Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food | Hacker News Reader

Emails Show FDA Chemists Have Been Finding Glyphosate in Food

modernfarmer.com

691 pointsclumsysmurf316 comments

From the article:

“All of the official samples passed the test and were within the legal limits of glyphosate residue. But those off-the-record, unofficial samples, though done with the same equipment and tested by the same chemists, showed glyphosate.

That’s right. The chemists found glyphosate residue on just about everything: crackers, granola, cornmeal, honey, oatmeal, baby food, and even corn. Their surreptitious corn test—one of the four items the FDA is actually testing—found glyphosate significantly over the legal limit set by the EPA. The chemists emailed their bosses to ask what to do. The FDA’s response (which was also captured in the FOIA documents): That corn was not an “official sample” and will thus be ignored.”

I remember watching a lecture from Vandana Shiva who claimed that glyphosate was harmful and making it in to our food. She cited some European studies that found glyphosate in a wide variety of products. She claimed that there were shady things going on in the US government that seemed to obscure these facts. At the time, I saw people writing her off as a nut, or claiming that her masters degree in physics and PhD in philosophy meant that she didn’t have the expertise to evaluate the biological effects of glyphosate.

And yet, I feel as though this article, if the claims are verified, does seem to back up her claims that glyphosate is more prevalent than our government would like to admit, and that there could really be official cover ups going on.

I’d really like to know what’s in our food.

While this might prove her true that the US government is trying to hide the glyphosate levels in food, does it prove her claim true that it is harmful? It seems like the jury is out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate#Humans

Every time the jury is out on a topic where one side has a vested interest and a billion dollar budget to protect it, you can be reasonably sure what the outcome will be.

See: pesticides and bees, fossil fuels and climate change, food packaging plastics and cancer, pain treatment meds and addiction.

The answer in all those cases is the harmful effects eventually became known, but the jury was out long enough for the vested interests to make a ton of profit and cause a ton of damage which they'll never pay for repairing. All made possible with a series of comparatively small investments to buy scientific research to keep the jury out. The Wikipedia section that the parent post links to straight up says that the only research that found no links was sponsored by Monsanto.

Edit: to be really clear, 'jury being out' refers to scientific consensus. We are not talking about issues where public opinion is uncertain despite scientific consensus, such as vaccines+autism. We are talking about issues where scientific evaluation of some phenomenon is actively prolonged or hindered by vested interests to delay regulatory action.

Counterexamples: asbestos, tobacco, alcohol, fossil fuels, climate change.

(On the latter two, the studies mostly have the correct outcome. What is difficult is convincing half of the American population that that matters.)

Who has supported the asbestos industry? Has there ever been a company that actually promotes asbestos?

Yes, in fact asbestos is still mined and marketed today: https://youtu.be/cy3piCUPIkc

Only white asbestos (also known as Chrysotile) --- and the great number of people who have been exposed to large amounts of it and lived long healthy lives certainly makes one wonder; AFAIK it's only the other types, particularly blue asbestos, which are unanimously carcinogenic and the industry stopped using them a long time ago, but the effects from that (and contamination of white asbestos with the other types) have continued and led the majority of fears.

This article is worth reading: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3581056/

In the case of Mesothelioma I believe there's a fair amount of evidence that you need both : 1) Asbestos exposure and 2) to be a smoker. This might explain why some people exposed to asbestos remain healthy.

https://www.mesothelioma.com/blog/authors/staff/smoking-asbe...

Well, um, definitely yes.

https://www.pinterest.com/braytonpurcell/vintage-asbestos-ad...

Not a company exactly, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POB3Dr0uonc&t=75

Tobacco is definitely not a counter example; the industry managed to cover up / confuse the evidence for years.

Also see: Aircraft contrails and mind control, water flouridation and turning our children into Communists, cell phone towers and cancer, vaccination and autism. [1]

[1] None of these associations are actually true, but much ink and some research funding was spilled on the subject.

None of those are what an honest/sane individual would call borderline either, so why bring them up?

>None of these associations are actually true,

Have you done research on any of these yourself? Also, I don't think you can put all those things in the same basket. For example, the last two. Doing the research on those might require huge resources that are way above the head of a single individual or small organization...

And in similar manner, every such issue might have different aspects that it might be stupid to generalize all of them into one category.

Human beings have a natural tendency to do this, which is why we are so easy to fool. May be, don't try to do that...

So every single time a “vested interest” cares about something, they are wrong? Environmental groups have a vested interest in promoting catastrophe as it increases fundraising and their influence and power. I am not saying that all environmental groups are “bad” or “wrong” but they have equal incentive to trumpet their view of the world.

You don’t think billion dollar alternative energy companies don’t have incentive to overstate the case against fossil fuels? Guys like George Soros, often seen as charitable, have made billions of dollars by sowing discord and destabilization. His massive profit in shorting the pound is legendary. Could it be at least a little possible that everyone has a vested interest in something and facts don’t necessary matter?

The Sierra Club CEO makes over $600,000 per year at a non-profit! You don’t thing the Sierra Club has any vested interests tied to promoting specific agendas?

There are multiple sides to every story and it’s folly to assume that any side is acting benevolently.

Soros didn't destabilize the pound. The Bank of England destabilized the pound. Soros said it was a bad idea, and put his money where is mouth was, and made a fortune because he was right.

The "vested interests" have the sole purpose of making money for their shareholders. They are corporations, and that is the definition of capitalism.

The purpose of environmental groups is to protect the environment.

Who would be the most likely to act benevolently?

Are the environmentalists perfect? No. They are human. They make mistakes. Sometimes they do things that are counterproductive or totally ineffective. But their goal is to protect the environment. I'd call that benevolence.

On the whole, it's also far more likely for the environmentalists to get hurt or killed than the other way around. In 2017, four environmentalists were killed every week by the "vested interests". Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/02/almost-f...

To summarize, your argument seems to be something like "Hey, look, the environmentalists are not perfect, we can't trust anyone, so we must stop attacking the polluters, they must be totally innocent!".

And that's just FUD.

Much of what's been written about bees and pesticides is also probably bullshit (not to put too fine a point on it). American honey bees are livestock, not wildlife.

>American honey bees are livestock, not wildlife.

Then if it's harming European honeybees, which are livestock as you say, do you not think it might be plausible that native pollinators and others insects might also be affected?

The "livestock" line is just a talking point, and the pesticide industry is pleased as punch every time we repeat it for them.

I think if we were serious about native wildlife we'd address habitat loss instead of fixating on comic book opponents like "the pesticide industry". Either way: reports of the impending bee-pocalypse are extraordinarily overrated.

Can't agree; know too many hobbyist beekeepers who've had 20-40 years beekeeping who can't keep a hive alive through a winter now. When I was a kid peoples' hives survived a harsh Minnesota winter. Now they all die even though we don't have enough snow to ski.

We don't have to guess or extrapolate from anecdotes; the price of pollination services are tracked, and have grown low single-digit percentages over the last several years, just like prices in general.

Complete outsider to this: any chance that is due to external factors, such as increase in number of competitors (perhaps foreign), or reduced demand (e.g. new alternatives)?

Referring to "price of pollination services" means the natural ecosystem has failed.

There is no natural ecosystem of honey bee pollination in the United States.

