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.
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.
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).
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.
One way to view current US politics is that the broader banana republic tendency ran out of South American governments to overthrow and moved back to the domestic government, which has now taken on all the corruption and extractive politics of South American CIA-backed dictatorships. The violence levels are not comparable .. yet. But having an explicitly political paramilitary force that's shot a few citizens in the street is not a good sign.
There's a well-known sociological concept called "imperial boomerang" that describes this. It's also seen in surveillance technologies used against oppressed people. As far back as the surveillance apparatus Britain built in Ireland which eventually came to roost on the British people themselves
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.
I don't eat bananas I can buy in Europe, not after doing some travels. They are extremely bland, doesn't matter where I buy them. Now when traveling in exotic countries, what a beautiful experience to taste one!
It's not pesticides, it's everything. Everything from slavery laws to workers rights, environmental regulations, health and safety regulations. The ruling class has conspired to evade those regulations and crush local competition for 100+ years, by offshoring and globalizing their abuses and exploitation.
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.
Capitalism is the most effective driver of progress known.
Capitalism has lifted enormous numbers of people out of absolute poverty and is a great positive for the world.
Inequality is an unavoidable side-effect of capitalism.
The optimal risk:benefit tradeoff depends on the resources you have available.
It can be rational behavior for a poor person to take greater risks with their health than a rich person, because the value of wealth has strongly diminishing returns. I personally believe we should have state-enforced wealth redistribution to limit this scenario to a reasonable minimum, but I'm not so naive as to think eliminating it entirely would be the globally optimal solution. In practice, "everybody gets identical protection from pesticides" means "everybody is poor".
That's not really true. Most pesticides have a PHI (pre-harvest interval) where they will be broken down by microbs or sunlight before harvest. There's also pesticides that are more stable and thus can't be used on plants meant for human consumption, but even then most of those do not last very long in the soil. Microbes are very efficient at breaking down chemicals.
And then, after all of that, you still have: the solution to pollution is dilution.
What's toxic on a fruit tree for human consumption, is likely not toxic on thousands of cubic yards of dirt or millions of gallons of ground water.
Ideally we would all be exemplar citizen of the world direct-democratic federation, careful of avoiding any compromission and bribery in our wonderful system. Ideally we would all always optimize for sustainability, careful to keep our action in contemporary reciprocal mutual benefits, in the extend that we confidently believe also able to bring prosperity and peace to future human generations.
Concretely, my friend, I'm afraid this is not quite the world the power imbalances lead us to.
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.
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.
No, this is definitely an official gvmt body that can fine you if you try to sell fruit as organic that doesn't follow the regulations. It IS definitely compulsory if you mark your produce as organic.
"IMHO organic labels optimize for the wrong things."
What do you mean?
I only know of "Demeter", that also has some very esoteric requirements (homeopathy, cosmic energy flow rituals) - but otherwise organic label optimize for:
- no or little pesticides and herbicides
- more space and better condition for the animals
My only other grievance is that they also all ban GMO
Am aware of that, bug glyphosat is definitely not allowed and likely a result of neighbors spraying plentiful in bad wind conditions (there are strict regulations in theory, that are usually ignored in reality)
They optimise for natural. So you can still have pesticides and herbicides. If you find your poison in some plant, it is fine. If you synthetize the same molecule in a factory, then it's not allowed.
As for the animal welfare, true, but there are also labels specifically for that that.
I was surprised after moving to Ireland to discover that you can break the law and nothing will happen. I went through hell with planners (idiots who don’t believe in climate change and hate eaves) while people around me put three mobile homes on their land as well as building two permanent homes with no permission (and ripping out ancient hedgerows) and successfully got retention. Why even bother?
Family next door had 17 kids (yes, from one mother), 5 dangerous dogs, and absolutely despised us (somehow we thought having a few acres of land would make worrying about neighbours less necessary). There was an ongoing decades-old land feud with the farmer behind both of our homes. The aforementioned dangerous dogs killed several of the farmer's sheep, so the farmer finally shot and killed one of the dogs during an attack on said sheep, which escalated tensions. We had 2 and 4 year old kids who, it's worth noting, were roughly the size of sheep and about as tempting for the dogs to kill, so we were basically terrified to let our kids outside. Neighbours routinely insulted us, yelled at us, and threw
garbage (including old chemical containers, sharp metal, etc.) on to our land.
They also routinely trespassed and shot fireworks over our thatch roof (the roof was part thatch, part modern) - very concerning when your roof is more flammable than kindling. Finally they left a dead crow in a bag by our door which felt like a threat, so we sold the place at a €100k loss and moved to the Netherlands.
Gardai were absolutely lazy, uncaring, and useless, and did absolutely nothing.
Now I encourage everyone I can to stay as far away from rural Ireland as possible.
Mostly to be careful. The house was an absolute dream on paper. It was even something you could commute to Dublin from on the train in a pinch.
I eventually gained some biases that the former-me who lived in the lefty "Dublin 2 and https://irishtechcommunity.com/" bubble wouldn't have been particularly quick to espouse. Now that it's been a few years I think I'm a little better at seeing different sides of things politically, at least.
I jokingly refer to this as the Catholic principle: "sin first - confess and repent later" as it's a common theme in countries that are/were traditionally Catholic, including my own.
It's really just places culturally untouched by Calvinism, Puritanism and the like, all of which put emphasis on order.
The last thing to attempt bringing order to them were various forms of authoritarianism and they didn't last. I think we can agree this is not the right approach.
Maybe I'm a Calvinist. I'm definitely happier in the Netherlands. My general experience was that Irish laws existed mostly for show and if you followed them you were a chump. Unless you wanted to smoke a joint now and then, of course.
Ireland supposedly cares about nature too, but you can still buy truckloads of turf off the side of the road in Offaly. Good luck getting those rules enforced.
When we still lived in Dublin I got pretty tired of having to push my baby in her pram in the street because the pavements (sidewalks) were completely covered in cars, even in the city centre trying to get to the YMCA creche.
Our experience wasn't limited to "victimless" crimes though. I think when you're threatening your neighbours and letting dangerous dogs loose on other people's land where there's kids or sheep then authoritarianism is called for.
You may have a point but you're discrediting yourself by using extreme hyperbole.
Authoritarianism would be you and your family getting picked up and interrogated sometime at night for this critical comment you just made.
And saying "crime is legal" when referring to cars parked on the sidewalk or you having had a bad experience with a neighbours dog? I think if you reflect a little you'd realise that these are the kind of "crimes" you probably have committed yourself countless times.
I don't want to discount your experience or judge that particular event. I just disagree with calling for authoritarianism in response to that.
Happy that you are happier :) I'm German, so in general I find it refreshing when people manage to live peacefully with each other without having a rule for every single thing. Obviously a dog endangering children is not such a case.
Thats some mighty hyperbole, not everybody is breaking some minor (or not so minor) laws 50x a day. Or a year.
Societies where there is high amount of respect towards each other and rules tend to perform much better over long time, ie Switzerland. Its a pleasure to live in such society especially when coming from more messy ones, triple that with small kids.
> Thats some mighty hyperbole, not everybody is breaking some minor (or not so minor) laws 50x a day. Or a year.
How do you know? Do you know of all of the protected species of bug in your country for instance?
In my town there are laws about using profanity in public. I'm sure they would be deemed illegal if charges were brought but the law is still on the books.
Last year I was in a Samsung shop when one couple remarked to me that it was the second time they came to buy the same phone for the wife in a month. Then naturally I asked for the reason why, I thought they like it so much to buy a second one.
Apparently the couple just recently come back from a trip in Ireland and lost the new Samsung phone there. Someone has stolen the wife's baggage from the bus when it's doing the routine transit stop by the bus stop while opening the bus baggage conpartment. By the time they realised the thief already going away from the bus with the baggage with the new Samsung phone inside it. They reported to the police but nothing happened. In UAE, Singapore or Japan this type of crime is just not worth it since the petty thief will be punished severely. A lady can incidently left her Louis Vuitton bag inside a restaurant in Dubai, left it at her seat, then after a few hours come back to fetch the bag without losing anything inside.
> As of March 2023, Emirati authorities continued to incarcerate with no legal basis at least 51 Emirati prisoners who completed their sentences between 1 month and nearly 4 years ago. The prisoners are all part of the grossly unfair “UAE94” mass trial of 69 government critics, whose convictions violated their rights to free expression, assembly, and association. UAE authorities used baseless counterterrorism justifications to continue holding them past their completed sentences. Some prisoners completed their sentences as early as July 2019.
there was a recent case of a kid who was literally stabbed by a sihk guy and got arrested because the sihk guy said the guy said something racist.
Now before you say that I need to check my white privilege, I am brown. everytime one of these people commit these crimes and the police look the other way in the name of political correctness, it gives legitimacy to the racists who want to cast all of us in a bad light. Law and order needs to be a applied equally and its very strange to me how people are getting arrested for speech when they are a direct consequence of government policies. don't make teh speech illegal, correct the issues the=is speech is surfacing.
> I think when you're threatening your neighbours and letting dangerous dogs loose on other people's land where there's kids or sheep then authoritarianism is called for.
