Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices

foodwatch.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 315 posts

Re: EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices

#171

Post by CalRobert »

Bewelge wrote: post #169
CalRobert wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm a Calvinist. I'm definitely happier in the Netherlands. My general experience was that Irish laws existed mostly for show and if you followed them you were a chump. Unless you wanted to smoke a joint now and then, of course. Ireland supposedly cares about nature too, but you can still buy truckloads of turf off the side of the road in Offaly. Good luck getting those rules enforced. When we still lived in Du…

You may have a point but you're discrediting yourself by using extreme hyperbole. Authoritarianism would be you and your family getting picked up and interrogated sometime at night for this critical comment you just made. And saying "crime is legal" when referring to cars parked on the sidewalk or you having had a bad experience with a neighbours dog? I think if you reflect a little you'd realise that these are the k…

I’ve never let dogs with a history of killing livestock on to my neighbours’ land where kids are playing.

But regardless, I’m much happier since leaving.

Re: EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices

#172

Post by Pay08 »

Bewelge wrote: post #169
CalRobert wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm a Calvinist. I'm definitely happier in the Netherlands. My general experience was that Irish laws existed mostly for show and if you followed them you were a chump. Unless you wanted to smoke a joint now and then, of course. Ireland supposedly cares about nature too, but you can still buy truckloads of turf off the side of the road in Offaly. Good luck getting those rules enforced. When we still lived in Du…

You may have a point but you're discrediting yourself by using extreme hyperbole. Authoritarianism would be you and your family getting picked up and interrogated sometime at night for this critical comment you just made. And saying "crime is legal" when referring to cars parked on the sidewalk or you having had a bad experience with a neighbours dog? I think if you reflect a little you'd realise that these are the k…

The dog thing specifically was very heavily policed in the part of Spain I used to live in. It being unenforced would be unheard of.

Re: EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices

#173

Post by Pay08 »

beAbU wrote: post #159
CalRobert wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was surprised after moving to Ireland to discover that you can break the law and nothing will happen. I went through hell with planners (idiots who don’t believe in climate change and hate eaves) while people around me put three mobile homes on their land as well as building two permanent homes with no permission (and ripping out ancient hedgerows) and successfully got retention. Why even bother?

2 months ago there was a story about a huge family mansion in Meath being demolished after a court found they did not have the proper planning permissions, and the council was unwilling to grant the permissions after the fact. Also just last week a judge ordered the demolition/removal of 26 mobile homes from a site in Dublin set up without permissions. Friends of mine recently got planning permission for a house they…

In common parlance, that's called corruption.

Re: EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices

#174

Post by Saline9515 »

luqtas wrote: post #90
Saline9515 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all synthetics are dangerous, many are. Many are banned, with the list growing each year: https://www.npic.orst.edu/reg/restricted.html Why were they allowed in the first place, if "research" was enough? Science is not definitive, and what we believe to be an approximation of the truth today way be discovered to be totally wrong tomorrow. You are confusing science and religion. Would you defend, for instance, tha…

> Not all synthetics are dangerous, many are. Many are banned, with the list growing each year: https://www.npic.orst.edu/reg/restricted.html as many synthetic are developed... last time i was making an inventory of an exclusive corn and soybean high tech farm (selling on the hundreds millions USD) there was at least 45 different pesticides... some were distributed in a quantity of 10 mililiters! per hectare with mac…

Why are synthetics regularly banned if they are safe then? Is every farm high-tech, with million dollars tractors and big, flat fields? How about crops where pesticides have to be applied manually? How about communities near the fields, which breathe those products?[0]

Why are you trying to slide the discussion with GMOs, which aren't relevant since we talk about pesticides?

Saying that "organic has 2% of the world crop" is not true : certified organic crops, yes. Most of the earth's biomass grows without synthetic pesticides, and many farms in the world have the same practices without the labels.

In general, organic farming is a reference, of course that it doesn't have to be a religion. It is also a great source of scientific experimentation, especially for soil regeneration and biodiversity (which alas, I know, isn't profitable for Monsanto&co... yet!)

Using less pesticides in general is something that is proven better[1], and doesn't necessarily reduces yields[2]. Organic farming is part of the global effort for the reduction in pesticide usage, and doesn't have to be hegemonic. Having "organic farming only" areas are for instance great to create havens for biodiversity, while agricorps are allowed to run wild elsewhere.

Overall it's great for consumer choice, and reducing to the maximum pesticides intake for children should be a goal, given their sensitivity to endocrine disruptors.

[0] https://oem.bmj.com/content/68/9/694.short

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42452-019-1485-1

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nplants20178

Re: EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices

#175

Post by mrob »

thesmtsolver2 wrote: post #105
im3w1l wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you see the world in black and white and those pesticides being an absolute evil. But if you see it as a complicated tradeoff where whats right for one country can be wrong for another then it's unproblematic.

> But if you see it as a complicated tradeoff where whats right for one country can be wrong for another then it's unproblematic. How can anyone entertain that belief unless: a) they think people in other countries have a different biology b) profits matter more than the health of people in other countries (mostly former colonies of Europe)

They can believe that:

Capitalism is the most effective driver of progress known.