In my strange corner of the world that hasn't been "agronomically optimized", there aren't giant monoculture farms spraying insecticides, and there are dozens of species acting as pollinators.

No one pays for "pollinator services".

I suppose there's a business opportunity for someone to capture all the rainfall, dam the rivers, and sell it back to me as well.

Herbicides and pesticides aren't necessary for agriculture. They are necessary for a very specific type of agriculture that has been lobbied for and subsidized, starting with the Nixon administration's "get big or get out out" message to farmers. It's been successful by metrics like 'food produced per man-hour of human labor', and appears cheap because we are all forced to partially pre-pay under threat of violence (overly dramatic way of saying its subsidized through taxes), and ignoring massive externalities of ecosystem destruction.

You're missing my point. I'm saying there's no natural ecosystem for honey bee pollination in the US because there are no natural honey bees in the US. They're not a native species.

Okay, if that was your point all along then I understand.

Not to move the goalposts, just to share some food for thought. Making a distinction between native and invasive species implies there is some particular snapshot in time when things were "right", when evolution was "done", when new species stopped being introduced into ecosystem by various means and competing with each other.

I think we're concerned with different points. You're saying the pollinator services business is fine and profitable despite the use of insecticides.

I'm saying it's sad that a diverse ecosystem consisting of many pollinators which allowed trees and bushes to bear fruits and berries without paying for a company to truck in a bunch of bees has been replaced by something more profitable, but less resilient and healthy.

Yes, the subtext of my point is that there's a narrative that the American food supply depends on a natural resource of pollinating insects, and that it is threatened by an unnatural collapse of native pollinating bees.

In fact:

* the parts of our food supply that are heavily dependent on pollinating agents rely entirely on commercial pollination services, not native ambient pollinating species.

* there is strong evidence that no threat exists to commercial pollinators and that standard bee husbandry practices are working just fine. That evidence includes the price of commercial pollination, which would (obviously) rise if collapsing bee populations were making commercial pollinating hives scarce, but which are in fact possibly not even keeping up with inflation, along with the price of new queens (nuc prices have grown over the last 5 years, or at least seemed to be last time I checked, but beekeping has grown immensely in popularity over the last few years as well --- but queen prices haven't really budged at all; granted: my research method here is "find companies that sell queens, follow their prices on archive.org", so I'm ready to be rebutted).

* the honey bees that tend to dominate this conversation are a non-native invasive species. There's a pretty widespread and well-documented belief that the US "feral" honey bee population was wiped out in (IIRC) the mid-80s --- not by pesticides but by another invasive species, the Varroa mite --- and that subsequent to that event, every honey bee you've seen "in the wild" since then is technically somebody's property. That may be changing? There may now be a significant number of feral colonies? Nobody's crop depends on them.

* the entire reason honey bees exist at all in the US is to support at-scale agriculture. They're livestock.

* it is entirely legitimate to worry about things we're doing to threaten native insect species! My objection to the conversation about native pollinators is twofold. First: I think it's disingenuous to imply that threats to native pollinators are the existential threat to our food supply that people claimed CCD was. Second, and much more importantly: neonicotinoid pesticides are not the major threat to native pollinators; they're just a cosmetically appealing villain we insert into this narrative to reassure ourselves that there's a "big pesticide" bad guy we need to organize against. The reality of species loss in the US is that it's a consequence of habitat loss, which implicates all of us, not just some shadowy faceless corporation.

"* the parts of our food supply that are heavily dependent on pollinating agents rely entirely on commercial pollination services, not native ambient pollinating species."

So the orchards that cultivate a healthy ecosystem through a diversity of species, and care given to soil health, which grow, produce, and sell fruit for only slightly above factory farming rates aren't part of the food supply?

If you only define food supply = factory farming monoculture, then absolutely the "least bad herbicides and pesticides" are the best thing possible.

Eating almost entirely locally costs far less per year than the difference between and entry level vs top of the line laptop. Eating from nearby food producers who take care of the land is not very expensive relative to other luxuries people invest in. Habitat loss may be inevitable, but factory scale, chemical based monoculture does not implicate all of us, and personal action is quite reasonable.

It's probably less effort than changing your diet for other reasons, but people seem to be more motivated to change their diet for body image reasons, or the soylent-esque lifestyle optimization, etc.

It baffles me that more people aren't raging environmentalist lunatics as I am.

FYI if you think this is bullshit, here's a public demonstration of an alternative to factory farming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3riW_yiCN5E There's a free hour long video that's more in depth but I realize even expecting 10 more minutes of anyone's attention is asking a lot.

And an argument for the importance of this pesticide issue that would be persuasive for people who aren't generally inclined to entertain restructuring all of modern agriculture would be...?

I don't have one. The pesticide issue and species collapse is one of many entry points to get people to entertain (or better participate) in restructuring all of modern agriculture.

There are other reasons too (resilience, independence, better economics for small communities) and the common response of "bigger must be better because thats what the free market has produced" is invalid when there has been so much government intervention that has given and continues to give much advantage to the existing system.

So basically I implore you to entertain the idea of restructuring agriculture even though you implied you aren't inclined to :)

I'm fine listening to the arguments of people who believe we need to restructure all of commercial agriculture. That's a coherent perspective.

What I'm not fine with are people pretending that a bee-pocalypse threatens commercial agriculture as it exists today as a stalking horse argument. I'm not saying that's what you were doing.

Well I hope we meet again on a thread that's a more appropriate platform to spread my lunatic gardener beliefs.

I enjoyed the discussion and learned something new about the honey bee.

It could be varoa mites, for example, that's causing the die off. It could be the result of artificial insemination of queens by distributors, creating a cheap stock and poorly survivable colonies. Just a some alternative ideas to consider...

Here's a link to WaPo article that bees are doing just fine https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/10/belie...

Another fallacy: relative privation. Let's not worry about the bees and pesticides because of bigger problems.

I think the problem here is that over-emphasis, bluster and hyperbole are so normalised and frequent now that the use of emphasis to try and draw attention to an issue is now practically useless (maybe it was never useful...).

Perhaps we shouldn't worry about any of these 'small problems' because we're working hard to destroy the Earth anyway...

No, once again, the glossary of logical fallacies you're working from isn't serving you well. I would be arguing relative privation if I was saying "things are so bad elsewhere it doesn't matter if the bees were dying", or "the bees are dying and that's all that really matters".

In fact, what I'm saying is that the bees are pretty much fine, and not an issue at all.

A matter of differences between intent and actions I guess, you suggested the concern should be redirected to habitat.

How fine is 'pretty much?' How not-fine should we let it get before we show concern?

This seems to be general sentiment in that we are not overly concerned about the impact to wildlife until it becomes 'endangered,' at which point we need to act...

>what I'm saying is that the bees are pretty much fine, and not an issue at all.

You have stated this opinion many times, I think we are all clear on that.

Do we have more than your authority to go on in evaluating your claim?

I think HN would become a very uninteresting place to debate if every discussion devolved into unsupported arguments from authority, which seems to be the logical fallacy you are relying on in your 'argument.'

How does that fact change the narrative? If anything, it makes it worse.

It does take away a bit of the emotional appeal of pristine, natural, innocent public resources that need protection from greedy farmers when the bees are owned by and grown for a different group of greedy farmers instead of being championed by people with purely altruistic motivation. But that they're declining when there are people with expertise and financial incentives trying to make more of them means there's a pretty serious problem.

