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More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

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Re: More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

#91

Post by merpnderp »

devmunchies wrote: post #7

Is it possible to grow enough food in your backyard to live off of (plus chickens as a yard waste disposal) if you also work full time? I can't even eat at a restaurant without knowing if they use organic produce.

Without pesticides? As an layman I doubt it. A few friends in my neighborhood started a garden and one of us said we couldn't use any pesticides that weren't organic. Bugs and fungus destroyed most of our crops. We spent hours and hours sitting on our knees rubbing soapy water on the bottom of the zucchini leaves trying to get rid of the squash bugs, to zero effect.

I finally called enough and said we were dusting everything with sevendust. The next day all the bugs were gone. I have no idea how people could farm on the ground, in any quantity, without pesticides.

Re: More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

#92

Post by khawkins »

mtw wrote: post #37
devmunchies wrote: post #7

Is it possible to grow enough food in your backyard to live off of (plus chickens as a yard waste disposal) if you also work full time? I can't even eat at a restaurant without knowing if they use organic produce.

If you don't know how to grow food, there's this project that will seed and take care of plants https://farm.bot From what I read, this produces enough veggies for a family of four all year round. Now producing beans, rice or wheat is another matter. I don't think its possible without moving to your own farm

Gonna call bullshit on that claim. I've seen estimates that an acre feeds 2-20 people. Assuming 20 people, that's roughly 2000 ft^2/person, which is 10 times bigger than the 200 ft^2 size of their larger model. Not going to believe packing plants close together is going to give an advantage of 40x more produce.

Re: More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

#93

Post by Joakal »

thfuran wrote: post #62
geddy wrote: post #28

Watched a great documentary on Netflix called `Stink!` that was about all the crap found in all sorts of products under the hidden phrase "fragrance" (or in some cases, "parfum"). All sorts of chemicals you've never heard of to make those garbage bags smell like apple orchards. Very informative and, if you're like me and are constantly panicked that everything's trying to kill you, I recommend it.

>All sorts of chemicals you've never heard of Is that supposed to be a meaningful measure of anything at all?

Not OP, but on a tangent, if I find chemicals renamed, I get extremely suspicious about the other ingredients. Some obvious examples, aqua = water, sucrose = sugar, or one of the many numbered ingredients etc.

It indicates to me that the supplier are deceptive in manipulating the important information for consumers.

Re: More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

#95

Post by xyzzyz »

idontpost wrote: post #78
beenBoutIT wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, there has never been a case of mercury toxicity from normal consumption of commercial seafood recorded in any American medical journal. These larger species you mention could exist outside of that sphere.

Literally on the first page of google results for "mercury toxicity from normal consumption of commercial seafood": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4721310/ Cites dozens of studies of cases of adverse effects from mercury from seafood.

This is pretty worthless study. They are doing multiple comparisons without doing Bonferroni correction. Once you do that, there's no significant finding. On top of that, they have stupidly large 95% confidence intervals, their test metrics are pretty weak, and they only have blood levels of Hg of only a fraction of study participants. They seem to attempt to control for confounds, which is commendable, but with their sample being rather small, there's little hope of obtaining significant finding after controlling and correcting for multiple comparisons.

Controling for confounds here is the most important part really. It's like all the studies finding that people drinking wine have better health outcomes -- it turns out that wealthy people both are more likely to drink more wine, and have better health outcomes for reasons other than drinking wine. If you don't control for that, you'll find spurious associations.

Re: More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

#96

Post by thatcat »

likpok wrote: post #66
Tobani wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Glyphosate is not approved for organic use so that's an irrelevant point. Actually it is a pretty interesting point.

Saying "there's less glyphosate therefore less pesticide" is poor reasoning, because glyphosate is replaced with other, generally more toxic, pesticides in organic crops. It's interesting that organic crops have glyphosate despite it being banned for use with them, but that's a separate discussion.

No it isn't. Glyophosate is broadspectrum herbicide for use with gmo glyophosate resistant crops only, there is no organic analogue to this. Also consider that the concentration used is much higher for glyophosate application and the reduced ability for it to be filtered from ground water creates additional externalities.

Re: More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

#97

Post by merpnderp »

hammock wrote: post #32
ip26 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of what I've seen has shown that it is indeed better, although not perfect. E.g. glyphosate is detectable in organic wine, but at much lower levels (5x?) compared to regular wine.

Glyphosate is not approved for organic use so that's an irrelevant point. Whether total pesticide load (however you want to measure that) is higher or lower for organic vs conventional, varies widely with crop, location and farming method. There are toxic organic pesticides like copper-based compounds that persist in the soil. And things like strawberry fields are fumigated with methyl bromide regardless of organic o…

Methyl Bromide was nearly completely phased out in the US as of 2005.

https://www.epa.gov/ods-phaseout/phaseout-class-i-ozone-depl...

Re: More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

#98

Post by astrea »

korethr wrote: post #79

Okay, this Environmental Working Group found traces of pesticides on produce. That's not terribly unexpected, given how most produce is, well, produced. What this article annoyingly neglects to mention, is the _numbers_ attached to those traces of pesticides. Where there large amounts of trace chemicals, such that the levels exceed the EPA's recommended safe exposure levels? Were they so high that dangerous levels of…

Also worth noting the EWG's reports have been questioned in the past for their bias. Heck, even the type of report this article mentions is commonly criticized: https://www.accountablescience.com/how-dirty-are-your-fruits...

Re: More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

#99

Post by ChuckMcM »

sokoloff wrote: post #90
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a lot? Acres of farmland are pretty cheap. I takes only a mobile home to live there. Well, plus a well and septic tank. Maybe $25K?

As a Fermi problem, to try to understand the overall scale, I was intrigued to learn that there’s about the same number of arable acres of land as people in the world. Naturally, neither of these things is evenly distributed. In the place where my well-paying job is, it would be difficult for us to afford 5 arable acres on one locally top 5% income within a reasonable commute to my work.

You are conflating the terms "possible" and "practical" :-)

There are communication technologies today that have made this more practical. 10 Gigabit microwave links are a thing these days.

That said, there are a lot of variables. Community gardens, barter systems, and others which once you open up the problem to the question "can a community be self sufficient" you get into village design.

[1] https://www.cablefree.net/cablefree-millimeter-wave-mmw/10g/

Re: More Than 90% of Americans Have Pesticides or Their Byproducts in Their Bodies

#100

Post by devmunchies »

AndrewGaspar wrote: post #22
devmunchies wrote: post #7

Is it possible to grow enough food in your backyard to live off of (plus chickens as a yard waste disposal) if you also work full time? I can't even eat at a restaurant without knowing if they use organic produce.

I find this comment kind of funny because the incredible byproduct of modern agriculture (including pesticides) is that the vast majority of the human race can now do something besides toiling away at food production.

from what i understand, pesticides weren't being used in a big way until the 90's, so the "(including pesticides)" doesn't seem true.
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