields are lower when you implement the cutting edge stuff AEA is doing.
Current legislation and politics doesn't help, but true regenerative ag (not greenwashed) will also outperform conventional ag in the free market eventually. This is beyond just organic, making use of the latest scientific insights, on plant sap analysis and being data driven.
Yields are higher than they need to be already for many crops and subsidies have long distorted the market and arguably have incentivized the wrong things. We could stand a bit of inefficiency if we gain a lot of resilience and other nth order beneficial effects to the ecosystem as a result.
> A lot of money depends on things staying as they are.
Not just for the farmers, but also for the agrochemical industry, which has a lot of cash flow and invested capital to lose from the success of regenerative farming techniques.
Permaculture may require more in certain forms of labor costs, but it's offset by a reduction in costs spent on crop treatment. Money that would go to labor instead of capital, that reduces negative externalities (and in fact exudes positive externalities, because it has the potential to make farms a carbon sink) should be seen as a win, societally. Unfortunately, those varieties of reversal are often presented as a technological step "backwards" – be wary.
A plant will not ward off pests like insects all by itself. A garden or farm is a big pile of food on one end of an unbalanced equation, where entropy favors pest populations growing to consume that excess. Natural gardening therefore puts a big point of focus in developing an entire ecosystem, such that when you do get these inevitable surges in prey population its balanced by predation. There are certain cover crops you can plant that will help attract predatory insects to your garden.
some of plant-produced toxins are more toxic than the stuff we use - I don't know where I read it, but the indigenous ppl somewhere said to only eat stuff that has insect on it, because Insects know when the plant is less toxic - made sense to me
The opposite is actually true. Insects only eat dead, dying plants and low quality plants. Its an indicator of crops that are lacking in nutrition. For example, once a plant reaches a certain level of photosynthesis, it produces so much sugars that aphids can't digest it. I've seen it myself, its fun they just fall of the plant and die. You can measure this with a 20 dollar device.
There's research being done, for example by the bionutrient institute, that tells us nutritional values vary a lot. The exact same crop can have a 5 to 300 times difference in some nutrients (like vitamines) between lowest and highest performing crop.
The chemicals plants use specifically to repel insects, (secondary metabolites), are especially important and healthy for us to consume.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39383739 Chlormequat in food and urine from adults in the United States from 2017 to 2023
Rodenticides
Fungicides
Insecticides
https://usrtk.org/pesticides/chlorpyrifos/
- Chlorpyrifos: Pesticide tied to brain damage in children - banned in EU in 2020, the EU imports from countries that use it, some in some US-states it's still legal, in some it's banned.
https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/csem/ethylene-propylene-glycol/toxicological_effects.html
from the atsdr article: ethylene glycol can be converted into oxolate, which is an Anti Nutrient that binds to calcium
Mould in rice an peanuts, see Page9 of this PDF, it's from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations homepage
I feel like in part it's an education issue. I don't have the slightest clue - was never taught - what is ok to eat and what is risky. I rely entirely on gut feelings and Google.
Nature is always evolving, and I think it's a mistake to consider human contributions as "unnatural." All kinds of plants produce a wide variety of pesticides as a natural defense without human intervention, and are cooking up new varieties to trial against the real world. Diseases are in a constant arms race with immune systems regardless of humanity.
I'm not saying we can't get better at predicting the side effects of things we introduce into the system. But I do think regarding the cat and mouse game as "industry vs nature" is reductive dualism and shallow thinking. We are nature. Considering humanity as apart from nature was one of our more misguided ideas.
Industry is a part of nature, an active participant, not in opposition to it. We were doomed to shuffle diseases around long before industry. There is an explosion of novel chemicals that we have introduced into the environment, and they will no doubt change things. Humans evolved in a world that is not the world we are creating, and we very well might not be fit for the future we're creating. But let's not call what we're doing "unnatural." That just serves as a kind of denial that we are active participants, and reinforces a subtle idea that we are Gods apart from "Nature."
By this logic humans could nuke the entire planet and that would still be “part of nature”.
I think it tends to be easier for people on HN to get caught in this kind of “but it’s technically true” fallacy. We’re trained to constantly look for patterns and generalize the crap out of things so it’s a natural inclination.
Exactly. Humans have accelerated the processes led by evolution. It is naive to assume the biosphere can keep up. The nature is likely to unable to adjust at that pace, unless we are talking about drastic corrective measures - like wiping out most of life. This accelerated development works for producing high-tech stuff, but what we do with it? We throw it out. You can't throw Earth 1 out and go to Earth 2, like an iPhone. There's just no such option.