They are in fact not declining. There is no indication at all that a reliable supply of bee-driven pollination service in the US is in any way threatened. You'd be forgiven for not knowing that, though, since the story is presented in the media as if farmers relied on wild honeybees (an invasive species eradicated several decades ago by the Varroa destructor mite) rather than commercially managed bee husbandry.

The information I've turned up suggests that commercial bee colonies are also rapidly dying off. https://beeinformed.org/2016/05/10/nations-beekeepers-lost-4...

Are commercial pollination services perhaps using robotic bees? Because pollination services went up by something like 1% since that article was published.

Are the bee sources still the same? Bees are often imported from other regions to meet supply.

I have no idea. Why does that matter?

If all the bees keep dying perhaps you'll eventually run out of bees to import.

The argument here being that there is a reserve supply of latent bees not used for commercial pollination, backfilling the commercial supply?

I think robot bees are a more plausible explanation.

According to the article you yourself linked to support the claim that there's no problem, that's exactly what they do -- purchase extra bees. That and split colonies (which creates weaker colonies which are more susceptible to death). And this same article admits a substantial price increase in products requiring bees for production.

How would you reconcile "substantial price increase due to bee requirements" to "sub-inflationary increases in pollination prices"? Again, you don't have to guess about this: pollination prices are tracked and published. We don't need the axiomatic method to figure this out; Google does just fine.

Regardless of that, the article does not support your argument of robot bees being more likely and demonstrates the former to be true.

Robotic bees are a joke, not a serious proposal. The reality is: these are insects, and bee husbandry provides commercial pollinators with an essentially limitless supply of them.

If you are participating in a debate and you want to argue for something, usually you post the sources for your claim instead of asking your interlocutor to find them for you. Especially when you've just shared a source that actually contradicts your claims.

Specifically, this is the passage I am referring to in, again, the article you yourself provided as evidence for your claims:

> The price of some of that extra work will get passed on to the consumer. The average retail price of honey has roughly doubled since 2006, for instance. And Kim Kaplan, a researcher with the USDA, points out that pollination fees -- the amount beekeepers charge to cart their bees around to farms and pollinate fruit and nut trees -- has approximately doubled over the same period.

> "It's not the honey bees that are in danger of going extinct," Kaplan wrote in an email, "it is the beekeepers providing pollination services because of the growing economic and management pressures. The alternative is that pollination contracts per colony have to continue to climb to make it economically sustainable for beekeepers to stay in business and provide pollination to the country’s fruit, vegetable, nut and berry crops." We have also been importing more honey from overseas lately.

Since you can literally just Google [<year> pollination price] and the first hit will contain a table, not following up on this point seems like willfulness on your part.

I am not an expert in the field or anything, but it's not necessarily the case that, because pollination services have gone up slightly, the problem is solved. It could be that they've been able to work through this problem so far but will not be able to do so indefinitely.

[Citation needed]

Happy to:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/call-...

That's the Washington Post noting bee colonies at a 20 year high (a timespan that includes the tail end of the original Varroa epidemic!) in late 2015.

Then, go look up pollination service prices since 2015 --- a trivial Google search! --- and compare them with inflation.

First, wild honeybees were not eradicated by Varroa. There are many papers written and researchers who have studied substantial wild honeybee populations for decades, and chronicled their decline and resurgence to pre-Varroa numbers. What has happened over the last few decades is that wild North American bees have adapted and are thriving, while 'babied' commercial bees are struggling.

Second, the number of commercial bee colonies for pollination services is not declining because beekeepers can choose to focus on making more when they need to. A reliably-consistent number of colonies can exist whether 5% die out every year or 50% (although at different cost). Having said that, what IS declining is the annual survival rate of colonies, which is linked to many factors, of which pesticides likely play a part. This is a not-so-subtle difference. Just because it doesn't immediately threaten commercial pollination doesn't mean there is no issue.

You just wrote a comment that essentially says there's no issue. Wild North American bees† are thriving. Commercial bees are "struggling". But they're not struggling in any way we can measure, since prices for bee-driven services aren't changing.

If neither commercial pollination nor wild populations are threatened, why is this a top-of-mind issue? My contention: for the same reason glyphosate is. These are cosmetic problems that are easy for us to talk about and assign blame for, without confronting the thorny systemic issues that really implicate out way of live.

† Presumably you either mean invasive feral honey bee colonies, since honey bees don't belong here, or native bee species like the Bombus bees, which aren't exploited at scale in agriculture.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6345/1393

check out this study. Science is a reputable journal. sure, it's just one study. but there are thousands more.

looks like there is ample evidence of bees being harmed by pesticides.

I don't think you heard me say that neonicotinoids don't "diminish bee health".

This conveniently ignores the other side of the coin where interests are aligned and it's the conspiracy theorists that are harmful (e.g. vaccine manufactures and autism).

All functioning economies have vested interests in things good and bad. The only thing a vested interest means is that scrutiny is needed on the actions of the vested parties.

On what planet is the jury out about vaccines and autism? There's not a single research paper suggesting a link between those.

You are falsely conflating scientific consensus with public opinion.

SO what about cell phone radiation and cancer, or maybe GMO food and cancer?

What about that fiction?

a pretty informative read re: cell phones and cancer: https://www.thenation.com/article/how-big-wireless-made-us-t...

(as usual, article headline is clickbait, not chosen by writer, please do not judge the content based on the title)

Could you do the TL;DR of that? I skimmed it, because it's the long-form type of read I hate (little meat, lots of unrelated stories). Is there anything there that stands up to the standard counterargument called "non-ionizing radiation"?

I think hueving just meant to say that not every institution is corrupt, and the medical industry is good when it comes to vaccines. The vested interests, in this case doctors, are doing great, and the anti-vaxxers are bad.

Again, the jury was never out about vaccines, there's no scientific research claiming they are harmful. This scenario is not analogous to the grandparent post where scientific consensus is being actively manipulated by vested interests to delay regulatory action

Doctors don't make vaccines. Pharmaceutical researchers do. And pharmaceutical manufacturers wouldn't blink twice before selling you drugs that they know are harmful, there's plenty of well covered precedent for that. It's not that the medical field is more or less moral, it's just that in the case of vaccines, they actually perform well with no significant side effects so there's no reason to engage in morally questionable business practices to sell them

I've also read that vaccination is not a big moneymaker.

I can't really even understand what this comment is trying to say. Vaccines aren't harmful. But doctors don't make vaccines, pharma companies do. And pharma companies would gladly hurt you. Conclusion: ???.

I think what is meant (from the post in question, not necessarily your summary): cui bono arguments are particularly ineffective for those claiming vaccines are harmful, because doctors, who generally consider vaccines to be very effective and mostly harmless, are not particularly financially vested in the continued use of vaccines (unlike the manufacturers, presumably.) If the use of vaccines was curtailed, doctors would arguably have more work.

>because doctors, who generally consider vaccines to be very effective and mostly harmless, are not particularly financially vested...

Interested does not always have to be financial. It is hard for a community to go back on its beliefs. So in all probability, it is possible that a doctor can ignore the negative effects of a vaccine they are seeing due to this and huge perceived peer pressure in talking against the current medical consensus (Which is, as stupid as it sounds, All vaccines are completely safe)

Lets not put all vaccines into a sigle category. There are many different types of vaccines, from how they work to how they are actually manufactured, and they all carry different levels of risks. Blanket statements are not helpful.

