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Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

modernfarmer.com

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

#271

Post by Applejinx »

buvanshak wrote: post #169
topmonk wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget leaded gasoline: https://www.thenation.com/article/secret-history-lead/

I think that the common people have no way of knowing the real truth about something. And all our decisions should be based on this simple fact of modern life...

That and, entities with large amounts of power (such as a titanic corporation with billions in revenues) are compelled to exploit any avenue for making more money, compelled to exploit any externalities they're not actively held responsible for, and compelled to hire astroturf and pay for false information to the exact extent that they can, not legally, but practically, get away with it.

They are compelled to be this because if they don't the next guy will do it and beat them, and there's an ocean of evidence demonstrating that 'good people' will go along with all of it if seeming authority demands it.

History's littered with this. To be like 'oh, but THIS time we have to give the corporation the benefit of all possible doubt, because their PR statement says if you don't then billions of people will die and all will be lost'…?

No way. No way. The fundamental truth of society is that the powerful will take advantage. Acknowledging that goes back to the Magna Carta. This is no time to ditch that and turn over unquestioned power to gods, kings and corporations.

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

#272

Post by mannykannot »

ekianjo wrote: post #187
mannykannot wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what is meant (from the post in question, not necessarily your summary): cui bono arguments are particularly ineffective for those claiming vaccines are harmful, because doctors, who generally consider vaccines to be very effective and mostly harmless, are not particularly financially vested in the continued use of vaccines (unlike the manufacturers, presumably.) If the use of vaccines was curtailed, doctors…

Lets not put all vaccines into a sigle category. There are many different types of vaccines, from how they work to how they are actually manufactured, and they all carry different levels of risks. Blanket statements are not helpful.

There are extensive, multi-stage, rational, mandated procedures for not putting every candidate vaccine into a single category. Categorizations based on anecdotal evidence and superstition are not helpful.

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

#273

Post by Applejinx »

zasz wrote: post #12
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #3

From the article: “All of the official samples passed the test and were within the legal limits of glyphosate residue. But those off-the-record, unofficial samples, though done with the same equipment and tested by the same chemists, showed glyphosate. That’s right. The chemists found glyphosate residue on just about everything: crackers, granola, cornmeal, honey, oatmeal, baby food, and even corn. Their surreptitiou…

I'm no fan of toxic chemicals in our food and I don't trust the government or corporations to do enough to protect it, but it seems fair to me to say that a PhD in philosophy and a master's in physics are not particularly relevant to claiming expertise in evaluating toxicological claims.

Neither is a massive corporate PR budget, but it'll work wonders at widely spreading the specific claims that benefit you, whether or not you just made them up or paid to have them written down by a third party.

That PhD in philosophy is likely to give an otherwise naive person the useful information of, "yes, seemingly nice people will act like this if it benefits them, or if they've deferred to some authority that requires it of them". It'll also give a grounding in 'rationalizing such decisions'.

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

#274

Post by notjtrig »

What I think people are missing is the relationship between GMO and Glyphosate. The first round of GMO seed available in America was Monsanto's 'RoundUp Ready' brand engineered to be sprayed with a unholey amount of RoundUp. In 2014 83% of GMO crop planted was modified to be resistant to herbisides, mostly RoundUp.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genetically_modified...

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

#275

Post by Applejinx »

jopsen wrote: post #24
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…

Most of the world runs of on good faith and best intentions, without it everything would break down. This goes for taxes, healthcare, insurance, checks, postal mail, traffic code, currency, etc. This also holds for an alarming number of electronic systems such as the phone network, and many ISP network configurations. While it's tempting to say no trust should be required, that's very expensive, like bitcoin. For sys…

Trust is a scale issue. Beyond a certain scale, beyond a certain degree of abstraction, it just doesn't exist anymore. Everything DOES break down, and has been doing so since the Roman Empire broke down, and even before that into prehistory.

If we like to retain what structures and expectations we have, the one thing we can't expect is to trust the largest and most unaccountable aggregations of power. At this point, those largest powers aren't governments, certainly not the FDA.

