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Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

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Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#201

Post by TangoTrotFox »

Some interesting factoids here.

- The US legal limit of glyphosate are vastly higher than the EU, ranging up to 10000% in some cases (cattle). (EU) [1] (US) [2]

- Glyphosate has been declared a probably carcinogen by the World Health Organization.

- Monsanto is the developer of glyphosate. The former head of the FDA, appointed by the last administration to a newly created position tongue in cheek referred to as 'The Czar of Foods', officially "Deputy Commissioner of Foods the FDA", was Michael Taylor. [3]. Michael Taylor was a Monsanto VP whose career was in large part started by legally arguing that companies ought be allowed to knowingly allow at least some percent of carcinogens into processed foods.

- US regulatory agencies test thousands of products for hundreds of different chemical residues. Even though glyphosate is, by far, the most widely used chemical herbicide, it was never tested for until after the WHO declared it a probable carcinogen and private tests showed extremely high levels of glyphosate even in products where it should not be present in, such as honey. [4].

- Regulatory capture sucks.

[1] - http://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/pesticides/eu-pesticides-data...

[2] - https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=1&ty=HTML&h=L&m...

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_R._Taylor

[4] - https://www.huffingtonpost.com/carey-gillam/fda-suspends-gly... (I am reluctant to link to a Huffington Post article, but this is far above their normal standards of quality, and provides a clear and factual overview. Searching for 'US glyphosate testing' turns up countless other sources if one would prefer not rely on Huffington.)

Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#202

Post by mustacheemperor »

gowld wrote: post #91
hetman wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how it works. Weeds don't somehow get into grains when they're collected. What they do is reduce yields of the crops we're actually interested in collecting. Lower yields for the same farming effort means higher prices. So what ultimately happens when the consumer sees two identical loaves of bread on the supermarket shelf and one is $2.50 while the other is $3.50?

The cost of grain input is essentially 0 (as a fraction of finished product sticker price). The cost is in baking and transportation. Corn is the cheapest product in USA.

Agriculture has a relatively fixed supply and demand every cycle because of nature and basic human needs. It's not a matter of defects affecting the bottom line, it's a reduction of invaluable output. Because natural forces flex and largely define the output for a given season, anything that can increase it is critical. Efficient agriculture technology is the only reason the world didn't collapse a la Malthus.

The best concept to replace chemicals in food production that I've seen is the use of UAVs or other robots to mechanically remove weeds and pests. Those tasks were done by humans for a long time, but we switched to chemical alternatives because human labor isn't practical for the scale of food production humanity demands.

Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#203

Post by elago »

tptacek wrote: post #158
elago wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Referring to "price of pollination services" means the natural ecosystem has failed.

There is no natural ecosystem of honey bee pollination in the United States.

In my strange corner of the world that hasn't been "agronomically optimized", there aren't giant monoculture farms spraying insecticides, and there are dozens of species acting as pollinators.

No one pays for "pollinator services".

I suppose there's a business opportunity for someone to capture all the rainfall, dam the rivers, and sell it back to me as well.

Herbicides and pesticides aren't necessary for agriculture. They are necessary for a very specific type of agriculture that has been lobbied for and subsidized, starting with the Nixon administration's "get big or get out out" message to farmers. It's been successful by metrics like 'food produced per man-hour of human labor', and appears cheap because we are all forced to partially pre-pay under threat of violence (overly dramatic way of saying its subsidized through taxes), and ignoring massive externalities of ecosystem destruction.

Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#204

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #159
emodendroket wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all the bees keep dying perhaps you'll eventually run out of bees to import.

The argument here being that there is a reserve supply of latent bees not used for commercial pollination, backfilling the commercial supply? I think robot bees are a more plausible explanation.

[deleted]

Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#205

Post by headsoup »

tptacek wrote: post #183
emodendroket wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the article you yourself linked to support the claim that there's no problem, that's exactly what they do -- purchase extra bees. That and split colonies (which creates weaker colonies which are more susceptible to death). And this same article admits a substantial price increase in products requiring bees for production.

How would you reconcile "substantial price increase due to bee requirements" to "sub-inflationary increases in pollination prices"? Again, you don't have to guess about this: pollination prices are tracked and published. We don't need the axiomatic method to figure this out; Google does just fine.

Regardless of that, the article does not support your argument of robot bees being more likely and demonstrates the former to be true.

Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#206

Post by fbarred »

briandear wrote: post #32
asfasgasg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterexamples: asbestos, tobacco, alcohol, fossil fuels, climate change. (On the latter two, the studies mostly have the correct outcome. What is difficult is convincing half of the American population that that matters.)

Who has supported the asbestos industry? Has there ever been a company that actually promotes asbestos?

Not a company exactly, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POB3Dr0uonc&t=75

Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#207

Post by sebleon »

Whether you believe glysophate is carcinogenic or not, this scandal demonstrates how the FDA works for industry, not the people.

If they had the taxpayers best interests at heart, they would not be concealing or halting research around a widespread potential carcinogen in our food supply.

Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#208

Post by narrator »

philipkglass wrote: post #131
tptacek wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The evidence seems to suggest that glyphosate is basically inert in humans, doesn't it?

I've read enough literature about the carcinogenicity to assure myself that it is very probably not a carcinogen. And to my chemist's eye it looks fast to degrade, pretty benign overall. But biology is surprisingly complicated. That's why I think that the " it targets " argument means little. That's the only part I took issue with.

Glyphosphate is a very strong estrogen receptor agonist and causes breast cancer at very low levels[1]. Let's see how fast the shills show up.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23756170

Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#209

Post by azernik »

petre wrote: post #189
colah3 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With regards to GMOs, the green revolution (as I understand it[1], partly using GMOs to increase food production, especially in developing countries) is often described as saving a billion lives. On a brief glance, I can't find a detailed estimate of the Humanitarian effects, but Borlaug received a Nobel peace prize for it and that scale of impact does seem plausible. [1] See discussion below about relative importanc…

I'm sure Monsanto and the GMO lobby's objective was saving lives in developing countries, not profits. When they pushed GMOs bundled with pesticides and herbicides they did so aided by the corruption in these countries, where the farmers were doing quite fine replanting seeds. Now they're abusing a BASF product to ripen tomatoes overnight.

Who gives a shit about motivation? Do you care if your take-out food was made in the expectation of a financial return, or does it need to be made out of the restaurant owner's sincere love of feeding strangers?

Re: Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

#210

Post by pdonis »

PantaloonFlames wrote: post #65
exp1orer wrote: post #9

So this suggests that the samples submitted to the FDA for testing were not representative of ordinary food. This reminds me of the ongoing Tetra Tech/Hunter's Point scandal [1], where the US Navy paid $300M to a contractor to clean up a development site. The contractor was required to submit samples from the site to prove they had cleaned it up. Instead, they just pulled soil from known clean places and submitted fo…

> this suggests ... Not quite. It suggests that it’s possible that regular food has glyphosate residue. But samples “brought from home” may have been contaminated elsewhere. This is why we depend on rigorous controlled tests. It’s also possible that the “official tests” were rigged, and suspiscions about that led the testers to go rogue, and that glyphosate really IS in our food in larger concentrations than we are l…

> samples “brought from home” may have been contaminated elsewhere.

Or they may have been contaminated at home, if the home has Roundup somewhere around.

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