This is why people say billionaires have become so interested in space and luxury bunkers recently. They'll need places to go after they throw out Earth 1. If they can't find Earth 2 in time, they'll retreat to their isolated subterranean compounds and watch in comfort while the surface burns and the rest of us eat each other for survival.
I can't say how accurate that theory is, but I know that one way or another, we're going to need an Earth 2 if the species is going to survive so I'm glad we've got people funding space exploration. NASA sure as hell isn't getting the budget to do it.
On one hand an asteroid strike isn’t much different than that. Global warming too isn’t so different than other periods of earths history where even other organisms generated enough change to see some of the largest extinctions in history.
There is an explosion of novel chemicals that we have introduced into the environment, and they will no doubt change things. Humans evolved in a world that is not the world we are creating, and we very well might not be fit for the future we're creating.
This is precisely what people mean by saying what we are doing is unnatural.
But let's not call what we're doing "unnatural."
But most people believe this is the right word to use. I don’t think they will change their minds.
Regardless of what’s “natural”, widespread contamination from industry should reduce or remove the limits to industry’s liability.
Externalities are real & must be accounted for.
I would go further: we shouldn't use the word "nature" in this sense at all. Because what is nature? The woolly meaning you are using, which I presume is the common one we hear in this context, is at best so utterly banal, that it looses all meaning. At worst, it is incoherent. What is "natural" vs. "unnatural" according to such a definition? Is nature all that wasn't produced by human beings? Since everything human beings produce is produced from preexisting things (a process ancient philosophers might call "mutation" -- mutatio and poiesis), does that mean all such things are unnatural? Is rainwater natural, but water synthesized from hydrogen and oxygen unnatural? Is corn unnatural, given it is the result of selective breeding carried out by human beings? Is a blueberry natural, but a blueberry danish unnatural? Are human tears unnatural?
And this contemporary use of the word isn't really in accord with the traditional meaning, if we can say that, certainly not the traditional philosophical view. Nature concerns the nature of the thing. Thus, the nature of water is to be wet and transparent in its liquid state, but equally, the nature of certain plastics is to be flexible within certain conditions. And we can extend this to organisms: the nature of human beings is to be rational; the nature of lions is to hunt prey and consume their flesh; the nature of synthetic water is identical to the nature of water found in a puddle; the nature of corn is to grow to produce the fruit that we happen to eat.
Now, in a traditional philosophical context, we may speak of creation, that is, all that is, metaphysically speaking, contingent, that which did not need to exist, or that which cannot account for its own existence, not just in time, but here and now. This draws the distinction between creation and creator, that is to say, that cause which causes things to be and which itself is not a thing, not contingent, and does not require a cause, as it is that cause. But this has nothing to do with distinguishing between things we already find in the world, and things made by human beings, like pesticides or artifacts or synthetic objects. Everything that is is creation in this sense, man-made or otherwise.
Also according to this traditional metaphysical view is how human beings differ from other embodied living things, and that is the capacity to reason and the capacity to choose (either in accord or against reason, effectively). And these faculties of intellect and will, dependent as they are on the physical to function, but inexplicable as physical phenomenon as such, mean human beings are a unity of the physical and immaterial. It is not my intent to prove this claim here (it has to do with the act of abstraction and matter as the principle of individuation, if you're interested; you might find this video of use [0]). The point is to show a sound basis for making certain distinctions, none of which conform to the woolly, contemporary notion of "nature".
What we might say is that the pesticide in question, because of its nature, is harmful to human beings, because of our nature.
Are you discounting the benefits of advances in agriculture? Such as producing more food on less land? (Granted, it would be better if more of the land were given back to Nature instead of suburban sprawl, but that’s a different problem and I digress)
No, I advance a half-baked argument, don't take it as a maxim. All I am saying is that some developments in agriculture that may seem as advances today may not seem so if we take a longer time scale into consideration.
> When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle?
Realistically, never, because these chemicals are solving real problems for us. We would need to be willing to leave problems unsolved for decades to do this.
> When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle?
It's a curious question, how many eff-ups humanity needs to learn what's the optimal way to do something that's fairly new.
Do we need to introduce and be forced to withdraw tens of substances? Hundreds? Thousands? How many failures until we can learn from them how to do this properly?
Yeah, with various poisons that will mess up some and kill others, and who knows what are long term consequences on genome. Not that great of an achievement if you ask me, since we know better, but its not as price efficient.
Its not binary, it never was. West throw absurd amount of food away. West is getting progressively fatter with US firmly leading (I'd presume due to food lobbying getting extremely powerful there earlier than elsewhere and realizing for some breadcrumbs you can pass literally anything, like sugar is healthy).
