It is forbidden to use Chlorpyrifos in the EU, but in Morocco it's used. Recently, imports of olives contaminated with high levels of this chemical have been detected, but they have entered into the EU.
Oftopic but related, In Morocco, too, strawberries are irrigated with sewage water, and several times this year consignments of strawberries contaminated with hepatitis virus have been detected, but unfortunately they have also entered the EU.
The point is that if health is at risk, then it should be banned at each of its sources, importation included.
Morocco is preparing a major import hub through the Canary Islands, which is expected to "un-label" the source of products, I guess.
Yes, of course the EU is aware of this. Health and Food regulations apply to the products grown inside the EU. There may be partial import restrictions on GMO products and hormone-boosted meat, but other food products are generally allowed in.
This is even more true with organic products, that are subjected to stringent norms and checks in the EU, but absolutely no checks when coming from outside the EU.
So when buying organic bananas, from say, Africa, the probability of them actually not being organic is close to 1. Organic olive oil from Turkey? Well, let's say you can be happy if it is olive oil at all. Honey from China? Hmm.. Well.. Let's say that with 150'000 tons exported a year, their counterfeiting labs are better funded and equipped than the fraud-detection labs on the EU side.
So, if you want a quality product with a relative certainty you're not being defrauded (or worse, poisoned), you buy European. Anything else? You're on your own.
> which is expected to "un-label" the source of products
That is not legal. But, of course, fraud exists everywhere, unfortunately.
It is crazy that we (Spain) are importing olives from Morocco into the EU when we are the largest producer of olives in the world, more than doubling the second.
EU is aware, but are too afraid to enforce it that way. See all the protest from farmers in the last months, one of their main demands is that imported foods are also subject to same rules they are.
Source on "Morocco is preparing a major import hub through the Canary Islands, which is expected to "un-label" the source of products, I guess."?
The legislation is pretty clear imho. Raw food needs to be labelled when it comes to the origin. Even processed food needs to state the origin of their main ingredient.
Good point on moroccan stuff, will try to avoid it in the future.
> In Morocco, too, strawberries are irrigated with sewage water, and several times this year consignments of strawberries contaminated with hepatitis virus
Hepatitis A contamination of frozen fruits happens from time to time all around the world, but I thought it was usually linked to the picking process and processing plants. Not that irrigation can’t be blamed, but some single digit hours of sunlight exposure should inactivate viruses (even the non-enveloped kind).
Morocco just doesn't seem to place the same importance in food cleanliness as the rest of the world. For example, they display, store and sell food directly touching the floor.
Buy a kilo of flour from a seller in Morocco, and he probably was storing that flour on the street. Directly on the street - not on a plastic bag or anything. He'll literally shovel the flour from his pile on the street into your bag.
It's always a cat and mouse game, isn't it? Industry thinking they can optimize nature's chemistry, then something else always pops out on the other end. When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle?
Is there a possibility that if things could have been more optimal for the delicate balance of different life forms on Earth, nature would have done it all by itself?
Is there even a way to get back to natural state of things? Can the food we produce be considered "natural" at all, or we have altered the chemistry of the whole chain so much that we are now all doomed on this planet to shuffle diseases around different social classes and species ad eternum?
Pesticides scale really well. The alternative would be to control the environment more, but that does not scale so well. Maybe with increased automation we could do some inroads in this direction.
Consumers are to blame too. They won't accept blemished produce, but a potato with some insect larvae in it, is really not that much of an issue. You just remove around the larvae and cook as per usual, and that is much healthier than dosing your produce with pesticides, that cannot easily be washed off.
Nature is always evolving, and I think it's a mistake to consider human contributions as "unnatural." All kinds of plants produce a wide variety of pesticides as a natural defense without human intervention, and are cooking up new varieties to trial against the real world. Diseases are in a constant arms race with immune systems regardless of humanity.
I'm not saying we can't get better at predicting the side effects of things we introduce into the system. But I do think regarding the cat and mouse game as "industry vs nature" is reductive dualism and shallow thinking. We are nature. Considering humanity as apart from nature was one of our more misguided ideas.
Industry is a part of nature, an active participant, not in opposition to it. We were doomed to shuffle diseases around long before industry. There is an explosion of novel chemicals that we have introduced into the environment, and they will no doubt change things. Humans evolved in a world that is not the world we are creating, and we very well might not be fit for the future we're creating. But let's not call what we're doing "unnatural." That just serves as a kind of denial that we are active participants, and reinforces a subtle idea that we are Gods apart from "Nature."