There are extensive, multi-stage, rational, mandated procedures for not putting every candidate vaccine into a single category. Categorizations based on anecdotal evidence and superstition are not helpful.

Actually there are public registries of known incidences of harm from vaccines (i.e. VAERS etc). This again goes to people arguing in Black and White and refusing to rationally engage the middle grounds:

I don't believe there is research (at least verified/mainstream) that has determined widespread harmful effects of vaccines. I.e. the risk of issue from vaccines is lower than the risk of disease being caught (sorry don't have exact odds here to verify this). There are also no (that I'm aware of) long term generational studies of the effects of vaccines other than obvious observation that disease incidence has reduced.

To be clear, the point I'm making is that economic interests are aligned for vaccine manufactures to make vaccines and for people to take them. Just because both sides have a vested interest in taking them, there isn't suddenly an invalidation of all pro-vaccine research (e.g. everything that shows no link between vaccines and autism).

In college, I did a deep dive into GMO safety research for journal club back when the Seralini "GMOs cause cancer in mice" paper hit (2010 or thereabouts) and found quite a counterexample to your rule: bogus (obviously p-hacked) science from Seralini and an aggressive misinformation campaign from Greenpeace to convince people that Monsanto was using terminator genes (bio-DRM) against poor farmers when the truth had been quite the opposite for some time (Monsanto patented the idea, promised not to use it, and kept the promise).

Blind opposition to industrial progress -- which is what you are suggesting -- carried by the rising tide of public opinion will cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid.

EDIT: oh, and there's a National Toxicology Program study -- "cell phones cause cancer" would be the sensationalized headline -- working its way through the bureaucratic pipes at the moment with another round of "review" landing in a few months. Somehow it got through the first draft and review process while completely ignoring the first law of toxicology, so I suspect it will pass the second round as well, and while I trust the official document will contain sufficiently reserved wording the media circus that spins up around it will become a second excellent example of bullshit from the "little guys."

You're just throwing out the tu quoque fallacy for I'm not sure what reason. Hey the 'other side' does it too so let's not make a big deal here!

Black and white opposition to everything with cherry-picked arguments is becoming more and more prevalent, and it doesn't help us solve (or even rationally discuss) any problems or even understand them better.

That's in fact not an instance of the tu quoque fallacy.

It is. You're implying that the other commenter's post is invalid as 'blind opposition' because 'their side' of the argument behaves the same.

* Edit on below: On re-reading you're correct, you were categorising their comment. My apologies!

No. Tu quoque is an appeal to hypocrisy. Pointing out that other concerns with big industry have been misleading, as with Seralini's apparently fraudulent glyphosate study, is an appeal to credibility.

You're misrepresenting the chain of the conversation:

A: The jury is out on [topic].

B: Whenever a jury is out, with one side having massive funding you know what the outcome will be [implying the massively funded camp is wrong and trying to hide it].

C: Here is a counter-example where the side with funding was correct. So maybe your over-generalisation is wrong.

You: You're throwing out a to-quoque fallacy, blind opposition is bad.

GP was opposing blind opposition, and you're arguing that they are blindly opposing skepticism. I'm not sure you read the conversation completely before you replied.

>> Blind opposition to industrial progress -- which is what you are suggesting -- carried by the rising tide of public opinion will cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid.

What damage will be caused by people using their phones less for fear of getting cancer?

What about GMOs? What is the harm in not using them? The EU has mostly banned them and it doesn't look to be suffering any damage.

With regards to GMOs, the green revolution (as I understand it[1], partly using GMOs to increase food production, especially in developing countries) is often described as saving a billion lives. On a brief glance, I can't find a detailed estimate of the Humanitarian effects, but Borlaug received a Nobel peace prize for it and that scale of impact does seem plausible.

[1] See discussion below about relative importance of engineering disease resistant varieties vs fertilizers and pesticides. I only have a vague familiarity with the green revolution and could be mistaken.

That's not what the green revolution was. It was pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers.

While GMOs are not harmful and banning them is overall bad, they don't have nearly the same magnitude of impact on agricultural productivity as herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers.

Thanks for the feedback - I've updated my comment to express uncertainty.

As I understand it, a big part of the green revolution, especially initially, was Borlaug developing a strand of wheat that was resistant to many common diseases and had higher yields. This seems born out by a quick skim of his [wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug), although I'm sure nitrogen fertilizer, etc, also played large roles.

I don't have the time to do a deep dive right now, so I've just updated my previous comment to be uncertain.

That's legit. I think that with further reading, the nuanced view is that it's both the high-yield strains of staple foods that Borlaug developed and the high-input farming style, in combination.

But my point is actually that modern GMO plants, the Monsanto ones that people are currently freaking out about, don't revolutionize yields. They improve them on the margin, but it's not another green revolution, at least so far.

Its mostly well accepted in plant breeding circles that the improvement in crop yields in North America in the last ~30-40 years can be 66% attributed to genetic progress (i.e higher yield, more disease/pest tolerance, better adaptation, etc.) and the remaining 33% can be attributed to agronomic factors (i.e earlier planting, better/more precise equipment, better soil/nutrient management, etc.)

Norman Borlaug would disagree with your characterization of the green revolution. Much of the Green Revolution involved the plant breeding.

I completely disagree. Quite a lot of the work done during the Green Revolution was breeding plants that were more hardy and resilient to the environment. For instance, Norman Borlaug worked on strains of wheat that were resistant to stem rust (something that had caused starvation in Mexico several years earlier). Pesticides, herbicides, nor fertilisers help with stem rust. GMOs also allow the breeding of plants that have higher yield, which is something we need if we want to feed the world.

You also have things like Golden Rice, which help people who have vitamin A deficiencies and don't have access to vitamin A sources to be able to get vitamin A. Vitamin A deficiencies kill almost a million children under 5 each year especially in South-East Asia. It is only practical to solve this problem through GMOs. (Greenpeace also protested Golden Rice, meaning they protested against programs that can save tens of millions of children. Whether or not you hold that against them is up to you, but if they want to play the "blood on your hands" game I don't see why I shouldn't.)

To be clear; pesticides, herbicides, and fertilisers are very important to agriculture and many more people would be starving without them. But the same is true of GMOs -- they are more than just "not harmful"; they are necessary.

Breeding (even hybridizing) plants is not considered GMO or all carrots, corn, and avocados would be considered the same. I'm a supporter of GMO, but directly modifying (or inserting) genes is different from selective breeding and even cloning. I don't particularly like breeding plants that are (more) tolerant of high doses of proprietary pesticides (insect=animal killers) or even herbicides, because like overusing anti-biotech at low doses for feed lot weight gain it is a recipe for eventual disaster.

> Breeding (even hybridizing) plants is not considered GMO or all carrots, corn, and avocados would be considered the same.

It is a different technique, but the purpose is the same. [1] gives a good overview over why discriminating between the "more natural" genetic modification techniques and the "less natural" ones is not a reasonable middle-ground. Healthy skepticism around particular GMOs (meaning particular plants) is completely fine (and should be encouraged -- like all skepticism), but skepticism around all plants produced by a given group of techniques doesn't make much sense imo.