It doesn't have to require authoritarianism to keep the peace. It also doesn't seem like it could only be solved by an authority. If there's a dangerous dog on your property, shoot it if you can't get it to leave and fear for the safety of your kids or sheep.
> I think when you're threatening your neighbours and letting dangerous dogs loose on other people's land
I know too little about this specific situation, but did the neighbour not stop despite being asked to?
I haven't been to Ireland or the Netherlands (aside from driving through of course), but from what I've heard I would not like it in the latter. Nature appears to be scarce there, as for some reason the Dutch insist on being an agricultural superpower despite the population density.
The reason is roughly that there were devastating food shortages in the world wars, and avoiding that happening again has been an important force in Dutch politics since.
> I think when you're threatening your neighbours and letting dangerous dogs loose on other people's land where there's kids or sheep then authoritarianism is called for.
You jumped straight to authoritarianism? How about trying self-defense?
The guy who carries a pistol and shoots the neighbor's dogs in self defense, I would expect that guy to face some social consequences and he'd be lucky if it was just the police.
Hobbes. we create the Leviathan so we don't have to constantly act in self defense. The alternative was cold, brutish, and short.
It's not just a Catholic thing, in Book II of Plato's Republic (written ~2,400 years ago) Adeimantus mentions that some people say there's no point in acting justly because you can just act unjustly and sacrifice to the gods later to make it up.
You joke, but it's not remotely Catholic in principle. A confession is by definition invalid if premeditated.
A presupposition of confession is that you have contrition and the resolve not to sin and wish to receive absolution (which doesn't remove the need for temporal justice btw). Premeditation and without remorse turns that confession into an empty act, and indeed, another sin.
Calvinists also believe in confession. Indeed, it doesn't even require the uncomfortable encounter with a priest. You can just do it privately in their view.
This touches on the purpose of sacraments in the Catholic Church. They are meant to be visible signs that give assurance and certainty that something has taken place. If a human being were to show perfect contrition (very rare), then there is no need for the confessional (and ultimately, God is not bound by the sacraments). But for the penitent, the confessional gives assurance of absolution, provided there is some measure of requisite contrition. You don't have to wonder about your eternal fate after leaving the confessional.
The idea that Catholic societies are corrupt or and Calvinist societies are tidy and ordered is a stereotype, and it is silly and ahistorical to claim that you need authoritarianism to bring order to Catholic countries. Catholic societies have a greater tolerance for the messiness of human life. It views itself like a field hospital ready to provide people with means to get back up and to heal. Calvinists, on the other hand, are strangled by their constant anxiety about whether they are part of the elect or not. That can translate into rigidity, rigorism, scrupulosity, and OCD. These, in turn, can resort in a backlash of moral laxity.
(Another stereotype is the Protestant work ethic. Apparently, no one ever heard of the Benedictines and their influence on Europe. There is also a healthy attitude toward work and an unhealthy one.)
2 months ago there was a story about a huge family mansion in Meath being demolished after a court found they did not have the proper planning permissions, and the council was unwilling to grant the permissions after the fact. Also just last week a judge ordered the demolition/removal of 26 mobile homes from a site in Dublin set up without permissions.
Friends of mine recently got planning permission for a house they've been living in for about 3 years already.
So you can def roll the dice on such things, maybe you get away with it for decades, maybe your house gets flattened.
My (also an immigrant like you) take on Ireland is that many of these systems are run and controlled by humans, and you can get pretty far by trying to make that human connection with the people controlling your fate. My wife was initially refused maternity benefit, because she did not have enough social security contributions. She works part-time, and she was missing 1 contribution (about €120) out of something like 38 for the year. After friends (the same from above) suggested we phone them and talk to the people, the maternity benefit application was approved. I find that there is a lot less "sorry can't help you, computer says no" here.
My suspicion is that leaving things like e.g. qualification for social benefits to the judgment of whoever happens to be talking to the claimant introduces the possibility of bias entering the decision.
It can, but I don't think we should assume it did. Innocent until proven guilty and all, and unfortunately most if not all laws come down to judgement calls by those in charge.
Eh, algorithmic / procedural bias is also a thing, and it can line up with the kinds of protected characteristics the rules are ostensibly there to prevent discrimination on the basis of. See, for example, redlining in the USA. I suspect the benefits of allowing discretion generally outweigh the risks it creates, provided that the aggregate feedback of that discretion is taken into account when redesigning the procedures, so that discretion doesn't become load-bearing as the real world moves on and the procedures stay in the same place.
It's funny you say this because, at least from what I've seen, groups that are historically discriminated against seem to be receiving more latitude in skirting the law.
There is a lot of truth to this but things are changing e.g. those houses without planning permission getting torn down. That simply would not have happened two decades ago.
We’ve had a warmer than average year worldwide every year since 1976. I suppose it’s just coincidence that exactly what climate scientists said would happen keeps happening and keeps getting worse.
OMG the planning system is definitely an issue in this country. I did try to wing it but had to demolish a small structure, retention was not approved. Their letters are insanely threatening, like you can go to jail or pay a fine in millions. But then another time I just did the planning permission in my own name, drawings and all and it was approved fairly quickly despite me not being an eng or arch. It depends on the town/city you are in and the planning department. I used to deal with planning in other European countries and Ireland just lacks technical supervision step, hence the dependence on neighbours notifying the council and on the front loading of the initial application process.
There also are a lot of things that could help a lot with reducing heat gain in the summer that planners are strongly opposed to, like eaves (which let in the sun in winter but not in the midday in summer), and I can't fathom why.
Which might or might not be safer than synthetic ones. Fundamental job of pesticides and herbicides is to kill stuff. Just because it appears in nature does not mean it is safe.
But "organic" also targets soil health, biodiversity, animal well-being, and the environment in general.
Some synthetic pesticides / herbicides / fungicides hardly break down in the environment. Which leads to accumulation of a cocktail of such chemicals in soil & ground/surface waters. Ultimately appearing everywhere in air, drinking water & food. Not unlike microplastics, PFAS etc. How this affects humans' health is largely unknown.
Generally, chemicals produced by plants also break down naturally. So they don't accumulate in soils over time.
So it's kind of "exclude nature as much as possible, cleanroom style" versus "work with nature to keep things in a healthy balance".
This is a common complaint in the EU, since enforcement is by ones own government, everyone believes that they are the only ones being held to account. It may or may not be true in general, but it sure gives that impression
The way I understand it, at least here in France, the complaint isn't exactly that some other random EU country has lax enforcement of the EU laws. Rather, it's about the various trade agreements with non-EU countries not known for their strict rules. The latest one being with Mercosur, and the main gripe being with Brazil (presumably because of their huge output, not sure if they're considered worse than the others by whatever metric). Another usual suspect is "ukrainian chicken".
Sure, the agreements say that whatever is imported needs to comply with this or that standard, but customs rarely inspect these. So you end up importing produce which is much cheaper than the local-grown one and which also doesn't comply with the strict local laws. That's where the "unfair competition" happens.
Sure, I bet French farmers aren't too happy to see tomatoes or whatever grown in other EU countries with cheaper labor flood the local market. However, anecdotally, I never see produce from eastern Europe here in Paris. Non-French usually means Spanish or Netherlands if it's EU, or northern Africa if not. You can mayyybe find son specialty cheese or meat from abroad, but outside the very common Italian varieties and Gouda, it's really not easy to find in regular supermarkets.
However, for some reason, apples from freaking Chile and South Africa seem very common, even in season, although apples grow fine here, including that specific variety (pink lady). And when I do find locally-grown ones, they're usually at the same price.
It's likely that centralized logistics makes even price-competetive local produce unattractive for large retailers. Much easier to deal with one large supplier halfway around the world than hundreds or thousands.
Sorry if it was not clear, this is about Spain/EU enforcement in Spain vs EU enforcement in Morocco, where we import tons of fruits from. I think it's plenty obvious that the enforcement level will be different at the source.
Edit: I've asked that myself multiple times. There's also some stubbornness there as well TBF.
Meanwhile nobody bats an eye in Spain if you hire illegal African immigrants, pay them far below minimum wage and house them in shacks without electricity and running water. Places like Almería look like slave towns.
Because it's fields+trees that have been there for decades, and even if there's no profit few years, it still pays for the salaries of the workers and expenses of maintaining the fields. If you stop it, things die and then it's more expensive to restart.
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.
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]
There is a hint of that it’s not just you but you get used to it and don’t notice it anymore. It’s kind of how most cheese has a persistent vomit smell.
The problem with lead (and presumably other heavy metals) is that exposure is cumulative as it gets accumulated in your body so there really isn't a safe amount.
If this report is seeing spices from outside the EU containing contamination then there are organic options available, as I'm looking at my EU made (comes from France) organic certified Cumin.
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
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
Surely that depends on the reason for the ban? Say it is banned in the EU because of concerns about secondary environmental impact, a different country with a different ecology could reasonably decide to keep using it.
Canadian lentils are sprinkled in glyphosate to kill them so they can be harvested (as the climate there doesn’t allow for this to occur naturally). They’re then harvested and shipped back to the EU where such a practice is forbidden. But it happened outside of the EU so it’s magically safe.
