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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

#161

Post by floor2 »

gumby wrote: post #33
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

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.

This is just a ridiculous straw-man argument.

Functioning roads and schools supported by taxes is supported by 99.9% of people. People only object to paying high taxes for wasteful, inefficient bureaucracies and corrupt deals to pay well-connected insiders or campaign donors excessively for providing services.

Everyone wants roads and schools. Conservatives complain when they realize they're paying taxes for a campaign donor to rebuild the same road every year. Liberals complain when they realize the owner of the construction company is now a billionaire. Both want the road, neither want corruption and injustice, they just focus on slightly different aspects of the same dysfunction.

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

#162

Post by Li7h »

TFYS wrote: post #159
andai wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't you think leaving education to the free market would make it harder for kids from poor backgrounds to go up in life? When everyone uses the same system, it's in everyone's best interest to fund it and make it as good as possible. You won't get the best results, but at least everyone gets a decent education.

Except we've seen that this doesn't really work in practice. Kids are not all getting a decent education. Poor kids are still at a huge disadvantage compared to wealthy kids. There isn't a one size fits all education. Different roles which are needed by society require different skills. Everyone doesn't need to go to college. The world still needs ditch diggers and it likely always will. Not everyone is equal when it comes to intellectual or physical capability. When you try to shove everyone through the same system, you get a lot of square pegs going through round holes. This prevents those with high intellectual capabilities from reaching their full potential by reducing education to the lowest common denominator.

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

#163

Post by ch4s3 »

biorach wrote: post #154
ch4s3 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 worki…

Right. It's a very complex system with complex trade offs. But, and this is crucial, not so complicated that the issues cannot be understood by an adult with high school education. As it is, there is very poor understanding among adults in the rich world of where their food comes from, how it is grown or reared, what food/fertiliser it is given, what chemicals it is treated with and how much, how it is processed, how…

> It's hard to envisage a world where we feed 8, 10, 12 billion people without some chemical input, but it's certainly a good idea to try at least move in that direction

It seems like with current projections global population might peak around 9.4 billion in the 2600s and then fall back down to around ~8.8 by the end of the century. If we can manage river water carefully, I think it's going to be fine in the medium to long run.

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

#164

Post by lathyrus_long »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #121
kickout wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've heard of facilities with short crop cycles (greens, herbs, etc.) running totally bug-free with zero pesticides, with air showers at the entrance and careful segregation so that one introduction doesn't ruin their whole crop, etc. I don't think that's common, though.

There's usually bugs. It's common to deliberately introduce predatory insects, which control the pests in the same way as in nature, with the additional benefit that they can't fly away if the pest population gets too low. Chemical pesticides are also widely used, both organic and non-organic.

Hydroponic crops are especially vulnerable to sucking pests (aphids, whiteflies, etc.), because of the large amounts of tender new growth. Without controls or natural predators, their population can just explode, much worse than anything you'd get outdoors.

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

#165

Post by slothtrop »

immmmmm wrote: post #146
slothtrop wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing unsustainable is an indefinitely growing population, but fortunately it's projected to level off. If so it renders the arbitrary objections a moot point.

No. You are wrong. The problem is not (only) the population size, the problem is the rich that consume enormously more ressources than the poor. https://theconversation.com/amp/emissions-inequality-there-i...

The rich aren't numerous enough in number for it to matter, but more importantly, the linked highlights global disparity. Everyone in the West has a higher carbon footprint than poor countries just by living here. The resources consumed by the rich aren't ridiculously greater than the middle class.

This is all a moot point in the face of stagnant population growth. It would be no less sustainable for the West to consume more by virtue that the demand isn't infinite and technological innovation increases efficiency all the time.

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

#166

Post by biorach »

ch4s3 wrote: post #163
biorach wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. It's a very complex system with complex trade offs. But, and this is crucial, not so complicated that the issues cannot be understood by an adult with high school education. As it is, there is very poor understanding among adults in the rich world of where their food comes from, how it is grown or reared, what food/fertiliser it is given, what chemicals it is treated with and how much, how it is processed, how…

> It's hard to envisage a world where we feed 8, 10, 12 billion people without some chemical input, but it's certainly a good idea to try at least move in that direction It seems like with current projections global population might peak around 9.4 billion in the 2600s and then fall back down to around ~8.8 by the end of the century. If we can manage river water carefully, I think it's going to be fine in the medium…

you mean 2060, right?

Looks like I misremembered the projected peak population.

And yes, long to medium run it's going to be fine if we can carefully manage river water carefully. And if we don't exhaust soils in key agriculture heartlands, and if we don't cause too much icecap collapse, and if we don't trigger desertification of vulnerable areas (southwest USA, various parts of sub-Saharan Africa etc) and...

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

#167

Post by lathyrus_long »

pgodzin wrote: post #109
symby wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Organic FV are low in pesticide residue. Conventional FV are high.

Lot of comments here mention pesticide use in organic FV as well, just not synthetic pesticides. Are there any distinctions within organic and conventional of fruits and vegetables that have low pesticide use regardless of organic or not?

I've seen fruit marked as "IPM" in my local grocery store. That refers to integrated pest management, a general philosophy of controlling pests through understanding of their physiology, behavior, and interaction with the artificially-managed ecosystem, sometimes using synthetic chemical pesticides but in the smallest quantities that achieve the desired effect.

http://ipm.ucanr.edu/

I don't believe use of the term is regulated, though. So in practice that may just be a nicer-sounding synonym for "conventional".

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

#168

Post by lathyrus_long »

malfist wrote: post #85
ceejayoz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany and Switzerland have allotment gardens today; communism isn't required.

In the US we had victory gardens during times of war rationing. I personally grow one still today, but not everyone has the space, time and inclination to learn how to grow plants and preserve a harvest.

Many American cities have "community gardens" equivalent to the European allotments. Mine will provide a few hundred square feet to any resident for a nominal fee, for the exclusive use of that resident with some basic restrictions (noncommercial, grow mostly edible plants, etc.).

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

#169

Post by ac29 »

MikeDelta wrote: post #28

I read a while ago about leek that was stolen while it was still toxic from the pesticides. Apparently the leeks needed some more weeks for the toxins to flush through. Haven't been able to find some other info about this process. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna9704486

For leeks to have a white portion of the stem (usually the part that is eaten), you have to bury part of it underground or it turns green. Presumably they use something like a soil fumigant to prevent spoilage of this underground part. Pretty nasty stuff if it actually renders the plant toxic for 6 weeks.

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

#170

Post by ac29 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #123
biorach wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I dont think it follows either, but at least when you cook from scratch you have control over how much stuff is washed before you use it. That's not the case for more processed food.

I'm not suggesting processed food necessarily uses poorly washed vegetables, just that its out of one's control - it certainly strikes me as possible that industrial scale processes might do a better job at removing chemical residues than a typical home cook giving store bought produce a quick rinse.

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