I am not saying not use anything. But have long term studies paid by producers of said things (with oversight of government) and then let it on your crops. Currently its exact opposite and government reacts after SHTF, utter stupidity if you care about more than just immediate profits.
You're living in a "move fast, break things" & "trust the science" world, posting on a forum filled with enginerds who subscribe to those philosophies with zealotry.
They think like this: as long as there is an absence of evidence of harm in the initial science, then that means evidence of absence. Long-term, higher-order effects & unknown unknowns are ignored in Scientism, and this ignorance is status quo.
It's the same mentality underpinning the approach to GMO foods & insects, dropping agent orange in Vietnam, and killing sparrows in Mao's China. It's the very spirit of modernity.
> It's the same mentality underpinning the approach to GMO foods & insects
Genetically-modified foods are fine: the main problem is when GM plants are wind-pollinated. And even that's largely due to patent law[0]: the harms of wind-pollination from monoculture is there regardless of where the genes come from.
Genetic modifications to insects are only to wipe out populations, as far as I can tell – it doesn't hugely matter what the long-term side-effects are, in that case, because there won't be any organisms around to experience them. There was a lot of research done into the effects of anti-mosquito gene drives before the (very recent) releases into the wild, because we have learned from the Four Pests campaign.
> You're living in a "move fast, break things" & "trust the science" world, posting on a forum filled with enginerds who subscribe to those philosophies with zealotry.
You're painting with far too broad of a brush. I personally see a lot of push back on HN against those "philosophies".
The objective of the human species is the annihilation of any kind of life on the planet in the seek of profit. pesticides and insecticides play a crucial role in this task, together with PFAS, co2 and EMR in the form of light pollution, for example
'We'? Maybe never, maybe a successor civilization will, maybe we'll figure out simulation and organ on a chip well enough to do those long term studies in only a year or two
Not for the scale we operate at, at least for our current level of ecological mastery. I presume you're gesturing at different planting techniques that reduce reliance on pesticides. Not endorsing the paradigm.
Yes and no. Yes, because we are in a state of nature - we are nature. No, because we've been modifying our environment for thousands of years, you might not even recognize the precursors as food. The chemistry isn't altered, the organism is.
..shuffling diseases.. around different social classes? Huh. What a suspicious thing to say
The problem is thinking in terms of optimization at all.
There’s no optimum, only trade-offs. But under capitalism, the problems all reduce to “make more X with less”. If GDP is increasing, we’re doing great - doesn’t matter if life sucks.
Everything is optimized until it all turns into shit.
If you didn't think we were in the end-stages of population growth and decline, just know that in your standard organic chemistry textbook given to students in university, it says that there are over 500,000 unregulated chemicals in industrial use. Exponential growth and technology with an evolutionary preference toward short-sighted and near-future decision making are going to cull the human race down by a large % as peoples systems are not evolved to tolerate the extensive environmental changes. The largest culprits are changes to food chemistry (prioritizing addiction mechanisms for profit over health), air pollution (prioritizing transportation and other means to maintain and grow economically), chemical exposures in the environment (multifactorial), and internet technology (prioritizing addiction mechanisms for profit over social health and function) [in my opinion]. People will get weaker, sicker, and dumber. Chronic diseases will start sooner, fertility will decrease, and population growth will reverse. The humans to survive out the other side will be children of health-conscious wealthy and those that live in less toxic environments globally.
It's really sad because it doesn't seem like there's anything any individual can do about it. I think these issues are honestly far more serious than global warming. They are causing serious problems RIGHT NOW everywhere. I think within the next 20 years even we're going to see many consequences related to these issues. I'd like to believe we can bioscience our way through this mess but I really think that won't be the case.
Fundamentally, I think proactive decision making takes a lot of time, energy, and work both on the individual and collective scales. I think it almost boils down to a physics problem where that just ends up being overtaken by the negative trend caused by exponential growth + the environmental equivalent of technical debt.
> It's really sad because it doesn't seem like there's anything any individual can do about it.
If we ate locally grown food and prioritized food that's not heavily processed, that would probably help. Throw in a plant based diet and your gut will probably be pretty happy overall.
It’s convenient and lucrative to use toxic patented pesticides and herbicides but there are definitely working alternatives which one could even mix themselves. Obviously the industry has no interest in cheap and available solutions. For a small example I questioned myself if DMSO a organic solvent would be useful to transport active ingredients into the plant and quickly found that just DMSO has a desired effect on plants, roots and seedlings.[1] Following the study adding H2O2 to DMSO should even increase the effect. Furthermore other ingredients can be added which impact the biochemistry of the plant.