This is nothing new though. A small number of poor countries manufacture goods and mine materials in pretty terrible conditions that are illegal in the countries consuming those goods and resources.
If it is not allowed to be used in the EU, it shouldn't be allowed to export it.
> Although these chemicals are not allowed on the EU market, they can still be exported from European Member States to third countries. From there, they can return to Europe as residues in imported food — a “toxic pesticides boomerang” that puts consumers at risk.
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
Why are synthetics regularly banned if they are safe then? Is every farm high-tech, with million dollars tractors and big, flat fields? How about crops where pesticides have to be applied manually? How about communities near the fields, which breathe those products?[0]
Why are you trying to slide the discussion with GMOs, which aren't relevant since we talk about pesticides?
Saying that "organic has 2% of the world crop" is not true : certified organic crops, yes. Most of the earth's biomass grows without synthetic pesticides, and many farms in the world have the same practices without the labels.
In general, organic farming is a reference, of course that it doesn't have to be a religion. It is also a great source of scientific experimentation, especially for soil regeneration and biodiversity (which alas, I know, isn't profitable for Monsanto&co... yet!)
Using less pesticides in general is something that is proven better[1], and doesn't necessarily reduces yields[2]. Organic farming is part of the global effort for the reduction in pesticide usage, and doesn't have to be hegemonic. Having "organic farming only" areas are for instance great to create havens for biodiversity, while agricorps are allowed to run wild elsewhere.
Overall it's great for consumer choice, and reducing to the maximum pesticides intake for children should be a goal, given their sensitivity to endocrine disruptors.
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
Or do you need evidence that the bio labels are not optimizing for health or environment? Check the rules. Most of them are just there to restrict synthetic products, regardless of their impact.
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
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.
The argument we are having here is essentially a classic of philosophy: empiricism versus rationalism. You keep arguing for the former; I am arguing for the latter. It is true that molecule X may not present an observable danger to health; it is also true that it may be reasonable to believe it does present one (most obviously because we do not have thousands of generations of evolutionary adaptation to it, as is the case with both lead and GMOs).
This dichotomy underpins a difference in regulation between the USA and Europe. As mentioned already, the EU Commission applies the "precautionary principle" in its legal regime for food and chemicals. This is not "unscientific". Empiricism has been more popular in the Anglophone world, but rationalism was one of the pillars of the scientific Enlightenment.
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.
Agricultural use is a lot more concentrated though, which is important. In the case of vinegar this is about safety.
Though I don't know how much vinegar is used in ag - my facebook feed is full of people who don't need roundup because some concoction of vinegar, salt, and dish soap works - they never point out that you need PPE to work with this stuff that isn't required for roundup.
Agricultural use is not more concentrated than culinary use by the time it goes into my mouth. I've never tasted any vegetable off the shelf that was more sour than a pickle.
Occupational exposure is certainly a totally different story but the context of the story and root of this thread was about the consumer safety of the end product.
True. My tea merchant sells two varieties of the same tea. The organic and the regular. I asked what the difference was, and they said the tea comes from the same village, and that the organic one was lower quality, so they invested in EU stamps to get a higher price, while the higher quality one did not feel the need. No difference essentially, except that the organic was priced higher.
So I always make a point to buy the inorganic one (pun intended!).
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.
> 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.
Many a health or ethics rabbit hole can be bypassed with simple abstention. However, this is not good for 'content creators'. They need the controversy and rage bait for engagement.
With saturated fat the health authorities that have science but industry lobbying to content with, have told us to avoid the stuff because it clogs the arteries and invariably comes with cholesterol because animals. Arguably Ebola and AIDS are worse than a bit of saturated fat, however, it is a clear message, up there with 'smoking is bad'. Yet a vocal minority will spin this yarn about how wonderful saturated fat is. They are for real and tell the gym-going public all kinds of nonsense.
Yet a diet from before farmers started using copious amounts of synthetic chemicals placed saturated fat as very hard to get. There is no fat on wild animals, only on fattened up farm animals (and humans).
In these former times, meat of any kind was hard to come by. Chicken was saved up for, paying in installments for that special birthday treat. Meat such as rabbit was far more prevalent, the chicken was there for the eggs, not to be eaten as a snack in a lunchtime sandwich.
Hence, scale back all the modern day junk to the idealised peasant diet and there is no need to know anything about any modern day diet or nutrition talking points.
The peasants did not live for long, though, did they? Hard to say if and how the diet contributed, but just because people rarely ate meat then, for example, doesn't necessarily mean it's better for your health. Even if we could agree that people these days eat too much.
People talk about how we spent generations adapting to certain aspects of diet, and so following the habits of old is surely safer, but seem to forget that evolution only really "cares" about producing offspring, not your longevity, or quality of life in old age.
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.
Because of the thermal shock, these bags release billions of plastic particles, that you immediately consume and let diffuse into your organs. It may be one of the worst forms of exposure to microplastics overall.
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.
Then where does the real stuff go? The arabs, indians?? Tea bags are the mass market in Europe for example. Hardly anyone uses tea leaves (are they different?).
I know an Iranian in the Netherlands who says the tea there is mostly coloring.
My knowledge of this from a long time ago and narrow, but I can give you a rough picture.
Different countries do buy different types and qualities of tea. The US is big market for low quality (dust, stalks) tea for tea bags.
Countries that like strong sweet tea with lots of milk buy tea that is low grown (i.e. lower elevations) and processed using the "cut, torn curled" process rather than the older "orthodox" process. High grown (on mountains) tea is better for those who drink it without milk.
Leaves do tend to be higher quality and they have grades reflecting the size of the pieces. There is a standard system which is marked on some types of tea.
It is usual to pluck two leaves and a bud. Plucking more would add a lot of stalk which lower quality. Plucking or using just a bud produces a very delicate flavour (sivlertips). High grown silvertips is good with
Most tea is blended so will contain a mix of different things.
India, China and Japan are the largest markets for quality whole leaf tea. Tea bags contain fannings and dust, the lowest quality byproducts of tea production. Try a single estate TGFOP and you’ll never want to drink tea from a bag again.
Chinese tea is again a whole different world from Indian tea, and has a much broader spectrum of complexity. You could spend a lifetime learning about Chinese tea.
I've been buying spices from Diaspora, Burlap & Barrel, Curio - not cheap but I definitely feel some validated after eyeing the report. The potency is top notch too. Tea I buy loose leaf from a trusted purveyor. Among yerba mate brands there are a few organic brands to choose from.
Probably the law says "they cannot be used in the EU" and that's it. If the law would ban the production of said pesticides it would be a completely different story.
I drink a lot of tea and I hadn't really thought about pesticides. I really don't know what's wrong with people. For so, so many products the thought process seems to be:
- encounter minor problem
- apply poison permanently and liberally
And then when you try to say that poison is bad someone comes in clutching their pearls and shrieking "but if we didn't use poison then the product would be more expensive!" I'd rather have less of it than be poisoned.
> When the interviewer immediately offered him a glass of the herbicide to drink, Moore refused, stating: "No, I'm not an idiot," and abruptly ended the interview.
This boomerang is the effect of another boomerang: nothing grows anymore without pesticides. I can see that in my crops and fruits: when I was young I could benefit from the produce my dad grew naturally. 30 years later nothing grows naturally anymore, blight, insects and diseases kill everything in a few days. We gave up, as it makes no sense to actively poison our produce when the poison comes with no hassle from bought one.
I don't think you can conclude much from a sample size of 1.
My country at least (and probably yours too) is producing more organic products than ever before. People are also consuming organic products more than before.
Yep but that's just always been the case: it's a world of difference between spraying the latest Monsanto v7 KillEmAll upgraded formula or supporting biodiversity such that for every major pest there is also something which eats it and gets rid of it.
Personally working at a bio farm and while it is more work than just spraying some chemical wholesale, I think it's not necessarily much harder than the past (not sure though). What I do know is that not being bio is much easier, that's all.
You’re not wrong. Where I am you need to cover everything with a net to even give it a chance at getting to the ripe stage otherwise 80% of it is somehow damaged by insects and disease. I’ve only been growing things for a few years but I just assumed that’s how growing things naturally always was. Is that genuinely not true?
Large amounts of pesticides which are banned from use in EU and/or US, are produced there then exported.
Afaik there's some EU work towards closing this loophole. But nothing major that made it into legislation (so far). No doubt Monsanto, Bayer & co have lobbyists + lawyers working to slow down or prevent that.
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.
> 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).
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.
Who wants to bet "Mercosur" agricultural products won't be checked at the border and will - surprise - turn out to have "issues". Has the forced labor agriculture in South America been solved yet?
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.
Precaution principle exists, and in the case of food safety, "getting new data" make take years or be very costly.
For instance, bisphenols in plastics baby bottles were proved problematic after decades of use. Precaution principle would have recommended to avoid them (especially since they weren't necessary).
It's not trivial, and many businesses would rather see their consumers die than cut their margins. I remember buying some custom furniture; when it arrived it reeked of varnish smell. I called the factory, told them they didn't cure it correctly. Manager said "yeah we know, we know it's dangerous but people get cancers years later and you can't identify the source anyway" (true story).