Are you discounting the benefits of advances in agriculture? Such as producing more food on less land? (Granted, it would be better if more of the land were given back to Nature instead of suburban sprawl, but that’s a different problem and I digress)
> When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle?
Realistically, never, because these chemicals are solving real problems for us. We would need to be willing to leave problems unsolved for decades to do this.
> When will we shift towards long-term, extensive trials before introducing another chemical in our life cycle?
It's a curious question, how many eff-ups humanity needs to learn what's the optimal way to do something that's fairly new.
Do we need to introduce and be forced to withdraw tens of substances? Hundreds? Thousands? How many failures until we can learn from them how to do this properly?
You're living in a "move fast, break things" & "trust the science" world, posting on a forum filled with enginerds who subscribe to those philosophies with zealotry.
They think like this: as long as there is an absence of evidence of harm in the initial science, then that means evidence of absence. Long-term, higher-order effects & unknown unknowns are ignored in Scientism, and this ignorance is status quo.
It's the same mentality underpinning the approach to GMO foods & insects, dropping agent orange in Vietnam, and killing sparrows in Mao's China. It's the very spirit of modernity.
'We'? Maybe never, maybe a successor civilization will, maybe we'll figure out simulation and organ on a chip well enough to do those long term studies in only a year or two
Not for the scale we operate at, at least for our current level of ecological mastery. I presume you're gesturing at different planting techniques that reduce reliance on pesticides. Not endorsing the paradigm.
Yes and no. Yes, because we are in a state of nature - we are nature. No, because we've been modifying our environment for thousands of years, you might not even recognize the precursors as food. The chemistry isn't altered, the organism is.
..shuffling diseases.. around different social classes? Huh. What a suspicious thing to say
The problem is thinking in terms of optimization at all.
There’s no optimum, only trade-offs. But under capitalism, the problems all reduce to “make more X with less”. If GDP is increasing, we’re doing great - doesn’t matter if life sucks.
Everything is optimized until it all turns into shit.
If you didn't think we were in the end-stages of population growth and decline, just know that in your standard organic chemistry textbook given to students in university, it says that there are over 500,000 unregulated chemicals in industrial use. Exponential growth and technology with an evolutionary preference toward short-sighted and near-future decision making are going to cull the human race down by a large % as peoples systems are not evolved to tolerate the extensive environmental changes. The largest culprits are changes to food chemistry (prioritizing addiction mechanisms for profit over health), air pollution (prioritizing transportation and other means to maintain and grow economically), chemical exposures in the environment (multifactorial), and internet technology (prioritizing addiction mechanisms for profit over social health and function) [in my opinion]. People will get weaker, sicker, and dumber. Chronic diseases will start sooner, fertility will decrease, and population growth will reverse. The humans to survive out the other side will be children of health-conscious wealthy and those that live in less toxic environments globally.
It's really sad because it doesn't seem like there's anything any individual can do about it. I think these issues are honestly far more serious than global warming. They are causing serious problems RIGHT NOW everywhere. I think within the next 20 years even we're going to see many consequences related to these issues. I'd like to believe we can bioscience our way through this mess but I really think that won't be the case.
Fundamentally, I think proactive decision making takes a lot of time, energy, and work both on the individual and collective scales. I think it almost boils down to a physics problem where that just ends up being overtaken by the negative trend caused by exponential growth + the environmental equivalent of technical debt.
> It's really sad because it doesn't seem like there's anything any individual can do about it.
If we ate locally grown food and prioritized food that's not heavily processed, that would probably help. Throw in a plant based diet and your gut will probably be pretty happy overall.
It’s convenient and lucrative to use toxic patented pesticides and herbicides but there are definitely working alternatives which one could even mix themselves. Obviously the industry has no interest in cheap and available solutions. For a small example I questioned myself if DMSO a organic solvent would be useful to transport active ingredients into the plant and quickly found that just DMSO has a desired effect on plants, roots and seedlings.[1] Following the study adding H2O2 to DMSO should even increase the effect. Furthermore other ingredients can be added which impact the biochemistry of the plant.
The point which I want to make is that many effective chemicals have been discovered long ago but are not in the interest of the industry because the patents expired already.
My dream is a mobile device/app that can analyze chemicals in fruits/vegetables, but we are too far from the StarTrek world.
I tried to build a vision system to at least identify wax on apples, but even that is too hard.
There was an Israeli startup couple of years ago that built some device but it looks like it was a flop.
