Pesticides in our Food
by Mary Frost, an excerpt from the book Back to the Basics of Human Health
Pesticides are difficult to eliminate.
Pesticide residues can be found in plants grown in soil previously sprayed years before.
Note the vigorous standards organic farmers must meet in California:
No chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or fungicides can be used on the land for three years, and the land is built-up organically.
At the end of those years, the produce is tested for pesticide residue. If there is any residue, the farmer must wait another year and have his product tested again before he can label it “Certified Organic”.
You would think that, once it was understood that increasing the amounts of pesticides not only doesn’t stop crop damage but actually increases it, the US Government would have stepped in to protect us and stop all this nonsense.
Not so.
Instead, chemical companies have been allowed to go crazy, genetically manipulating crops in order to sell even MORE pesticides.
Mother Jones Magazine published a chilling article in its Jan/Feb 1997 Issue, titled “The Future of Food”, which told of potato and corn seeds that are genetically altered to contain a built-in pesticide and soybean seeds that are genetically manipulated to survive direct applications of the toxic herbicide Roundup.
An article in the New Yorker magazine (April 10, 2000) traced the spread of genetically modified (GM) crops this way: “A decade ago, no transgenic* crops were commercially available anywhere on earth; in 1995 four million acres had been planted; by 1999, that number had grown to one hundred million.
In the United States, half of the enormous soybean crop and more than a third of the corn crop are products of biotechnology.
Because GM crops like soybeans initially produce high yields they flood the marketplace and prices drop.
The US government then comes to the rescue by paying out billions of dollars in subsidies to soybean farmers. This subsidy
“help” actually hides the huge biotech research cots that should have made the GM soybeans more expensive.
How does this play out in our lives?
Now that soybeans are cheap, the processed food industry decides to promote soy as the new “miracle food” and puts GM soy into more than 30,000 food items.
Basically, GM foods are then forced on the consumer by making it difficult for people to avoid eating them.
Because there is such a huge disconnect between consumers and our agricultural system most of us don’t even know this has happened.
*(adj.) transgenic: being or used to produce an organism or cell of one species into which one or more genes of another species have been incorporated.
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Well there you have it.
The only way we can turn this around is by education, one person at a time.
I know it seems like a daunting task at first, but just make choices one step at a time.
It’s like a checklist, or a to-do list.
Do ONE thing at a time. Finish it, then move on to the next thing.
Image from www.wikipedia.com