There is certainly more that we can do. Ie being more careful with introducing new chemicals with largely unknown long term effects.
The burden of proof shouldn't be decades of research seeing thousands of people developing serious health issues and/or dying, and then reacting. It should be on companies, having lengthy and expensive process for approval and then continue reviewing. This is not some app release ffs, we talk about lives and health of billions, how much more we can fail our children if we fail this.
Or you know what, you can do that with you and your kids, but please allow me and my family to use more conservative approach, I am happy to pay a bit extra.
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.
There's always a tradeoff between eating crops that will make you sick and kill you when you are 60 vs not eating enough nutritious food that will kill you when you are 40.
Some do, especially in Portugal and the Azores, for tea. And I grow my own peppers and chillies in cold Germany - why would we not be able to do so on an industrial scale?
Or you buy your tea from other first-world countries, such as Japan.
But we absolutely need to shut down our farms to lower emissions so that we appear "green". It's totally worth to become food dependent on questionable countries for that.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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%.
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.
> 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.
Those aren't additives, it just means you don't need to breakdown the nutrients label it doesn't change the additives.
So the things you have brought up doesn't seem to be the reason USA has so many more additives listed on their products. If you give a single example of an identical product listing more things in USA than in the EU and how these regulations influenced that I could trust you, but as is what you say seems to just be a meme.
Lol we, even you, talk about additives and then you bring up nutritional content of the food itself. Do you even understand the topic discussed? It certainly doesn't seem so, or you have an agenda to serve, for whatever reason. Or are llms today having most of computing power diverted into pretraining new version?
We do list all of that, but thats usually a separate table, or if not a separate bloc of text. Its always there. Posting random webs scraped by llms ain't providing facts and personal experience to discussion.
> 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.
So, the issue with chlorinated chicken washing is not that the chlorine is unsafe, as such. There are two concerns. The first is cross-contamination. The second is that there is some evidence that it is essentially a cheat; it defeats common tests for salmonella but does not actually reliably destroy the salmonella. So, if you allow chlorine washing, then you can pass the tests while not fixing supply chain problems.
Reference on most American chicken now being washed with _vinegar_? As far as I know that’s fairly uncontroversial ineffective.
“The vast majority of chicken processed in the United States is not chilled in chlorine and hasn't been for quite a few years.
…
Less than 5% of poultry processing facilities still use chlorine in rinses and sprays, according to the National Chicken Council, an industry group that surveyed its members. (Those that still do use a highly diluted solution at concentrations deemed safe.)
Nowadays, the industry mostly uses organic acids to reduce cross contamination, primarily peracetic, or peroxyacetic acid, which is essentially a mixture of vinegar and hydrogen peroxide.“
This is exactly what I’m talking about. The US and the European Union both allow chlorine in drinking water as in both areas it’s used kill bacteria. The US allows slightly more but both of them set it to safe levels and the chlorine and chloramane used do not make people sick
> 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.
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.
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.
As a non-American, that mostly is a reaction to rabid US jingoism, as in the US claiming themselves as "Numba 1" in everything, when usually, they are in the 10s or 20s at best.
And to many Americans this is even worse: If you are not best™ or worst™ ... you are unremarkable, 'E pluribus unum'.
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.
[†] https://www.foodwatch.org/fileadmin/-INT/pesticides/banned_p...
Object on "blame"--it is actually only saying that this scenario is possible, it is not establishing that it actually is the cause.
I checked the list of pesticides in the article, and almost all of them were banned because of the effect on pollinators, not because of human health.
So using these pesticides only on products for export makes utterly no sense!
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.
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).
I think the biggest scandal in this whole thing, which isn't talked about enough, is just how much of a joke enforcement of labelling is.
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
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic
I'd be more scared of publicly criticizing Chiquita than the CIA at this point
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.
So what's really the difference?
You can't spell Chiquita without CIA
Not just South America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_CIA_involvement_in_the...
Of course not.[0][1][2] But nowhere as extensively as South America.[3][4]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19...
[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/26/a-timeline-of-cia-...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
One way to view current US politics is that the broader banana republic tendency ran out of South American governments to overthrow and moved back to the domestic government, which has now taken on all the corruption and extractive politics of South American CIA-backed dictatorships. The violence levels are not comparable .. yet. But having an explicitly political paramilitary force that's shot a few citizens in the street is not a good sign.
There's a well-known sociological concept called "imperial boomerang" that describes this. It's also seen in surveillance technologies used against oppressed people. As far back as the surveillance apparatus Britain built in Ireland which eventually came to roost on the British people themselves
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang
What else would they have produced with banana crops that people would’ve wanted?
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.
And they aren't even cloning anything even close to the tastiest bananas, just the ones best suited for transport/storage.
I don't eat bananas I can buy in Europe, not after doing some travels. They are extremely bland, doesn't matter where I buy them. Now when traveling in exotic countries, what a beautiful experience to taste one!
"Exotic countries" lol. There's at least a few species in the banana genus that grow in almost every single country in the global south
It's not pesticides, it's everything. Everything from slavery laws to workers rights, environmental regulations, health and safety regulations. The ruling class has conspired to evade those regulations and crush local competition for 100+ years, by offshoring and globalizing their abuses and exploitation.
> EU countries export these banned pesticides to third countries
Shouldn't EU ban ideally exports of good that it bans internally?
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.
In other words, “yes, definitely”. But they won’t because €€€€€.
> But if you see it as a complicated tradeoff where whats right for one country can be wrong for another then it's unproblematic.
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)
They can believe that:
Capitalism is the most effective driver of progress known.
Capitalism has lifted enormous numbers of people out of absolute poverty and is a great positive for the world.
Inequality is an unavoidable side-effect of capitalism.
The optimal risk:benefit tradeoff depends on the resources you have available.
It can be rational behavior for a poor person to take greater risks with their health than a rich person, because the value of wealth has strongly diminishing returns. I personally believe we should have state-enforced wealth redistribution to limit this scenario to a reasonable minimum, but I'm not so naive as to think eliminating it entirely would be the globally optimal solution. In practice, "everybody gets identical protection from pesticides" means "everybody is poor".
Couldn't it also be case where the pesticides are fine to use on potatoes but not on tomatoes, for example?
No, pesticide are volatile and can poison water deep in earth no matter which thing was the initial target.
That's not really true. Most pesticides have a PHI (pre-harvest interval) where they will be broken down by microbs or sunlight before harvest. There's also pesticides that are more stable and thus can't be used on plants meant for human consumption, but even then most of those do not last very long in the soil. Microbes are very efficient at breaking down chemicals.
And then, after all of that, you still have: the solution to pollution is dilution.
What's toxic on a fruit tree for human consumption, is likely not toxic on thousands of cubic yards of dirt or millions of gallons of ground water.
Ideally we would all be exemplar citizen of the world direct-democratic federation, careful of avoiding any compromission and bribery in our wonderful system. Ideally we would all always optimize for sustainability, careful to keep our action in contemporary reciprocal mutual benefits, in the extend that we confidently believe also able to bring prosperity and peace to future human generations.
Concretely, my friend, I'm afraid this is not quite the world the power imbalances lead us to.
The EU has said it will, and some member states, like France, have, but a full ban is still pending.
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.
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".
> strict Spanish regulation for organic produce.
Organic labels are a different thing than official regulation though. IMHO organic labels optimize for the wrong things.
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.
No, this is definitely an official gvmt body that can fine you if you try to sell fruit as organic that doesn't follow the regulations. It IS definitely compulsory if you mark your produce as organic.
"IMHO organic labels optimize for the wrong things."
What do you mean?
I only know of "Demeter", that also has some very esoteric requirements (homeopathy, cosmic energy flow rituals) - but otherwise organic label optimize for:
- no or little pesticides and herbicides
- more space and better condition for the animals
My only other grievance is that they also all ban GMO
> no or little pesticides and herbicides
From Wikipedia:
> Pesticides are allowed as long as they are not synthetic.[28]
See also:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48451194
Am aware of that, bug glyphosat is definitely not allowed and likely a result of neighbors spraying plentiful in bad wind conditions (there are strict regulations in theory, that are usually ignored in reality)
They optimise for natural. So you can still have pesticides and herbicides. If you find your poison in some plant, it is fine. If you synthetize the same molecule in a factory, then it's not allowed.
As for the animal welfare, true, but there are also labels specifically for that that.
I was surprised after moving to Ireland to discover that you can break the law and nothing will happen. I went through hell with planners (idiots who don’t believe in climate change and hate eaves) while people around me put three mobile homes on their land as well as building two permanent homes with no permission (and ripping out ancient hedgerows) and successfully got retention. Why even bother?
Sure, but you have to move to Ireland. That's a deal-breaker for most folks.
Yeah, we ended up leaving in part because of how lawless our area was (the midlands)
I'd love to hear more about this if you have the time. What specific things happened?