Not exactly what you describe, but there's Yuka for processed products (food and cosmetics). You scan a barcode and it gives you a score based on the product composition, it's quite helpful: https://yuka.io/en/
Wikipedia claims that "Some states, including California, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, and Oregon, have banned chlorpyrifos on food grown and sold in their jurisdictions. Those bans remain in effect." It's also 100% banned in foods sold in EU area.
So, not that hard to avoid depending on where you live. Apparently corn, soybeans, wheat, fruit trees are some of the most common crops it's used on.
This specific pesticide might not be used on organic crops, but plenty of other even-less-well-safety-tested "organic pesticides" may be used instead on organic crops.
The word "organic" is largely a marketing gimmick.
and these are just the chemicals you hear about. what about all the nonsense that never even makes the front pages?
I don't trust industrialized agriculture, especially not here in the US.
personally, I grow as much of my food as I can (lots of fruits trees and very large garden), especially from the dirty 15. and those that I can't grow, I buy organic though that doesn't always save you completely.
[+] [-] drtgh|2 years ago|reply
Oftopic but related, In Morocco, too, strawberries are irrigated with sewage water, and several times this year consignments of strawberries contaminated with hepatitis virus have been detected, but unfortunately they have also entered the EU.
The point is that if health is at risk, then it should be banned at each of its sources, importation included.
Morocco is preparing a major import hub through the Canary Islands, which is expected to "un-label" the source of products, I guess.
Is aware the EU about this?
[+] [-] fransje26|2 years ago|reply
Yes, of course the EU is aware of this. Health and Food regulations apply to the products grown inside the EU. There may be partial import restrictions on GMO products and hormone-boosted meat, but other food products are generally allowed in.
This is even more true with organic products, that are subjected to stringent norms and checks in the EU, but absolutely no checks when coming from outside the EU.
So when buying organic bananas, from say, Africa, the probability of them actually not being organic is close to 1. Organic olive oil from Turkey? Well, let's say you can be happy if it is olive oil at all. Honey from China? Hmm.. Well.. Let's say that with 150'000 tons exported a year, their counterfeiting labs are better funded and equipped than the fraud-detection labs on the EU side.
So, if you want a quality product with a relative certainty you're not being defrauded (or worse, poisoned), you buy European. Anything else? You're on your own.
> which is expected to "un-label" the source of products
That is not legal. But, of course, fraud exists everywhere, unfortunately.
[+] [-] LtdJorge|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiwidi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RamblingCTO|2 years ago|reply
The legislation is pretty clear imho. Raw food needs to be labelled when it comes to the origin. Even processed food needs to state the origin of their main ingredient.
Good point on moroccan stuff, will try to avoid it in the future.
[+] [-] Scoundreller|2 years ago|reply
Hepatitis A contamination of frozen fruits happens from time to time all around the world, but I thought it was usually linked to the picking process and processing plants. Not that irrigation can’t be blamed, but some single digit hours of sunlight exposure should inactivate viruses (even the non-enveloped kind).
[+] [-] bone_frequency|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] londons_explore|2 years ago|reply
Buy a kilo of flour from a seller in Morocco, and he probably was storing that flour on the street. Directly on the street - not on a plastic bag or anything. He'll literally shovel the flour from his pile on the street into your bag.
[+] [-] myth_drannon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blackhaz|2 years ago|reply
Is there a possibility that if things could have been more optimal for the delicate balance of different life forms on Earth, nature would have done it all by itself?
Is there even a way to get back to natural state of things? Can the food we produce be considered "natural" at all, or we have altered the chemistry of the whole chain so much that we are now all doomed on this planet to shuffle diseases around different social classes and species ad eternum?
Good morning, all!
[+] [-] dauertewigkeit|2 years ago|reply
Consumers are to blame too. They won't accept blemished produce, but a potato with some insect larvae in it, is really not that much of an issue. You just remove around the larvae and cook as per usual, and that is much healthier than dosing your produce with pesticides, that cannot easily be washed off.
[+] [-] IggleSniggle|2 years ago|reply
I'm not saying we can't get better at predicting the side effects of things we introduce into the system. But I do think regarding the cat and mouse game as "industry vs nature" is reductive dualism and shallow thinking. We are nature. Considering humanity as apart from nature was one of our more misguided ideas.
Industry is a part of nature, an active participant, not in opposition to it. We were doomed to shuffle diseases around long before industry. There is an explosion of novel chemicals that we have introduced into the environment, and they will no doubt change things. Humans evolved in a world that is not the world we are creating, and we very well might not be fit for the future we're creating. But let's not call what we're doing "unnatural." That just serves as a kind of denial that we are active participants, and reinforces a subtle idea that we are Gods apart from "Nature."
