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Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

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Re: Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

#121

Post by ClumsyPilot »

kickout wrote: post #66
xyst wrote: post #58

I can't wait until vertical farming becomes cheap enough to overtake traditional farming methods. Pesticide use will be a thing of the past while all of our food is grown locally in controlled environments. Optimizing for food taste instead of pesticide or weather resistance. Not to mention the reduced carbon footprint (due to transportation), significant decrease in water usage, and increased efficiency.

you think controlled environments don't use chemicals to control pests??? They do, and they use them a lot, because controlling pests and pathogens is physically hard no matter how hard you try. Vertical farming is way, way more energy intensive than regular outdoor based farming for the simple reason is outdoor farming can use the sun. That sole fact basically kills vertical farming for all but the highest of margin…

Controlled environments, are, well, erm, controlled, so something like a hydroponic greenhouse normally wouldn't use pesticides at all - pests should not be getting in at all.

If the greenhouse uses normal soil then ofcourse it's not totally isolated, but still i'd expect them to use less

Re: Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

#122

Post by fsckboy »

how are we supposed to parse this?:

"High-pesticide-residue FV intake was unrelated whereas low-pesticide residue FV intake was inversely related to all-cause mortality"

high pesticide consumption was unrelated (so had no effect on mortality), while low pesticide intake had inverse relation to mortality (low pesticide = high mortality)?

Re: Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

#123

Post by ClumsyPilot »

biorach wrote: post #17
DecentAI wrote: post #4

Can anyone provide a hopeful development update as to what efforts if any are underway in the farming industry to genuinely move past herbicides and pesticides of this kind?

Organic farming exists. Consumers can move past herbicides and pesticides by paying more (sometimes much more) for their food, and cooking more from scratch. Of course this is easy for wealthy first-world dwellers. Less so for low income families in places with less diverse supply chains. Organic farming has lower yields (those pests otherwise killed off by the pesticides end up eating a lot of the produce) and is mo…

> Consumers can move past herbicides and pesticides ... cooking more from scratch.

How is this even relevant?

Re: Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

#124

Post by ch4s3 »

biorach wrote: post #108
ch4s3 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should have been more clear, that one was allowed in the US, but some of the things that are allowable in the EU aren't necessarily super safe. Generally speaking really effective natural pesticides were dangerous for humans.

Sure, whatever. Organic farming isn't perfect and isn't a panacea, and I've zero interest in defending it, or in attacking high-chemical factory farming for that matter. We need to gain a better understanding of our food production systems, the full chain, precursors (seed, fertiliser and chemical suppliers), farms, processors, distributors, retailers. We need to stop thinking in terms of pure cost. We need to stop t…

> To a large extent these are two sides of the same coin.

Yeah, I think that's the interesting thing here. People don't routinely starve in droves anymore and malnutrition is increasingly rare. On the other hand there's creeping fragility in the food system(s), unknown knock on effects of chemicals applied to lots of staple crops, and land/water use issues.

It seems to me like a lot of smart people are actually working on these things but progress is as always uneven and happening in fits and starts.

Re: Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

#125

Post by ldiracdelta »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #115
ldiracdelta wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor Great Leap Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward Stalin allowed for the household plot, because.... everyone was starving due to communism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_plot During the Holodomor and in "the breadbasket" of Ukraine, people were arrested for not yielding _all_ of their produce to the state. Now the effect of terrorizing peo…

Europe and Russia has a history of peasants growing their own food. Subsequently farmland was divided into small lots. With lots of small farmers. This did not sit well with ideological goals of communism and also the soviets were in a military race with the west. Stalin wanted the state to be productively competitive with the high output large farms in America. So centrally controlled economy, and taking away land f…

The only part of your first post I object to is the attribution to communism. Literally, growing all the food and then sending it to the collection point of the commune. That didn't work at all and home plots were _allowed_ as a violation of pure communist idealogy. They existed before, they were opposed by communism, but then allowed to return because they actually work.

Re: Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

#126

Post by asdff »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #46
gumby wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same school of thought that says that one should lower taxes and invest less in road fixing and schools. Instead, cars wear out faster/need more repairs and wealthier parent pay for tutors to make up the difference. 40+ years of externalizing costs has taken its toll.