Family next door had 17 kids (yes, from one mother), 5 dangerous dogs, and absolutely despised us (somehow we thought having a few acres of land would make worrying about neighbours less necessary). There was an ongoing decades-old land feud with the farmer behind both of our homes. The aforementioned dangerous dogs killed several of the farmer's sheep, so the farmer finally shot and killed one of the dogs during an attack on said sheep, which escalated tensions. We had 2 and 4 year old kids who, it's worth noting, were roughly the size of sheep and about as tempting for the dogs to kill, so we were basically terrified to let our kids outside. Neighbours routinely insulted us, yelled at us, and threw garbage (including old chemical containers, sharp metal, etc.) on to our land.
They also routinely trespassed and shot fireworks over our thatch roof (the roof was part thatch, part modern) - very concerning when your roof is more flammable than kindling. Finally they left a dead crow in a bag by our door which felt like a threat, so we sold the place at a €100k loss and moved to the Netherlands.
Gardai were absolutely lazy, uncaring, and useless, and did absolutely nothing.
Now I encourage everyone I can to stay as far away from rural Ireland as possible.
What an absolute nightmare! Did this teach you anything valuable? Apart from staying away from rural Ireland.
Mostly to be careful. The house was an absolute dream on paper. It was even something you could commute to Dublin from on the train in a pinch.
I eventually gained some biases that the former-me who lived in the lefty "Dublin 2 and https://irishtechcommunity.com/" bubble wouldn't have been particularly quick to espouse. Now that it's been a few years I think I'm a little better at seeing different sides of things politically, at least.
I jokingly refer to this as the Catholic principle: "sin first - confess and repent later" as it's a common theme in countries that are/were traditionally Catholic, including my own.
It's really just places culturally untouched by Calvinism, Puritanism and the like, all of which put emphasis on order.
The last thing to attempt bringing order to them were various forms of authoritarianism and they didn't last. I think we can agree this is not the right approach.
Maybe I'm a Calvinist. I'm definitely happier in the Netherlands. My general experience was that Irish laws existed mostly for show and if you followed them you were a chump. Unless you wanted to smoke a joint now and then, of course.
Ireland supposedly cares about nature too, but you can still buy truckloads of turf off the side of the road in Offaly. Good luck getting those rules enforced.
When we still lived in Dublin I got pretty tired of having to push my baby in her pram in the street because the pavements (sidewalks) were completely covered in cars, even in the city centre trying to get to the YMCA creche.
Our experience wasn't limited to "victimless" crimes though. I think when you're threatening your neighbours and letting dangerous dogs loose on other people's land where there's kids or sheep then authoritarianism is called for.
It really is a place where crime is legal.
You may have a point but you're discrediting yourself by using extreme hyperbole.
Authoritarianism would be you and your family getting picked up and interrogated sometime at night for this critical comment you just made.
And saying "crime is legal" when referring to cars parked on the sidewalk or you having had a bad experience with a neighbours dog? I think if you reflect a little you'd realise that these are the kind of "crimes" you probably have committed yourself countless times.
I’ve never let dogs with a history of killing livestock on to my neighbours’ land where kids are playing.
But regardless, I’m much happier since leaving.
I don't want to discount your experience or judge that particular event. I just disagree with calling for authoritarianism in response to that.
Happy that you are happier :) I'm German, so in general I find it refreshing when people manage to live peacefully with each other without having a rule for every single thing. Obviously a dog endangering children is not such a case.
The dog thing specifically was very heavily policed in the part of Spain I used to live in. It being unenforced would be unheard of.
Thats some mighty hyperbole, not everybody is breaking some minor (or not so minor) laws 50x a day. Or a year.
Societies where there is high amount of respect towards each other and rules tend to perform much better over long time, ie Switzerland. Its a pleasure to live in such society especially when coming from more messy ones, triple that with small kids.
> Thats some mighty hyperbole, not everybody is breaking some minor (or not so minor) laws 50x a day. Or a year.
How do you know? Do you know of all of the protected species of bug in your country for instance?
In my town there are laws about using profanity in public. I'm sure they would be deemed illegal if charges were brought but the law is still on the books.
Last year I was in a Samsung shop when one couple remarked to me that it was the second time they came to buy the same phone for the wife in a month. Then naturally I asked for the reason why, I thought they like it so much to buy a second one.
Apparently the couple just recently come back from a trip in Ireland and lost the new Samsung phone there. Someone has stolen the wife's baggage from the bus when it's doing the routine transit stop by the bus stop while opening the bus baggage conpartment. By the time they realised the thief already going away from the bus with the baggage with the new Samsung phone inside it. They reported to the police but nothing happened. In UAE, Singapore or Japan this type of crime is just not worth it since the petty thief will be punished severely. A lady can incidently left her Louis Vuitton bag inside a restaurant in Dubai, left it at her seat, then after a few hours come back to fetch the bag without losing anything inside.
what happens if you criticise the government in these safe countries?
Generally nothing. In Singapore, there are some risks.
Nothing in UAE? I call bullshit.
> As of March 2023, Emirati authorities continued to incarcerate with no legal basis at least 51 Emirati prisoners who completed their sentences between 1 month and nearly 4 years ago. The prisoners are all part of the grossly unfair “UAE94” mass trial of 69 government critics, whose convictions violated their rights to free expression, assembly, and association. UAE authorities used baseless counterterrorism justifications to continue holding them past their completed sentences. Some prisoners completed their sentences as early as July 2019.
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/unite...
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/10/uae-reporters-un-cl...
What happens if you criticize the government of Japan?
Nothing.
what happens if you criticize the government with regard to certain topics in the UK on social media?
https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-stru...
Which topics?
Racist ones? I only skimmed the article.
it appears you've misunderstood what criticizing the government is, nice try though
there was a recent case of a kid who was literally stabbed by a sihk guy and got arrested because the sihk guy said the guy said something racist.
Now before you say that I need to check my white privilege, I am brown. everytime one of these people commit these crimes and the police look the other way in the name of political correctness, it gives legitimacy to the racists who want to cast all of us in a bad light. Law and order needs to be a applied equally and its very strange to me how people are getting arrested for speech when they are a direct consequence of government policies. don't make teh speech illegal, correct the issues the=is speech is surfacing.
Yes, that wasn’t criticising the government either.
you don't think criticizing asymmetry in policing isn't criticizing government?
> I think when you're threatening your neighbours and letting dangerous dogs loose on other people's land where there's kids or sheep then authoritarianism is called for.
It doesn't have to require authoritarianism to keep the peace. It also doesn't seem like it could only be solved by an authority. If there's a dangerous dog on your property, shoot it if you can't get it to leave and fear for the safety of your kids or sheep.
That's great until the retaliation.
> I think when you're threatening your neighbours and letting dangerous dogs loose on other people's land
I know too little about this specific situation, but did the neighbour not stop despite being asked to?
I haven't been to Ireland or the Netherlands (aside from driving through of course), but from what I've heard I would not like it in the latter. Nature appears to be scarce there, as for some reason the Dutch insist on being an agricultural superpower despite the population density.
The reason is roughly that there were devastating food shortages in the world wars, and avoiding that happening again has been an important force in Dutch politics since.
Oooh shit, now it all makes perfect sense. Thank you!
The neighbour screamed at me never to talk to her or her kids.
> I think when you're threatening your neighbours and letting dangerous dogs loose on other people's land where there's kids or sheep then authoritarianism is called for.
You jumped straight to authoritarianism? How about trying self-defense?
Boy you really are a Calvinist
The guy who carries a pistol and shoots the neighbor's dogs in self defense, I would expect that guy to face some social consequences and he'd be lucky if it was just the police.
Hobbes. we create the Leviathan so we don't have to constantly act in self defense. The alternative was cold, brutish, and short.
Europeans largely do not believe in the right to self defense
It's not just a Catholic thing, in Book II of Plato's Republic (written ~2,400 years ago) Adeimantus mentions that some people say there's no point in acting justly because you can just act unjustly and sacrifice to the gods later to make it up.
You joke, but it's not remotely Catholic in principle. A confession is by definition invalid if premeditated.
A presupposition of confession is that you have contrition and the resolve not to sin and wish to receive absolution (which doesn't remove the need for temporal justice btw). Premeditation and without remorse turns that confession into an empty act, and indeed, another sin.
Calvinists also believe in confession. Indeed, it doesn't even require the uncomfortable encounter with a priest. You can just do it privately in their view.
This touches on the purpose of sacraments in the Catholic Church. They are meant to be visible signs that give assurance and certainty that something has taken place. If a human being were to show perfect contrition (very rare), then there is no need for the confessional (and ultimately, God is not bound by the sacraments). But for the penitent, the confessional gives assurance of absolution, provided there is some measure of requisite contrition. You don't have to wonder about your eternal fate after leaving the confessional.
The idea that Catholic societies are corrupt or and Calvinist societies are tidy and ordered is a stereotype, and it is silly and ahistorical to claim that you need authoritarianism to bring order to Catholic countries. Catholic societies have a greater tolerance for the messiness of human life. It views itself like a field hospital ready to provide people with means to get back up and to heal. Calvinists, on the other hand, are strangled by their constant anxiety about whether they are part of the elect or not. That can translate into rigidity, rigorism, scrupulosity, and OCD. These, in turn, can resort in a backlash of moral laxity.
(Another stereotype is the Protestant work ethic. Apparently, no one ever heard of the Benedictines and their influence on Europe. There is also a healthy attitude toward work and an unhealthy one.)