Regarding proprietary pesticides, there is a legitimate issue there (as there is with the patenting of biotech -- or patents in general) but it has been hijacked by anti-GMO protests making claims that farmers were sued because of cross-contamination from other farms and similarly false statements.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcbTVEr3_X4

Yes GMO is different: unlike random chance we know exactly what genes we changed and what each does. Random chance seems to solve some problem and we never both to ask why or what the side effects might be.

I'm sure Monsanto and the GMO lobby's objective was saving lives in developing countries, not profits. When they pushed GMOs bundled with pesticides and herbicides they did so aided by the corruption in these countries, where the farmers were doing quite fine replanting seeds. Now they're abusing a BASF product to ripen tomatoes overnight.

Who gives a shit about motivation? Do you care if your take-out food was made in the expectation of a financial return, or does it need to be made out of the restaurant owner's sincere love of feeding strangers?

Considering what motivates someone can often be useful.

People can behave and make drastically different choices based solely on motivation. People will often pick and choose what information they choose to share or choose to hide based largely on the motivations that are driving their project.

Motivation can drastically alter the way an idea is presented to the audience in which it is being presented.

Obviously we would prefer to have one hundred percent accurate information to base all of our decisions on but sadly, we don’t —- considering the motives of those who are selling us whatever they’re selling is wise.

Motivations here as are complex as the players involved. It's entirely reasonable to expect that researchers who invented e.g. golden rice were thinking about the lives it'll save. It's also entirely reasonable to expect companies to support development and deployment of it because it's profitable for them.

On a less extreme end, companies sure want crops with improved resistance to pathogens and insects for profit reasons, but this is the case where their incentives somewhat align with public good.

> It’s entirely reasonable to expect that researchers who invented e.g. golden rice we’re thinking about the lives it’ll save.

Absolutely. I was simply responding to the above poster’s implication that we should never consider motives when someone is selling the entire world a product.

And I agree with you completely that it’s reasonable to expect there was some altruism in producing golden rice. It’s also reasonable to expect companies who have billions of dollars tied up in their patents on the world’s food supply might selectivity choose which information they share in order to make their product appear in the best light possible. In some ways it would be unreasonable to assume they would share their negative info with us, they have an incredible amount to lose if we don’t buy into their products.

And look, I’m certainly not suggesting that GMOs are evil, I am incredibly excited by some of the advancements we’re seeing. I’m just saying there is nothing wrong with considering motives when different data streams seems to be in tension with one another. Simply considering motives as one small piece in the puzzle is rational.

I believe to make informed decisions, we need as much information as possible. And understanding motivations is just more information to help us parse. Again, I’m incredibly pro-gmo, but I’m also willing to consider there may be consequences to some products and some policies - particularly when these policies are mixing intellectual property and patents on something as important as the worlds food supply.

Complex motivations, with humans that's almost a truism, agreed.

>companies sure want crops with improved resistance to pathogens and insects for profit reasons, but this is the case where their incentives somewhat align with public good //

If we ignore all other aspects of the public good. Yes we want cheaper food, but not at the cost of poisoning of farmworkers or consumers, eutrophication, destruction of bio-diversity, destruction of soil structure that aids long-term fertility and reduces erosion, etc.. These are all externalised [potential] costs.

>It's also entirely reasonable to expect companies to support development and deployment of it because it's profitable for them. //

Every day this becomes less reasonable to me. Why should we allow the financial profit motive of a small number of capitalists be the primary driver as opposed to the general good of the demos; it seems so perverse to reduce the decisions on managing of economic aspects such as food production to "what makes the owners of Monsanto et al. the most money without producing a provable and immediately catastrophic harm". Bof.

Our information about the benefits of GMO is pretty thorough and persuasive, so in this case, we don't need to care about motivations.

A lot of this information comes from studies affiliated with industry:

A 2011 analysis by Diels et al., reviewed 94 peer-reviewed studies pertaining to GMO safety to assess whether conflicts of interest correlated with outcomes that cast GMOs in a favorable light. They found that financial conflict of interest was not associated with study outcome (p = 0.631) while author affiliation to industry (i.e., a professional conflict of interest) was strongly associated with study outcome (p < 0.001).[129] Of the 94 studies that were analyzed, 52% did not declare funding. 10% of the studies were categorized as "undetermined" with regard to professional conflict of interest. Of the 43 studies with financial or professional conflicts of interest, 28 studies were compositional studies. According to Marc Brazeau, an association between professional conflict of interest and positive study outcomes can be skewed because companies typically contract with independent researchers to perform follow-up studies only after in-house research uncovers favorable results. In-house research that uncovers negative or unfavorable results for a novel GMO is generally not further pursued.[130]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_cont...

This is one very good reason why the motivation of industry should be examined carefully. If their motivation is profit and they are allowed to optimise for that alone without any oversight or regulation AND on top of that they are the keepers and dispensers of information about their product, what chance does the general public have to make an accurate assessment of their product's safety?

That's some cult-level doublethink going on here. Of course you need to understand motivation. "Who cares what the motives of ISIS are, they're rebuilding towns and cities destroyed by imperialist aggression.." <= try that experiment in thought.

And also enslaving and killing by the thousand. So no, a utilitarian view doesn't support that idea.

I do care because it makes farmers dependent on Monsanto seeds + chemical packages, for they cannot compete with the ones that are using these products and go out of business otherwise. This reduces food diversity, aids big agricultural conglomerates while harming small producers and leads to creation of food deserts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

> the green revolution (as I understand it[1], partly using GMOs to increase food production, especially in developing countries) is often described as saving a billion lives.

This argument is moot, industrialisation saved those lives, not GMO, GMO only provides a 5% increase to crops in the developed world. Tractors, fertilizers and proper agricultural techniques saved the developed world (just like it did in the current developed one) not GMO.

Furthermore, currently, world-wide more people die from the "side effects" of too much food; not enough is not the challenge.

We have the food. It's just "unevenly distributed."

Furthermore, my sense is, the argument for the world needing GMOs is based on the animal protein heavy diet. Such animals are resource / feed intensive. Shift the diet to less meats and more plants and the fact is you feed more.

I'm not here to make a case for zero meat. Only the the pro GMO argument is based on a myth, a myth that I've seen plenty of reasonable people buy into.

I think as the developing world grows economically we will continue to see higher demand for meat. Eventually the only thing stopping higher meat consumption will be the fact that the price has been pushed higher and higher by limited worldwide production capacity intersecting with high demand.

I don't disagree. But the "need" for so much meat is a myth. The level of. First World meat consumption is bad for the planet, and bad for those who consume it.

Health, ethic, eco and moral downsides. Yet we're sooo blinded and confused.

Isn't there a chance GMOs will be able to allow the crops to be (chemical) pesticide free, so that way you can avoid putting cancer-causing chemicals on the food in the first place. That seems like a huge win to me.

Like others have commented below GMOs (well, GMO crops specifically) were not the main driver of the Green Revolution. So the question remains- what are the harms that can come about by not using GMOs?

My understanding is that, at this point in time, the harms are primarily financial. For instance, when the EU imposed a moratorium on GMO crops, the reaction was primarily for countries that, until then, sold GMO crops to EU countries, to complain to the WTO about trade agreement violations- in other words, their financial interests were damaged.