The point which I want to make is that many effective chemicals have been discovered long ago but are not in the interest of the industry because the patents expired already.
My dream is a mobile device/app that can analyze chemicals in fruits/vegetables, but we are too far from the StarTrek world.
I tried to build a vision system to at least identify wax on apples, but even that is too hard.
There was an Israeli startup couple of years ago that built some device but it looks like it was a flop.
Not exactly what you describe, but there's Yuka for processed products (food and cosmetics). You scan a barcode and it gives you a score based on the product composition, it's quite helpful: https://yuka.io/en/
Wikipedia claims that "Some states, including California, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, and Oregon, have banned chlorpyrifos on food grown and sold in their jurisdictions. Those bans remain in effect." It's also 100% banned in foods sold in EU area.
So, not that hard to avoid depending on where you live. Apparently corn, soybeans, wheat, fruit trees are some of the most common crops it's used on.
If it’s banned in all those places, does that have a knock-on effect of limiting its profitability thereby causing the market to produce less of it to sell elsewhere?
This specific pesticide might not be used on organic crops, but plenty of other even-less-well-safety-tested "organic pesticides" may be used instead on organic crops.
The word "organic" is largely a marketing gimmick.
While organic might currently be a "marketing gimmick" purchasing organic is an important signal to the market that consumers consider it important. I'll gladly be a first adopter if it helps move the industry and regulations in the right direction.
and these are just the chemicals you hear about. what about all the nonsense that never even makes the front pages?
I don't trust industrialized agriculture, especially not here in the US.
personally, I grow as much of my food as I can (lots of fruits trees and very large garden), especially from the dirty 15. and those that I can't grow, I buy organic though that doesn't always save you completely.
As a European, I don't think that's true. Besides the fact that apparently in Europe we don't check imported goods as noted elsewhere in the thread, in the US eggs are washed so thoroughly they have to be kept in the fridge afterwards to keep them good. Chicken has to be chlorinated in the US. You're not allowed to sell cheese made from raw milk in the US. I bet there's more examples.
> in the US eggs are washed so thoroughly they have to be kept in the fridge afterwards to keep them good.
That isn't actually true, you can keep them out, they'll be just fine.
> Chicken has to be chlorinated in the US.
It doesn't have to be, rather it's permitted. There is no chlorine left in the final result. And don't imagine the EU is against chlorine washer, vegetables are chlorine washed in the EU.
> You're not allowed to sell cheese made from raw milk in the US
That's not true either, the cheese just has to be aged more than 60 days.
> I bet there's more examples.
Your examples were quite poor, actually I doubt there are other examples.
> in the US eggs are washed so thoroughly they have to be kept in the fridge afterwards to keep them good. Chicken has to be chlorinated in the US.
As I understand, these are because standards are comparatively worse elsewhere in the chain. (Wikipedia confirms that this is the position of the EU, but cites no sources, so the editor and I might just have heard the same rumours.)
Yes, true. But on the grand scheme of things, it is still a limited part of the world. :-) And, if for some reason OP does not want to live there, than he would be out of luck..
I got curious and went checking a bit deeper USRTK, haven't found much to discredit their reporting.
Don't think we will get a well thought out argument given the user's comment history, a bit of a loony with a taste for hot takes with weird hyperbole.
As far as I can tell, there seems to effort to discredit USRTK citing how some major prior donors to USRTK (such as Organic Consumers Association) have become antivax organizations pushing conspiracy theories, but it seems the most this has resulted in is USRTK investigating lab leak theories of Covid-19's origin and a few events in collaboration with the antivax funders. All and all, it seems like some cause for scrutiny, but not anything close to discrediting the organization.
> Dr. Kathleen Jamieson [professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a recent article on conspiracists’ exploitation of uncertainty in COVID-19 science] argued USRTK’s work deserved scrutiny because of its funding and affiliations. But she also noted that the organization’s published research stopped short of open conspiracy theorizing on the virus’ origins.
Why are you conflating antivaxing with origin investigations? At best it seems like Dr. Jamieson is trying to do narrative shaping. I'd prefer to hear from experts in virology on that topic instead of a professor of discourse manipulation.
Oftopic but related, In Morocco, too, strawberries are irrigated with sewage water, and several times this year consignments of strawberries contaminated with hepatitis virus have been detected, but unfortunately they have also entered the EU.
The point is that if health is at risk, then it should be banned at each of its sources, importation included.
Morocco is preparing a major import hub through the Canary Islands, which is expected to "un-label" the source of products, I guess.
Is aware the EU about this?