It's the saying, "It's easier to ask forgiveness than get permission."
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/06/19/forgive/
It's always worth understanding the consequences of non compliance before you'd decide to comply (and vice versa.)
2 months ago there was a story about a huge family mansion in Meath being demolished after a court found they did not have the proper planning permissions, and the council was unwilling to grant the permissions after the fact. Also just last week a judge ordered the demolition/removal of 26 mobile homes from a site in Dublin set up without permissions.
Friends of mine recently got planning permission for a house they've been living in for about 3 years already.
So you can def roll the dice on such things, maybe you get away with it for decades, maybe your house gets flattened.
My (also an immigrant like you) take on Ireland is that many of these systems are run and controlled by humans, and you can get pretty far by trying to make that human connection with the people controlling your fate. My wife was initially refused maternity benefit, because she did not have enough social security contributions. She works part-time, and she was missing 1 contribution (about €120) out of something like 38 for the year. After friends (the same from above) suggested we phone them and talk to the people, the maternity benefit application was approved. I find that there is a lot less "sorry can't help you, computer says no" here.
True, and we did find that we could at least talk to our TD pretty easily, which was good for a sympathetic ear but didn't change much.
Might be worth noting that the house you mention was built 20 years ago. https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/housing-planning/2026/05/...
And indeed, rules against mobile homes are actually enforced in Dublin, but outside the pale we definitely had a different experience.
In common parlance, that's called corruption.
Definitely is an embodiment of class/accent/skin colour privilege.
No, it's just good old corruption and/or nepotism.
What did I miss in the GP comment that points to the decisions being made on class, accent, or skin color?
My suspicion is that leaving things like e.g. qualification for social benefits to the judgment of whoever happens to be talking to the claimant introduces the possibility of bias entering the decision.
It can, but I don't think we should assume it did. Innocent until proven guilty and all, and unfortunately most if not all laws come down to judgement calls by those in charge.
Eh, algorithmic / procedural bias is also a thing, and it can line up with the kinds of protected characteristics the rules are ostensibly there to prevent discrimination on the basis of. See, for example, redlining in the USA. I suspect the benefits of allowing discretion generally outweigh the risks it creates, provided that the aggregate feedback of that discretion is taken into account when redesigning the procedures, so that discretion doesn't become load-bearing as the real world moves on and the procedures stay in the same place.
It's funny you say this because, at least from what I've seen, groups that are historically discriminated against seem to be receiving more latitude in skirting the law.
Interesting that you think this is corruption or favours are being offered up. I wonder how you'll react when confronted by some real corruption.
There is a lot of truth to this but things are changing e.g. those houses without planning permission getting torn down. That simply would not have happened two decades ago.
We’ve had a warmer than average year worldwide every year since 1976. I suppose it’s just coincidence that exactly what climate scientists said would happen keeps happening and keeps getting worse.
OMG the planning system is definitely an issue in this country. I did try to wing it but had to demolish a small structure, retention was not approved. Their letters are insanely threatening, like you can go to jail or pay a fine in millions. But then another time I just did the planning permission in my own name, drawings and all and it was approved fairly quickly despite me not being an eng or arch. It depends on the town/city you are in and the planning department. I used to deal with planning in other European countries and Ireland just lacks technical supervision step, hence the dependence on neighbours notifying the council and on the front loading of the initial application process.
There also are a lot of things that could help a lot with reducing heat gain in the summer that planners are strongly opposed to, like eaves (which let in the sun in winter but not in the midday in summer), and I can't fathom why.
Organic food can use organic pesticides.
Which might or might not be safer than synthetic ones. Fundamental job of pesticides and herbicides is to kill stuff. Just because it appears in nature does not mean it is safe.
Do you realize that stimulants like caffeine and nicotine (also the supplement sulforaphane comes to mind) evolved in nature as pesticides?
True when talking health of the end consumers.
But "organic" also targets soil health, biodiversity, animal well-being, and the environment in general.
Some synthetic pesticides / herbicides / fungicides hardly break down in the environment. Which leads to accumulation of a cocktail of such chemicals in soil & ground/surface waters. Ultimately appearing everywhere in air, drinking water & food. Not unlike microplastics, PFAS etc. How this affects humans' health is largely unknown.
Generally, chemicals produced by plants also break down naturally. So they don't accumulate in soils over time.
So it's kind of "exclude nature as much as possible, cleanroom style" versus "work with nature to keep things in a healthy balance".
This is a common complaint in the EU, since enforcement is by ones own government, everyone believes that they are the only ones being held to account. It may or may not be true in general, but it sure gives that impression
The way I understand it, at least here in France, the complaint isn't exactly that some other random EU country has lax enforcement of the EU laws. Rather, it's about the various trade agreements with non-EU countries not known for their strict rules. The latest one being with Mercosur, and the main gripe being with Brazil (presumably because of their huge output, not sure if they're considered worse than the others by whatever metric). Another usual suspect is "ukrainian chicken".
Sure, the agreements say that whatever is imported needs to comply with this or that standard, but customs rarely inspect these. So you end up importing produce which is much cheaper than the local-grown one and which also doesn't comply with the strict local laws. That's where the "unfair competition" happens.
Sure, I bet French farmers aren't too happy to see tomatoes or whatever grown in other EU countries with cheaper labor flood the local market. However, anecdotally, I never see produce from eastern Europe here in Paris. Non-French usually means Spanish or Netherlands if it's EU, or northern Africa if not. You can mayyybe find son specialty cheese or meat from abroad, but outside the very common Italian varieties and Gouda, it's really not easy to find in regular supermarkets.
However, for some reason, apples from freaking Chile and South Africa seem very common, even in season, although apples grow fine here, including that specific variety (pink lady). And when I do find locally-grown ones, they're usually at the same price.
It's likely that centralized logistics makes even price-competetive local produce unattractive for large retailers. Much easier to deal with one large supplier halfway around the world than hundreds or thousands.
Sorry if it was not clear, this is about Spain/EU enforcement in Spain vs EU enforcement in Morocco, where we import tons of fruits from. I think it's plenty obvious that the enforcement level will be different at the source.
Edit: I've asked that myself multiple times. There's also some stubbornness there as well TBF.
Meanwhile nobody bats an eye in Spain if you hire illegal African immigrants, pay them far below minimum wage and house them in shacks without electricity and running water. Places like Almería look like slave towns.
Why are they still farming? It sounds like an awful crop.
Because it's fields+trees that have been there for decades, and even if there's no profit few years, it still pays for the salaries of the workers and expenses of maintaining the fields. If you stop it, things die and then it's more expensive to restart.
It also shifts a lot of the real exposure onto farm workers and local environments outside the EU, while EU firms still capture the upside
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.
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).
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
> cumin smells like disgusting body odour
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 is a hint of that it’s not just you but you get used to it and don’t notice it anymore. It’s kind of how most cheese has a persistent vomit smell.
How much heavy meals can be hiding in a pinch of cumin realistically? Maybe you should invest in a metal detector.
The problem with lead (and presumably other heavy metals) is that exposure is cumulative as it gets accumulated in your body so there really isn't a safe amount.
If this report is seeing spices from outside the EU containing contamination then there are organic options available, as I'm looking at my EU made (comes from France) organic certified Cumin.
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
But is this scientifically supported?
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
If a pesticide is banned to use inside the EU, it should also be banned to import into the EU products that were grown using that pesticide.
Surely that depends on the reason for the ban? Say it is banned in the EU because of concerns about secondary environmental impact, a different country with a different ecology could reasonably decide to keep using it.
Canadian lentils are sprinkled in glyphosate to kill them so they can be harvested (as the climate there doesn’t allow for this to occur naturally). They’re then harvested and shipped back to the EU where such a practice is forbidden. But it happened outside of the EU so it’s magically safe.
This is nothing new though. A small number of poor countries manufacture goods and mine materials in pretty terrible conditions that are illegal in the countries consuming those goods and resources.
If it is not allowed to be used in the EU, it shouldn't be allowed to export it.
> Although these chemicals are not allowed on the EU market, they can still be exported from European Member States to third countries. From there, they can return to Europe as residues in imported food — a “toxic pesticides boomerang” that puts consumers at risk.
For spices and tea it really makes sense to buy organic (not that there are no fraudsters but still).
Just buy from places where these laws are in effect instead of imports from other countries where they legally use these pesticides.
You can but that makes grocery shopping more cumbersome so it's valid to ask why you have to put in that effort.
It also makes sense for anything coming out of third world countries, pesticides kill and harm lots of farmers there. https://www.publiceye.ch/en/topics/pesticides/pesticide-gian...
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)
Not all synthetics are dangerous, many are. Many are banned, with the list growing each year: https://www.npic.orst.edu/reg/restricted.html
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...
> Not all synthetics are dangerous, many are. Many are banned, with the list growing each year: https://www.npic.orst.edu/reg/restricted.html
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
Why are synthetics regularly banned if they are safe then? Is every farm high-tech, with million dollars tractors and big, flat fields? How about crops where pesticides have to be applied manually? How about communities near the fields, which breathe those products?[0]
Why are you trying to slide the discussion with GMOs, which aren't relevant since we talk about pesticides?