As to issues of food security and feeding the people of developed nations, as I understand it, there is an ongoing debate on whether GMO crops are really needed to achieve this, or whether better management of existing agricultural resources, or better distribution of current food production, can do the job. In other words- GMOs may be beneficial, so not necessary, therefore not using them would not lead to harm.

No, the harms are environmental. Spraying weed killers (ie glyphosate) uses much less carbon than the mechanical methods. Tractors pulling something through the soil need a lot of fuel. A sprayer running over the same field spraying a gallon of glyphosate uses much less fuel. If you have any concern about global warming you should demand that only GMO crops be grown.

Note that I work for John Deere. We sell to farmers who are both for and against GMO so I'm not supposed to have a bias, but I still need to make this connection clear.

As a separate comment, since it's a bit of a digression- the Green Revolution has not been all good. High yield agriculture has an -I believe- uncontroversial effect on the environment, including habitat loss and reduced crop biodiversity, but apparently also carbon emissions (because it relies on fossil fuels). There's a discussion of the environmental impacts on wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution#Environmental...

This includes an ominous note about reliance on non-renewable resources:

Dependence on non-renewable resources

Most high intensity agricultural production is highly reliant on non-renewable resources. Agricultural machinery and transport, as well as the production of pesticides and nitrates all depend on fossil fuels.[73] Moreover, the essential mineral nutrient phosphorus is often a limiting factor in crop cultivation, while phosphorus mines are rapidly being depleted worldwide.[74] The failure to depart from these non-sustainable agricultural production methods could potentially lead to a large scale collapse of the current system of intensive food production within this century.

In other words, the Green Revolution may not be much more sustainable than the Industrial Revolution and may prove to be just as harmful further down the line, exactly because it allowed us to feed an additional 5 billion mouths or so. I guess the argument is that it doesn't really scale that well.

including habitat loss

It's not quite that simple—in many places increasing yields means using less land. In particular, leaving marginal land fallow.

But the factors are pretty complicated, in the US especially dominated by policy: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030691921...

On the other hand, how much land was exhausted and then left fallow? How much was taken over for other uses (such as urbanization)?

And if we hadn't had yield increases, would we be using more land now? Or just eat less meat?

Edit:

While worldwide agricultural land has increased, in the US it decreased from 63% to 51% of the total 1949-2007 according to this survey, which draws from USDA data:

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2012/march/data-feature...

"Rural Kansas is dying. I drove 1,800 miles to find out why"

https://newfoodeconomy.org/rural-kansas-depopulation-commodi...

U.S. census data tells the story. The population in most of Kansas’s rural counties peaked 50 years ago or earlier.

In that 110 years ago was "earlier", that's true. But why not say that, unless the purpose is to mislead?

Saved a billion ~human~ lives, perhaps. It caused the death and destruction of many billions of non-human lives. It massively reduced bio-diversity on 90% of the earths surface.

It has to be said, it has to be acknowledged, the 'progress' of man has come at an extraordinary cost to every other living thing.

Do you believe that a human life should be valued more than say, a worm?

Hunger is not an efficiency problem. Hunger is a political problem. Handwaving that away to propagandize for an industrial food corporation is… not good.

Their are unseen cost

>The EU has mostly banned them and it doesn't look to be suffering any damage.

It's also the region of the world least susceptible to food shortages.

>What about GMOs? What is the harm in not using them?

lower crop yields, more starvation, more malnutrition

Starvation and malnutrition are political problems.

I find the argument 'if you don't support the food megacorporation that means you are killing billions of people' to be impossible, disingenuous, evil hyperbole.

As you say, a perfect solution might be a redistribution of global food supply to allocate more to starving regions. I will support you in 'fighting the good fight'. To me, the pragmatic solution is to grow more food with the same resources that you have. The only hyperbole is in equating not feeding someone with starving them.

To equate GMO tech with the megacorps that profit from them is a strawman argument.

What damage will be caused by people using their phones less for fear of getting cancer?

Unlike athermal levels of non-ionizing radiation, bullshit is never truly harmless.

> What damage will be caused by people using their phones less for fear of getting cancer?

Telcos will earn less money. Phone manufacturers will earn less money.

On the other hand, maybe app creators will finally learn to create apps that work perfectly fine offline (i.e. in the airplane mode).

There's chance GMOs will be able to be pesticide free, so that way you can avoid putting cancer-causing chemicals on the food in the first place. That seems like a huge win to me.

Or it could backfire horribly and create populations of insects that are immune to their protections:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_maize#Res...

"Blind opposition to industrial progress -- which is what you are suggesting -- carried by the rising tide of public opinion will cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid."

The OP is clearly NOT suggesting "blind opposition" to industrial progress - in fact, what is wanted, is absolutely transparent, non-blinded research.

But, this is not what is on the table. You've skilfully managed to turn the argument away from the facts: companies such as Monsanto WANT BLIND FAITH in their products, and work very avidly to ensure that the public - and their representatives - do not get to see all the facts.

So, what exactly is your intention here?

We could flip the original sentence as: "Blind faith in industrial progress..carried by the tide of public policy..is causing and will continue to cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid."

Yes it will be paid back. By generations to come. While the corporations who invented/introduced/pushed the stuff and got governments to support them by adjusting laws to allow doing it keep flourishing...

That's the sad truth, that coming generations will be paying for our short-sighted pursuit of profit and "progress".

This reminds me of the Long Now Foundation [0]. At least there is hope, that there are people aware of the need for long-term sustainable thinking, and are actively promoting it.

"Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed - some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries." Stewart Brand

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation

> The OP is clearly NOT suggesting "blind opposition" to industrial progress

Yes they are.

> "Every time the jury is out on a topic where one side has a vested interest and a billion dollar budget to protect it, you can be reasonably sure what the outcome will be."

OP is literally saying that from the moment the waters become slightly murky you can reasonably assume that the big vested interest is in the wrong. FUD stirring past this threshold is inevitable, so this amounts to blind opposition to >billion dollar vested interests, which are a reasonable proxy for industrial progress.

As for the inevitably of FUD-stirring, I'll again hold up Greenpeace as my example. Monsanto does many evil things, but instead of focusing on those, Greenpeace decided to engage in Fox-news level truth wrangling so that they could milk the juicy "terminator gene" soundbite. They did it again as the Seralini scandal developed -- but since I had my own "ground truth" opinion (which agrees with the scientific consensus supporting retraction) I saw their claims of suppression/censorship in a very different light. From that day forward I stopped assuming good intentions from environmental groups and adopted a "read both sides" policy. It was eye-opening.

> You've skilfully managed to turn the argument away from the facts

Right back atcha.

> So, what exactly is your intention here?

Self-styled environmentalists turned back the clock on clean energy by fifty years when they sank nuclear power. I don't want them to do the same to my food supply, but they're half way there. I don't want them to do the same to my cell phone, but I hear war drums beating in the distance.

"Blind opposition to industrial progress [...] will cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid."

Meanwhile, in reality: the exact opposite

> pesticides and bees

The EU is implementing a total ban on neonicotinoid pesticides by the end of 2018.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/27/eu-agree...

Only for outside use. They are still legal for use in greenhouses. I'm not disagreeing that this means they acknowledge the potential harm for bees, but it's not a "total ban".