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

#276

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #138
jjoonathan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In college, I did a deep dive into GMO safety research for journal club back when the Seralini "GMOs cause cancer in mice" paper hit (2010 or thereabouts) and found quite a counterexample to your rule: bogus (obviously p-hacked) science from Seralini and an aggressive misinformation campaign from Greenpeace to convince people that Monsanto was using terminator genes (bio-DRM) against poor farmers when the truth had b…

>> Blind opposition to industrial progress -- which is what you are suggesting -- carried by the rising tide of public opinion will cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid. What damage will be caused by people using their phones less for fear of getting cancer? What about GMOs? What is the harm in not using them? The EU has mostly banned them and it doesn't look to be sufferi…

> What damage will be caused by people using their phones less for fear of getting cancer?

Telcos will earn less money. Phone manufacturers will earn less money.

On the other hand, maybe app creators will finally learn to create apps that work perfectly fine offline (i.e. in the airplane mode).

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

#277

Post by jamespo »

random4369 wrote: post #14
dfxm12 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember watching a lecture from Vandana Shiva who claimed that glyphosate was harmful and making it in to our food. She cited some European studies that found glyphosate in a wide variety of products. She claimed that there were shady things going on in the US government that seemed to obscure these facts. While this might prove her true that the US government is trying to hide the glyphosate levels in food, does…

Every time the jury is out on a topic where one side has a vested interest and a billion dollar budget to protect it, you can be reasonably sure what the outcome will be. See: pesticides and bees, fossil fuels and climate change, food packaging plastics and cancer, pain treatment meds and addiction. The answer in all those cases is the harmful effects eventually became known, but the jury was out long enough for the…

You know there is a multibillion industry with vested interests against GMO: the organic food lobby.

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

#278

Post by jamespo »

buvanshak wrote: post #260
TeMPOraL wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wait a min. I don't remember smokers dropping dead left and right in all those times when almost everyone smoked.. Because the effect isn't very much pronounced. It's somewhat in the middle between eating rotten meat and using artificial sweeteners, in the sense that it really does damage health over long periods of time, which will result in worse life quality and quicker death of some fraction of smokers. Accordi…

>That was more subtle, but again, found relatively quickly. Wait. What? How do you measure "relatively quickly"? As far as I know, we have been using it even after the problems were known....... >The alternative to roundup is pesticides known to be much more toxic. Etc. Any source for this claim that there are no, absolutely no safer alternatives? Also, is there any proof that a safer alternative is fundamentally imp…

Surely you should be providing safer alternatives if you're convinced of them?

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

#279

Post by geden »

dfxm12 wrote: post #5
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #3

From the article: “All of the official samples passed the test and were within the legal limits of glyphosate residue. But those off-the-record, unofficial samples, though done with the same equipment and tested by the same chemists, showed glyphosate. That’s right. The chemists found glyphosate residue on just about everything: crackers, granola, cornmeal, honey, oatmeal, baby food, and even corn. Their surreptitiou…

I remember watching a lecture from Vandana Shiva who claimed that glyphosate was harmful and making it in to our food. She cited some European studies that found glyphosate in a wide variety of products. She claimed that there were shady things going on in the US government that seemed to obscure these facts. While this might prove her true that the US government is trying to hide the glyphosate levels in food, does…

The recent news is that Monsanto have known for a while that the formulations containing Glyphosate are harmful as a whole, while isolated Glyphosate may not be particularly harmful.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/08/weedkiller-t...

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

#280

Post by CompelTechnic »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #256
realusername wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This argument is moot, industrialisation saved those lives, not GMO, GMO only provides a 5% increase to crops in the developed world. Tractors, fertilizers and proper agricultural techniques saved the developed world (just like it did in the cu…

Furthermore, currently, world-wide more people die from the "side effects" of too much food; not enough is not the challenge. We have the food. It's just "unevenly distributed." Furthermore, my sense is, the argument for the world needing GMOs is based on the animal protein heavy diet. Such animals are resource / feed intensive. Shift the diet to less meats and more plants and the fact is you feed more. I'm not here…

I think as the developing world grows economically we will continue to see higher demand for meat. Eventually the only thing stopping higher meat consumption will be the fact that the price has been pushed higher and higher by limited worldwide production capacity intersecting with high demand.
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