Saying that "organic has 2% of the world crop" is not true : certified organic crops, yes. Most of the earth's biomass grows without synthetic pesticides, and many farms in the world have the same practices without the labels.
In general, organic farming is a reference, of course that it doesn't have to be a religion. It is also a great source of scientific experimentation, especially for soil regeneration and biodiversity (which alas, I know, isn't profitable for Monsanto&co... yet!)
Using less pesticides in general is something that is proven better[1], and doesn't necessarily reduces yields[2]. Organic farming is part of the global effort for the reduction in pesticide usage, and doesn't have to be hegemonic. Having "organic farming only" areas are for instance great to create havens for biodiversity, while agricorps are allowed to run wild elsewhere.
Overall it's great for consumer choice, and reducing to the maximum pesticides intake for children should be a goal, given their sensitivity to endocrine disruptors.
[0] https://oem.bmj.com/content/68/9/694.short
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42452-019-1485-1
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nplants20178
> There are still organic ones available, which are less dangerous.
"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
"Organic" as in "allowed in what is commonly called 'organic farming'". You can find the rather short list here: https://www.agdaily.com/technology/the-list-of-pesticides-ap...
Note that other countries may have different legislations. You are also free to eat DDT to prove that organic farming is not really safer.
> There are still organic ones available, which are less dangerous.
You’re gunna want to look at the later half of that.
At least in Germany we have “Bio” which is a organic label that is controlled at least somewhat.
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
Strong claims require strong evidence, not just throwing random fashionable words others are using. Your claims are very strong.
Do you need evidence that "Natural doesn't mean healthy or good for the environment"?
Asbestos, is "natural". So is Arsenic. And CO2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
Or do you need evidence that the bio labels are not optimizing for health or environment? Check the rules. Most of them are just there to restrict synthetic products, regardless of their impact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_certification#False_as...
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
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.
The argument we are having here is essentially a classic of philosophy: empiricism versus rationalism. You keep arguing for the former; I am arguing for the latter. It is true that molecule X may not present an observable danger to health; it is also true that it may be reasonable to believe it does present one (most obviously because we do not have thousands of generations of evolutionary adaptation to it, as is the case with both lead and GMOs).
This dichotomy underpins a difference in regulation between the USA and Europe. As mentioned already, the EU Commission applies the "precautionary principle" in its legal regime for food and chemicals. This is not "unscientific". Empiricism has been more popular in the Anglophone world, but rationalism was one of the pillars of the scientific Enlightenment.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/glossary/precauti...
Why are you allowing chemicals with proven toxicity then?
Yes, but we understand modern science as it pertains to both... which is why lead is controlled for both organic and non-organic farming.
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...
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.
I would imagine any agricultural use of vinegar as an organic chemical pales in comparison to it’s culinary use.
Agricultural use is a lot more concentrated though, which is important. In the case of vinegar this is about safety.
Though I don't know how much vinegar is used in ag - my facebook feed is full of people who don't need roundup because some concoction of vinegar, salt, and dish soap works - they never point out that you need PPE to work with this stuff that isn't required for roundup.
Agricultural use is not more concentrated than culinary use by the time it goes into my mouth. I've never tasted any vegetable off the shelf that was more sour than a pickle.
Occupational exposure is certainly a totally different story but the context of the story and root of this thread was about the consumer safety of the end product.
Are you sure the basic proposition of organic isn't "we can get people to pay more if we put on this label".
Speaking for myself, yes, I am sure. See previous comments for explanation.
Within the EU, it does. There's a whole regulation for it: EU 2018/848.
People are downvoting you, but you’re right: https://news.immunologic.org/p/organic-foods-are-not-healthi...
Organic is marketing. Organic produce is more profitable.
True. My tea merchant sells two varieties of the same tea. The organic and the regular. I asked what the difference was, and they said the tea comes from the same village, and that the organic one was lower quality, so they invested in EU stamps to get a higher price, while the higher quality one did not feel the need. No difference essentially, except that the organic was priced higher.
So I always make a point to buy the inorganic one (pun intended!).
Yes and no!
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.
Oh no, I drank 1 ml of saturated fat. Is it even still all bad for you? I thought I heard some detail about that recently ...
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.)
Many a health or ethics rabbit hole can be bypassed with simple abstention. However, this is not good for 'content creators'. They need the controversy and rage bait for engagement.
With saturated fat the health authorities that have science but industry lobbying to content with, have told us to avoid the stuff because it clogs the arteries and invariably comes with cholesterol because animals. Arguably Ebola and AIDS are worse than a bit of saturated fat, however, it is a clear message, up there with 'smoking is bad'. Yet a vocal minority will spin this yarn about how wonderful saturated fat is. They are for real and tell the gym-going public all kinds of nonsense.
Yet a diet from before farmers started using copious amounts of synthetic chemicals placed saturated fat as very hard to get. There is no fat on wild animals, only on fattened up farm animals (and humans).
In these former times, meat of any kind was hard to come by. Chicken was saved up for, paying in installments for that special birthday treat. Meat such as rabbit was far more prevalent, the chicken was there for the eggs, not to be eaten as a snack in a lunchtime sandwich.
Hence, scale back all the modern day junk to the idealised peasant diet and there is no need to know anything about any modern day diet or nutrition talking points.
The peasants did not live for long, though, did they? Hard to say if and how the diet contributed, but just because people rarely ate meat then, for example, doesn't necessarily mean it's better for your health. Even if we could agree that people these days eat too much.
People talk about how we spent generations adapting to certain aspects of diet, and so following the habits of old is surely safer, but seem to forget that evolution only really "cares" about producing offspring, not your longevity, or quality of life in old age.
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.
Because of the thermal shock, these bags release billions of plastic particles, that you immediately consume and let diffuse into your organs. It may be one of the worst forms of exposure to microplastics overall.
People still use tea bags even though they're a top source of microplastics.
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.
Source?
Not all, if they use stitch method with cotton it's okay - many use PLA though
https://www.hampsteadtea.com/blogs/news/is-pla-plastic-free-...
People still use tea bags even though what they contain is a byproduct of tea production and barely counts as tea.
Then where does the real stuff go? The arabs, indians?? Tea bags are the mass market in Europe for example. Hardly anyone uses tea leaves (are they different?).
I know an Iranian in the Netherlands who says the tea there is mostly coloring.
My knowledge of this from a long time ago and narrow, but I can give you a rough picture.
Different countries do buy different types and qualities of tea. The US is big market for low quality (dust, stalks) tea for tea bags.
Countries that like strong sweet tea with lots of milk buy tea that is low grown (i.e. lower elevations) and processed using the "cut, torn curled" process rather than the older "orthodox" process. High grown (on mountains) tea is better for those who drink it without milk.
Leaves do tend to be higher quality and they have grades reflecting the size of the pieces. There is a standard system which is marked on some types of tea.
It is usual to pluck two leaves and a bud. Plucking more would add a lot of stalk which lower quality. Plucking or using just a bud produces a very delicate flavour (sivlertips). High grown silvertips is good with
Most tea is blended so will contain a mix of different things.
India, China and Japan are the largest markets for quality whole leaf tea. Tea bags contain fannings and dust, the lowest quality byproducts of tea production. Try a single estate TGFOP and you’ll never want to drink tea from a bag again.
Chinese tea is again a whole different world from Indian tea, and has a much broader spectrum of complexity. You could spend a lifetime learning about Chinese tea.
Most tea bags aren't trying to be tea as in camellia sinensis but rather herbal infusions. Nothing wrong with that.
To me, sounds like it's a great thing that we waste less agricultural output and have goods available at different price points.
Yes, there’s a huge market in the UK, Australia and New Zealand for low quality tea.
I've been buying spices from Diaspora, Burlap & Barrel, Curio - not cheap but I definitely feel some validated after eyeing the report. The potency is top notch too. Tea I buy loose leaf from a trusted purveyor. Among yerba mate brands there are a few organic brands to choose from.
The obvious question is: if these pesticides are considered too unsafe to use in the EU, why are EU companies still allowed to export them?
Isn't that the only way they can profit?
Probably the law says "they cannot be used in the EU" and that's it. If the law would ban the production of said pesticides it would be a completely different story.
I drink a lot of tea and I hadn't really thought about pesticides. I really don't know what's wrong with people. For so, so many products the thought process seems to be:
And then when you try to say that poison is bad someone comes in clutching their pearls and shrieking "but if we didn't use poison then the product would be more expensive!" I'd rather have less of it than be poisoned.
Why? I thought pesticides were safe? That's what the Monsanto bot told me, anyway.
I too believed Patrick Moore representing Monstanto when he said 'Round up' was safe to drink.
> When the interviewer immediately offered him a glass of the herbicide to drink, Moore refused, stating: "No, I'm not an idiot," and abruptly ended the interview.
Guess he just want thirsty at that moment.
Only an idiot would drink when they are not thirsty. Nothing to do with his job being to lie and manipulate opinion.
I hope each one of you signs this!
We're reaching the point where people need to install GC/MS systems in their homes in order to be safe from food hazards.