Don't forget leaded gasoline: https://www.thenation.com/article/secret-history-lead/

I think that the common people have no way of knowing the real truth about something. And all our decisions should be based on this simple fact of modern life...

Why so pessimistic? Aren't there any independent labs where you can send your samples for testing and then see results for your self? Send to multiple labs for more control.

This is not always possible. For example, take the claim that a certain thing X in some eatables is harmful/not harmful for human beings. Such a thing might not be possible without long term study. Or the claim that smoking will kill you, but what if you want to know if smoking moderately is as bad as exposing to automobile pollution every day? Or living in an area with polluted air. Mainstream narrative today emphasizes on the dangers of smoking, but it does not really does the same with automobile pollution? What if you want to know the truth about this? Can this be so easily done by a common man?

Even in cases where this is possible, like pesticide residue in vegetables, You might have to run the experiments for a large number of samples for some amount of time to get a real picture. Which might be feasible, but way out of the comfort zone of a concerned person, who has a normal life and the associated hassles to deal with...

Those cases have another interesting feature - you're wasting time worrying about them.

When scientists have problems figuring out whether or how much something is harmful, it's because it's so harmless it's hard to measure. If e.g. artificial sweeteners caused cancers the way many believe, you'd see people dropping dead left and right, with cancers clearly linkable to the use of sweeteners.

Those studies are obviously important, on a population scale. For individuals, obsessing about those things too much puts you in more danger to your health than those things could ever cause.

>If e.g. artificial sweeteners caused cancers the way many believe, you'd see people dropping dead left and right, with cancers clearly linkable to the use of sweeteners.

Wait a min. I don't remember smokers dropping dead left and right in all those times when almost everyone smoked..

Another one is the effects on lead in automobile fuels. Again people were not dropping dead. Despite the issues about it that we have since discovered...

I think these kinds of apologetic behavior is vastly more dangerous than any hindrance to "progress" that might be caused by being more cautious...

>For individuals, obsessing about those things too much puts you in more danger to your health than those things could ever cause...

Not sure. How does producing vegetables myself, or making sure the vegitables I buy are free of residue, or limiting my exposure to air pollution put in me more danger than those things could ever cause...

If you think pesticide residue cannot do much damage, take a look at Endosulfan tragedy in India.

[1] http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Thiruvananthapuram/No-en...

> Wait a min. I don't remember smokers dropping dead left and right in all those times when almost everyone smoked..

Because the effect isn't very much pronounced. It's somewhat in the middle between eating rotten meat and using artificial sweeteners, in the sense that it really does damage health over long periods of time, which will result in worse life quality and quicker death of some fraction of smokers. Accordingly, scientists figured that out relatively quickly.

My whole point is that the difficulty for science to tie a cause to an effect is proportional to how strong impact that cause has. Saying that artificial sweeteners, or glyphosate, are clear carcinogens literally means the effect is strong and pronounced, which directly implies it's easy to find.

> Another one is the effects on lead in automobile fuels. Again people were not dropping dead. Despite the issues about it that we have since discovered

That was more subtle, but again, found relatively quickly.

> If you think pesticide residue cannot do much damage, take a look at Endosulfan tragedy in India.

I'm not saying that. We know Endosulfan is toxic. And it is being banned worldwide; the story you linked is about politics, not science.

Again, my point is only this heuristic: the health danger of a substance in mass use is roughly proportional to how easy it is to verify it. When you get to the point that the only indication of danger is that some mice might have had bad reaction to a substance, except the other studies show they didn't - when you have no sensible mechanism explaining the danger and only weak statistical correlation - at that point, costs of alternatives should outweigh any worry you should have. For example, the alternative to artificial sweetener is sugar, which is known to be much more dangerous to health. The alternative to roundup is pesticides known to be much more toxic. Etc.

>That was more subtle, but again, found relatively quickly.

Wait. What? How do you measure "relatively quickly"? As far as I know, we have been using it even after the problems were known.......

>The alternative to roundup is pesticides known to be much more toxic. Etc.

Any source for this claim that there are no, absolutely no safer alternatives? Also, is there any proof that a safer alternative is fundamentally impossible to make? Also, have we thought about using safer alternatives, and the hit in production that it might cause. Can we live with that?

Surely you should be providing safer alternatives if you're convinced of them?

Oh yeah, that's a really efficient approach. Like the average person knows how to buy that service, what it should cost, or what to do with the results.

That and, entities with large amounts of power (such as a titanic corporation with billions in revenues) are compelled to exploit any avenue for making more money, compelled to exploit any externalities they're not actively held responsible for, and compelled to hire astroturf and pay for false information to the exact extent that they can, not legally, but practically, get away with it.

They are compelled to be this because if they don't the next guy will do it and beat them, and there's an ocean of evidence demonstrating that 'good people' will go along with all of it if seeming authority demands it.

History's littered with this. To be like 'oh, but THIS time we have to give the corporation the benefit of all possible doubt, because their PR statement says if you don't then billions of people will die and all will be lost'…?

No way. No way. The fundamental truth of society is that the powerful will take advantage. Acknowledging that goes back to the Magna Carta. This is no time to ditch that and turn over unquestioned power to gods, kings and corporations.

Not all ignorance is deliberate. Almost none of it is -- ignorance is the default.

Some things we don't know yet. Others have effect sizes so small distinguishing them from zero is a true and deep challenge, even with tremendous study done. Some things actually do have effect sizes of zero, and no amount of evidence will stop people from demanding more study.

And also, Any amount of study does not say much if all of them uses flawed methodologies ("but that is the best we have" does not make it any better), which has been a serious issue lately..

Anti-GMO is a multibillion industry. There are rich, vested interests on both sides of this debate.

> See: pesticides and bees, fossil fuels and climate change, food packaging plastics and cancer, pain treatment meds and addiction.

Cigarettes come to mind, too.

>The Wikipedia section that the parent post links to straight up says that the only research that found no links was sponsored by Monsanto.

By my count the section lists 7 studies, 3 show no links and 4 show links.

You can probably add cigarettes to that list.

> "All made possible with a series of comparatively small investments to buy scientific research to keep the jury out."

I agree with 99.9% of what you said, except this bit. I hate to mince words __but it's essential to this tactic__. Simply put:

This is __not__ - and never should be considered - scientific research.

It's fiction.

It's a perversion.

It's the kind of nonsense Orwell warned us about.

There is only one thing more unconscionable: "Real" Science and its ilk remains silent. In addition, certainly, the FDA isn't the only lab capable of making making these test.

But this is contemporary / modern science. Again. Is it any wonder so many have so much doubt?

>Every time the jury is out on a topic where one side has a vested interest and a billion dollar budget to protect it, > you can be reasonably sure what the outcome will be. > See: pesticides and bees, fossil fuels and climate change, food packaging plastics and cancer, pain treatment meds and addiction.

I'm not sure you notice the grave strangeness of your comment. There's no jury out there on climate change. The basics are pretty clear. I also think the relation of some pesticides and bees dying is hardly controversial (though it gets muddy when you get into the details and ask which pesticides). For plastic packaging and cancer I'm not sure what the evidence says, but I guess it's complicated. I don't think any scientist seriously doubts that pain medication can be addictive (again, details may be more complicated and uncertain).

So you have 3 examples where the science is contrary to the interest of a billion dollar vested interest. What do you make of that?