IMO the issue is ideologies vs actuaries/statisticians ... It's shocking how both the "left"/"right" agree on many values, but also so disagree on how to achieve them. Eg: Both sides care about children, productive economy, value of education

But the values themselves are different. Caring about the children looks entirely different for one side vs the other given one side believes in a social safetynet and the other believes the opposite. The definition of a productive economy is different; for some it might mean everyone has a good paying job but for others it means their select investments return a lot of money in a year and they don't much care about these other sectors they aren't heavily leveraged in. What they identify as the value of education is different as well. For one side it might be to establish critical thinking skills and to hear a wide variety of thoughts on a topic, and for the other side it's just the opposite where they want only one groupthink and no deviation from that, and their leaders would prefer their base didn't critically think about the issues they support.

Re: Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

#127

Post by asdff »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #47
lm28469 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trend of "we fucked up big time and need to create additional waste to take negate our fuck ups" is really worrying. Installing ultra sonic cleaners, reverse osmosis machines, AC units, &c. in every single of our houses/flats won't be sustainable

What are people's problems with AC units? An AC unit is more sustainable than a furnace burning fossil fuels and electric heaters. They are just as sustainable as heat pumps.

It's a side effect of building the wrong structure for the environment. If you ever go to the south take note of the architecture in the old homes and even rowhomes where working class people lived. The cielings will be very high, and there will be second window above the doorway perhaps. The windows will have awnings. There will be porches with large overhangs shading living rooms and dining rooms inside the dwelling. All of these features help with cooling a home in a hot climate and making it livable in a world before air conditioning, taking no energy to do so beyond that initial energy investment to build the building itself.

Meanwhile, look at what is built in the south today. The same sort of buildings you might see from alaska to phoenix to orlando to upstate new york. Only they might have installed central air for that floorplan in phoenix or orlando. They aren't building structures fit for the particular environment, they are building structures that are cheap to build in the market and don't really fit too well anywhere, and shoehorning it into whatever environment it sits with AC.

Re: Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

#128

Post by gruez »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #103
SkyPuncher wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is a tradeoff. It's very easy to label things as waste in isolation. The reality is pesticides and other crop technologies substantially increase efficiency of the land we're using. This means per capita: we're using less land (more back to nature), losing less crop (less fuel/maintenance wasted), and requiring an increasingly smaller percentage of the population to tend to crops.

No, absolutely not everything is a tradeoff, many things like eating meat or going to a casino are a total waste of resources

>many things like eating meat

So don't ever eat out or make anything nice? Do you only eat rice and beans?

> or going to a casino are a total waste of resources

I broadly bucket expenses like that as "entertainment", which I guess isn't directly productive, but at the same time is arguably appreciated by the people who enjoy it. Hacker news arguably falls under this, mind you. There's a non-negligible amount of resources (server costs, paid moderator(s), and opportunity costs of all the participants) that's spent on it. So if you really want to put your money where your mouth is, you'd get off hn ;)

Re: Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

#129

Post by ClumsyPilot »

aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #119
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, absolutely not everything is a tradeoff, many things like eating meat or going to a casino are a total waste of resources

Yeah well, not sure about that meat thing buddy, not sure...

don't get me wrong, I love my steak and burger, but there are people who never eat meat and manage to built enough muscle to compete in the olympics.

Re: Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

#130

Post by yourapostasy »

andai wrote: post #116
maerF0x0 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the issue is ideologies vs actuaries/statisticians ... It's shocking how both the "left"/"right" agree on many values, but also so disagree on how to achieve them. Eg: Both sides care about children, productive economy, value of education

Using education as an example, I think great harm has come as a result of making it a government monopoly. Not sure how it is in the US but in Europe there's not really a free market with regards to how children are taught. So there's no room for a competitor to come in and say "we can do it better", because when this happens (and it does happen occasionally) they are just shut down by police. The school I went to wa…

> Not sure how it is in the US but in Europe there's not really a free market with regards to how children are taught.

Homeschooling is the closest to that free market in the US. Your comment prompted me to look up the homeschooling statistics [1] and I was surprised by the results for Europe. The US outstrips the rest of the world by number of children in homeschooling by a large margin.

US homeschooling outcomes are so far promising [2], so one could say it is a pretty competitive alternative market.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_st...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261885035_The_Socia...

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