No we don’t. And the greatest hazard is the soul crushing disappointment that is a Dutch tomato.
wasserbomben + https://www.hortidaily.com/article/6022801/how-tasty-tom-suc...
I'll settle for no soft apples.
This boomerang is the effect of another boomerang: nothing grows anymore without pesticides. I can see that in my crops and fruits: when I was young I could benefit from the produce my dad grew naturally. 30 years later nothing grows naturally anymore, blight, insects and diseases kill everything in a few days. We gave up, as it makes no sense to actively poison our produce when the poison comes with no hassle from bought one.
I don't think you can conclude much from a sample size of 1.
My country at least (and probably yours too) is producing more organic products than ever before. People are also consuming organic products more than before.
Don't organic foods use natural pesticides?
Yep but that's just always been the case: it's a world of difference between spraying the latest Monsanto v7 KillEmAll upgraded formula or supporting biodiversity such that for every major pest there is also something which eats it and gets rid of it.
> or supporting biodiversity
Natural pesticides do not support biodiversity. It's natural fallacy.
Personally working at a bio farm and while it is more work than just spraying some chemical wholesale, I think it's not necessarily much harder than the past (not sure though). What I do know is that not being bio is much easier, that's all.
You’re not wrong. Where I am you need to cover everything with a net to even give it a chance at getting to the ripe stage otherwise 80% of it is somehow damaged by insects and disease. I’ve only been growing things for a few years but I just assumed that’s how growing things naturally always was. Is that genuinely not true?
Not a single word on where the toxic products were produced except third countries?
Large amounts of pesticides which are banned from use in EU and/or US, are produced there then exported.
Afaik there's some EU work towards closing this loophole. But nothing major that made it into legislation (so far). No doubt Monsanto, Bayer & co have lobbyists + lawyers working to slow down or prevent that.
We’ve successfully outsourced pollution too.
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.
> 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).
Companies that poison the people like this should be sanctioned, along with their owners. Greed and profiteering
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 will probably do nothing again.
When it comes to safety regulations as with everything else, some countries do not succeed, others do not try
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.
But hey, we have USB-C! It evenS out, right?
Its up to individual countries to do it no? They've been testing honey here recently and several brands got removed from stores.
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.
Does the EU have a centralized food testing agency?
It does have a food safety agency, but this is a classic international trade problem that is solved at the border since the EU is a trade union.
Or in this case - purposefully NOT solved.
Who wants to bet "Mercosur" agricultural products won't be checked at the border and will - surprise - turn out to have "issues". Has the forced labor agriculture in South America been solved yet?
Nope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_South_Ame...
I guess not. Will the EU check? Hah!
Has nature protection been solved yet?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_Brazil
Nope. Will the EU check? Hah!
The EU makes their companies to compete against slavery. First in China, religious-ethnic slavery. Now in South America, also mostly ethnic slavery.
Whatever it takes to sell BMWs !
That's what the individual countries are supposed to do.
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.
The toxic dose is a vague term. You may not die from exposure, but you can still have effects, such as infertility, cancers or endocrine disruption.
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.
Precaution principle exists, and in the case of food safety, "getting new data" make take years or be very costly.
For instance, bisphenols in plastics baby bottles were proved problematic after decades of use. Precaution principle would have recommended to avoid them (especially since they weren't necessary).
It's not trivial, and many businesses would rather see their consumers die than cut their margins. I remember buying some custom furniture; when it arrived it reeked of varnish smell. I called the factory, told them they didn't cure it correctly. Manager said "yeah we know, we know it's dangerous but people get cancers years later and you can't identify the source anyway" (true story).
There is certainly more that we can do. Ie being more careful with introducing new chemicals with largely unknown long term effects.
The burden of proof shouldn't be decades of research seeing thousands of people developing serious health issues and/or dying, and then reacting. It should be on companies, having lengthy and expensive process for approval and then continue reviewing. This is not some app release ffs, we talk about lives and health of billions, how much more we can fail our children if we fail this.
Or you know what, you can do that with you and your kids, but please allow me and my family to use more conservative approach, I am happy to pay a bit extra.
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.
In the case of pesticides, lower doses may show increased effects, what you say is false.
https://academic.oup.com/edrv/article-abstract/33/3/378/2354...
+1
The downvotes aren't surprising, people who have spent enough time on this orange site tend to lose the plot
What's an orange site?
The one you are currently browsing
There's always a tradeoff between eating crops that will make you sick and kill you when you are 60 vs not eating enough nutritious food that will kill you when you are 40.
Shitting on your doorstep is a better term than the boomerang affect in my opinion.
Oh you import food from third world countries and it’s terrible? Who would have guessed.
Better keep pushing the farmers in the EU away for more of these great “trade deals”
Are these EU farmers that are being turned away growing tea and spices?
Some do, especially in Portugal and the Azores, for tea. And I grow my own peppers and chillies in cold Germany - why would we not be able to do so on an industrial scale?
Or you buy your tea from other first-world countries, such as Japan.
In the end, it is up to the consumer.
Local variants exist. But supermarkets are convenient and cheap.
https://unric.org/en/un-poverty-expert-europeans-impoverishm...
But we absolutely need to shut down our farms to lower emissions so that we appear "green". It's totally worth to become food dependent on questionable countries for that.
I carefully check the label and try to only buy Australian made 100% food.
I never buy any food ever from China.
Does that meaningfully restrict which foods / ingredients you can get?
No. Australia produces vast variety of food everything you could want to eat aside from more exotic stuff.
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.
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.
These do involve foods from China though..
You can use safe Australian ingredients to cook the recipe.
Where in Australia grows Sichuan peppercorns? They're almost exclusively grown in China and the general regions nearby to my knowledge.
You can grow them yourself. I had no effort producing more than I can use in only a few years time.
That's great but not an option for everyone.
They have some really good foods. They also have some really unethical foods. When we only have a broad brush...
Eh, tofu is hardly something that anyone is worse of not having.
the famed triple negative (also tofu is healthy and delicious)
In Australia, tea and spices are imported predominantly from Asian countries.
What's that going to help you with?
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.
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.
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).
EU generally leads the developed world in regulation, that has become a meme and a joke.
but for Food related stuff, EU standards and regulation are truly superior for consumers, relative to US and other countries
> 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.
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)
I'd love to see a policy difference where I prefer the attitude of the US
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%.
Yeah, the US FDA allows artificial growth hormones in dairy so let's drop this comical charade that US dairy is good.
It's banned in the EU mostly for animal welfare reasons, not for food quality reasons.
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.
https://www.tilleydistribution.com/insights/food-regulations...
That's not stricter, it's just different names.
It is stricter.
https://www.daymarksafety.com/news/some-fundamental-differen...
> 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.
Those aren't additives, it just means you don't need to breakdown the nutrients label it doesn't change the additives.
So the things you have brought up doesn't seem to be the reason USA has so many more additives listed on their products. If you give a single example of an identical product listing more things in USA than in the EU and how these regulations influenced that I could trust you, but as is what you say seems to just be a meme.
Lol we, even you, talk about additives and then you bring up nutritional content of the food itself. Do you even understand the topic discussed? It certainly doesn't seem so, or you have an agenda to serve, for whatever reason. Or are llms today having most of computing power diverted into pretraining new version?
We do list all of that, but thats usually a separate table, or if not a separate bloc of text. Its always there. Posting random webs scraped by llms ain't providing facts and personal experience to discussion.
I fear you have been vinegar brain washed. Like this talking point was dilled into you
> 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.
So, the issue with chlorinated chicken washing is not that the chlorine is unsafe, as such. There are two concerns. The first is cross-contamination. The second is that there is some evidence that it is essentially a cheat; it defeats common tests for salmonella but does not actually reliably destroy the salmonella. So, if you allow chlorine washing, then you can pass the tests while not fixing supply chain problems.
Reference on most American chicken now being washed with _vinegar_? As far as I know that’s fairly uncontroversial ineffective.
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/04/15/nx...
“The vast majority of chicken processed in the United States is not chilled in chlorine and hasn't been for quite a few years.
…
Less than 5% of poultry processing facilities still use chlorine in rinses and sprays, according to the National Chicken Council, an industry group that surveyed its members. (Those that still do use a highly diluted solution at concentrations deemed safe.)
Nowadays, the industry mostly uses organic acids to reduce cross contamination, primarily peracetic, or peroxyacetic acid, which is essentially a mixture of vinegar and hydrogen peroxide.“
On the other hand, US tap water is absolutely drenched in chlorine. Awful stuff.
This is exactly what I’m talking about. The US and the European Union both allow chlorine in drinking water as in both areas it’s used kill bacteria. The US allows slightly more but both of them set it to safe levels and the chlorine and chloramane used do not make people sick
> 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.
There is some weird obsession on the internet about proving the U.S. is the worst at everything.
Believe me, the majority of “The rest of the world” does not protect its citizens from harmful food contamination.
I attribute a lot of it to the principle of "punching up".
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.
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.
As a non-American, that mostly is a reaction to rabid US jingoism, as in the US claiming themselves as "Numba 1" in everything, when usually, they are in the 10s or 20s at best.
And to many Americans this is even worse: If you are not best™ or worst™ ... you are unremarkable, 'E pluribus unum'.