Capitalism has lifted enormous numbers of people out of absolute poverty and is a great positive for the world.

Inequality is an unavoidable side-effect of capitalism.

The optimal risk:benefit tradeoff depends on the resources you have available.

It can be rational behavior for a poor person to take greater risks with their health than a rich person, because the value of wealth has strongly diminishing returns. I personally believe we should have state-enforced wealth redistribution to limit this scenario to a reasonable minimum, but I'm not so naive as to think eliminating it entirely would be the globally optimal solution. In practice, "everybody gets identical protection from pesticides" means "everybody is poor".

Re: EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices

#176

Post by Saline9515 »

spwa4 wrote: post #170
Saline9515 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does have a food safety agency, but this is a classic international trade problem that is solved at the border since the EU is a trade union.

Or in this case - purposefully NOT solved. Who wants to bet "Mercosur" agricultural products won't be checked at the border and will - surprise - turn out to have "issues". Has the forced labor agriculture in South America been solved yet? Nope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_South_Ame... I guess not. Will the EU check? Hah! Has nature protection been solved yet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defo…

Whatever it takes to sell BMWs !

Re: EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices

#177

Post by Theodores »

card_zero wrote: post #57
Theodores wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no! In the UK, tea means tea bags and that normally means tea bags made of a plastic/paper mix. If I remember, the bag material is made and then they heat it up to get the plastic out, revealing the holes, needed for the bag. Of late there has been criticism of microplastics in tea bags, and the posh organic bags have fared quite badly. Fancy sachets are not necessarily it. As for chemicals, not one farmer sp…

Oh no, I drank 1 ml of saturated fat. Is it even still all bad for you? I thought I heard some detail about that recently ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat > A 2024 meta-analysis found that odd-chain and longer-chain saturated fatty acids were negatively associated with the risk of cardiovascular disease, including stroke. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd-chain_fatty_acid >OCFAs are found particularly…

Many a health or ethics rabbit hole can be bypassed with simple abstention. However, this is not good for 'content creators'. They need the controversy and rage bait for engagement.

With saturated fat the health authorities that have science but industry lobbying to content with, have told us to avoid the stuff because it clogs the arteries and invariably comes with cholesterol because animals. Arguably Ebola and AIDS are worse than a bit of saturated fat, however, it is a clear message, up there with 'smoking is bad'. Yet a vocal minority will spin this yarn about how wonderful saturated fat is. They are for real and tell the gym-going public all kinds of nonsense.

Yet a diet from before farmers started using copious amounts of synthetic chemicals placed saturated fat as very hard to get. There is no fat on wild animals, only on fattened up farm animals (and humans).

In these former times, meat of any kind was hard to come by. Chicken was saved up for, paying in installments for that special birthday treat. Meat such as rabbit was far more prevalent, the chicken was there for the eggs, not to be eaten as a snack in a lunchtime sandwich.

Hence, scale back all the modern day junk to the idealised peasant diet and there is no need to know anything about any modern day diet or nutrition talking points.

Re: EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices

#178

Post by account42 »

culi wrote: post #69
pipeline_peak wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What else would they have produced with banana crops that people would’ve wanted?

More banana varieties. The reason Panama Disease was so successful is because of the practice of cloning. Every single crop is the same genetics. Researchers warned that starting over with the Cavendish would result in the exact same thing again and the clear solution was to stop cloning the exact same plant and grow more types of bananas (there are more than 1,000 species of banana and tens of thousands of varieties…

And they aren't even cloning anything even close to the tastiest bananas, just the ones best suited for transport/storage.

Re: EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices

#179

Post by Hikikomori »

Saline9515 wrote: post #137
Hikikomori wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the EU have a centralized food testing agency?

It does have a food safety agency, but this is a classic international trade problem that is solved at the border since the EU is a trade union.

That's what the individual countries are supposed to do.

Re: EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices

#180

Post by bluebarbet »

bluGill wrote: post #95
bluebarbet wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern science can only "prove" that something is not harmful on a timescale of a year or perhaps a decade, not a generation or more. If the precautionary principle had been applied in Roman times, lead would not have been considered safe. Nor asbestos, nor thalidomide, nor microplastics, nor a bunch of synthetic molecules - "proven safe" - that are routinely added to non-organic food in order to improve its yield or…

That is still better than organic, which doesn't even ask what science can show about chemicals. The obvious example is organic doesn't have GMOs, even though GMOs are the only foods we even try and prove safe. Everything else, what we just assumed, but nobody has ever actually checked.

The argument we are having here is essentially a classic of philosophy: empiricism versus rationalism. You keep arguing for the former; I am arguing for the latter. It is true that molecule X may not present an observable danger to health; it is also true that it may be reasonable to believe it does present one (most obviously because we do not have thousands of generations of evolutionary adaptation to it, as is the case with both lead and GMOs).

This dichotomy underpins a difference in regulation between the USA and Europe. As mentioned already, the EU Commission applies the "precautionary principle" in its legal regime for food and chemicals. This is not "unscientific". Empiricism has been more popular in the Anglophone world, but rationalism was one of the pillars of the scientific Enlightenment.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/glossary/precauti...

Post reply on HN