[+] [-] lukas099|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jenadine|2 years ago|reply
Back to when 75% of the population worked in the fields many of them as slaves? Surely you don't want that back.
[+] [-] crq-yml|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MattGaiser|2 years ago|reply
Realistically, never, because these chemicals are solving real problems for us. We would need to be willing to leave problems unsolved for decades to do this.
[+] [-] scotty79|2 years ago|reply
It's a curious question, how many eff-ups humanity needs to learn what's the optimal way to do something that's fairly new.
Do we need to introduce and be forced to withdraw tens of substances? Hundreds? Thousands? How many failures until we can learn from them how to do this properly?
How long did it take for aerospace industry?
[+] [-] ThrowawayTestr|2 years ago|reply
That chemistry, like fertilizers, is why we can feed 8 billion people.
[+] [-] VoodooJuJu|2 years ago|reply
They think like this: as long as there is an absence of evidence of harm in the initial science, then that means evidence of absence. Long-term, higher-order effects & unknown unknowns are ignored in Scientism, and this ignorance is status quo.
It's the same mentality underpinning the approach to GMO foods & insects, dropping agent orange in Vietnam, and killing sparrows in Mao's China. It's the very spirit of modernity.
[+] [-] lijok|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burnished|2 years ago|reply
'We'? Maybe never, maybe a successor civilization will, maybe we'll figure out simulation and organ on a chip well enough to do those long term studies in only a year or two
Not for the scale we operate at, at least for our current level of ecological mastery. I presume you're gesturing at different planting techniques that reduce reliance on pesticides. Not endorsing the paradigm.
Yes and no. Yes, because we are in a state of nature - we are nature. No, because we've been modifying our environment for thousands of years, you might not even recognize the precursors as food. The chemistry isn't altered, the organism is.
..shuffling diseases.. around different social classes? Huh. What a suspicious thing to say
[+] [-] manoDev|2 years ago|reply
There’s no optimum, only trade-offs. But under capitalism, the problems all reduce to “make more X with less”. If GDP is increasing, we’re doing great - doesn’t matter if life sucks.
Everything is optimized until it all turns into shit.
[+] [-] hinkley|2 years ago|reply
> The chemical is not allowed on organic crops.
Phew.
[+] [-] Madmallard|2 years ago|reply
It's really sad because it doesn't seem like there's anything any individual can do about it. I think these issues are honestly far more serious than global warming. They are causing serious problems RIGHT NOW everywhere. I think within the next 20 years even we're going to see many consequences related to these issues. I'd like to believe we can bioscience our way through this mess but I really think that won't be the case.
Fundamentally, I think proactive decision making takes a lot of time, energy, and work both on the individual and collective scales. I think it almost boils down to a physics problem where that just ends up being overtaken by the negative trend caused by exponential growth + the environmental equivalent of technical debt.
[+] [-] RamblingCTO|2 years ago|reply
You can't solve the big thing, but there's some control over lifestyle imho.
Otherwise, I concur.
[+] [-] barbazoo|2 years ago|reply
If we ate locally grown food and prioritized food that's not heavily processed, that would probably help. Throw in a plant based diet and your gut will probably be pretty happy overall.
[+] [-] svnt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharpshadow|2 years ago|reply
The point which I want to make is that many effective chemicals have been discovered long ago but are not in the interest of the industry because the patents expired already.
1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13762-015-0899-6
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] scotty79|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myth_drannon|2 years ago|reply
I tried to build a vision system to at least identify wax on apples, but even that is too hard. There was an Israeli startup couple of years ago that built some device but it looks like it was a flop.
[+] [-] akyuu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aszantu|2 years ago|reply
https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/rasff-window/screen/search
[+] [-] s1gnp0st|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djakaitis|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weweersdfsd|2 years ago|reply
So, not that hard to avoid depending on where you live. Apparently corn, soybeans, wheat, fruit trees are some of the most common crops it's used on.
[+] [-] rsynnott|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] i_am_proteus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epgui|2 years ago|reply
The word "organic" is largely a marketing gimmick.
/biochemist,fwiw
[+] [-] itomato|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThrowawayTestr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomcar288|2 years ago|reply
I don't trust industrialized agriculture, especially not here in the US.
personally, I grow as much of my food as I can (lots of fruits trees and very large garden), especially from the dirty 15. and those that I can't grow, I buy organic though that doesn't always save you completely.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cushpush|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fransje26|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dappermanneke|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josefresco|2 years ago|reply
Is there something specific you'd like to point out?
[+] [-] Attummm|2 years ago|reply