(Of course having settled science doesn't mean political action follows, which is most evident when it comes to climate change. But that's a different question.)

There's nothing strange: GP is giving those as historical examples of this sort of behavior by the industry, not claiming the jury is out today on these topics.

Especially with climate change, there is no doubt the industry has done all it can to cloud the issue in the past, and still continues it. You could add other things (e.g. smoking) to the list.

You know there is a multibillion industry with vested interests against GMO: the organic food lobby.

>> See: pesticides and bees, fossil fuels and climate change, food packaging plastics and cancer, pain treatment meds and addiction.

Also, Asbestos, DDT, Thalidomide, etc.

I find that in discussions like this people often automatically adopt a defensive stance For Science, Technology and Progress, but they're missing the point that it is not science (i.e. scientists, or the scientific method) that is responsible for disasters like that- it's corporations. And they care not one jot about science, technology or progress, let alone feeding the poor or curing the ailing, or anything humantiarian and compassionate like that. It's the industry that destroys the environment and causes public health disasters, then tries its best to keep it all under wraps while people die.

Bottom line- defending big financial interests is not defending science. It's just defending someone else's money.

yep, you hit the nail on the head here.

often, the real evidence is extremely clear, but there is enough obfuscation created by those with an agenda to make things look inconclusive.

yet another example is polygraph tests and similar more modern devices.

all of the independent evidence says they're trash. but "the jury is still out" because there are a slew of very low quality studies performed by people hired by the companies who make the devices.

anyhow, we've known that monsanto was lying about this for quite some time, and we have also known that they have corrupted the parts of the US government responsible for regulating their behavior for quite some time.

it isn't okay for pesticides to be in our food.

> It seems like the jury is out

Ah yes, the jury is always out. Better do nothing and instead politicize the issue while pretending to debate the "science" for a few more decades.

> the jury is out

What we currently have is galf a dozen independent studies suggesting it might be a carcinogen. And one Monsanto backed study saying it has no immediate harm.

It is not so easy to dismiss. Both groups of studies can be correct.

If the assumption has been that it is not getting into food, when in fact it has, it is reasonable to ask whether studies have been based on valid models of exposure. Furthermore, the article you link to is almost entirely preoccupied with the cancer risk, which is far from the only danger of environmental toxins. this seems to be a case where the burden of evidence belongs on those calling it harmless.

>does it prove her claim true that it is harmful?

Always reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovKw6YjqSfM

The recent news is that Monsanto have known for a while that the formulations containing Glyphosate are harmful as a whole, while isolated Glyphosate may not be particularly harmful.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/08/weedkiller-t...

I'm no fan of toxic chemicals in our food and I don't trust the government or corporations to do enough to protect it, but it seems fair to me to say that a PhD in philosophy and a master's in physics are not particularly relevant to claiming expertise in evaluating toxicological claims.

It's fair to say that, because it's true, but it's not in and of itself a reason to write somebody off as a nut, or assume they have not found any other way to gain expertise on the thing they are talking about. I think OP's point was just that people used her unrelated qualifications as a way to dismiss her without reference to her actual argument.

That's totally fair, and you interpreted what OP was trying to say better than I did.

A high school dropout can be a source of expertise if she commits herself to learning the subject material and understanding the context of the claims she is making.

When someone with a PhD in philosophy is per se blacklisted regarding other matters of worldly concern, credentialism has gone too far.

Yes. In fact, from a slightly different perspective, one can easily argue that this very credentialism is a component of the control apparatus exploited by the "vested interests".

To become credentialed in a field, you must spend multiple years repeating the same things over and over, getting programmed to perceive and approach problems in compliance with the field's orthodoxy.

There is a small core of people who decide whether you will gain your credential or not. These persons generally have interests besides just "train the best new $OUR_FIELDers out there", if only because that's subjective and will take many years to play out. They're generally looking for funding, projects, publications, appointments, etc. In charge of those people is university administration, and their conflict of interest is so obvious and inherent that it's a waste of time to type it out.

So you have this big powerful apparatus that has many little gullets that can be made to respond much more favorably by pouring a little money here, a little prestige there, etc. Many of these "gullets" will balk if this is done openly, but if you add a thin layer of abstraction and ambiguity, very few people will even notice the relationship, let alone care. It really only takes a minimal amount of obfuscation to get people to jump on board with something that has direct personal benefit to offer.

As such, the perspective of intelligent outsiders who haven't gone through an elaborate niche-specific brainwashing process should be valued, not dismissed.

In the same universe where there exists a non-trivial number of highly successful subject matter experts that are college dropouts, why do you believe this?

There's limited time and a lot of bullshit to wade through, and I'm busy enough staying abreast of my chosen fields. Credentialism is often abused, but it remains a useful heuristic. It's definitely not useful for people who are expert enough to evaluate claims in and of themselves, but that's not most people. I'm not an expert in medicine, biochemistry, or whatever, so I'm not qualified to sift out the genuine autodidacts from the cranks. Whereas, I'm qualified to sift out autodidactic programmers who dropped out of HS.

By your own measure of credentials I find her reasoned, data backed opinion more valid than your skepticism.

What are your credentials?

A person's credentialing does not make facts any less true.

I believe the debate is around whether or not they are facts to begin with.

Yes, which is why I said "facts" and not "the facts." There is the point of this situation, and the point of ignoring a person's informed opinion. I was discussing the latter.

>Yes, which is why I said "facts" and not "the facts."

Wow that is an extremely subtle distinction.

Statistical analysis is generally universal and independent of a given discipline; nor does it require a PhD.

Society encourages everyone to draw simple, binary boxes around people, but people are more complicated than that.

She didn't do the research. She was trumpeting research done by people with training in the field.

I would argue that her advanced degrees put her far above average in her ability to read technical literature on the subject. She’s not doing original research in the field, merely sharing what she has learned from reading existing research. Knowledge she would like to spread when our own FDA puts its head in the sand.

I can understand that as reason to doubt her findings, and have further investigation, but the empirical evidence is increasingly agreeing with her...

Neither is a massive corporate PR budget, but it'll work wonders at widely spreading the specific claims that benefit you, whether or not you just made them up or paid to have them written down by a third party.

That PhD in philosophy is likely to give an otherwise naive person the useful information of, "yes, seemingly nice people will act like this if it benefits them, or if they've deferred to some authority that requires it of them". It'll also give a grounding in 'rationalizing such decisions'.

I don't think discrediting the person, rather than their arguments, furthers the discussion.

> I’d really like to know what’s in our food.

Why? Don't you trust the free market?

It seems like it would be really simple to know what's in your food by simply testing for it right?

If you're telling me that X substance is in some good that is freely available then it should be easy to prove it. You can catch the EPA/FDA red handed by simply doing some independent testing. The only reason I trust the EPA/FDA over the PhD you refer to is that the barrier of entry to testing something that I can buy off the shelf seems so low that lack of evidence, in this case, really hurts the accusation.

Like if I said bricks float in vegetable oil. That's trivially falsifiable.

Am I mistaken about how difficult it should be to test for glyphosate?

The health effects of glyphosate are another story, that is certainly much more difficult to prove and is a legitimate topic of discussion, especially considering how many times industry has withheld health issues in the past.

> Am I mistaken about how difficult it should be to test for glyphosate?

Read the article? The "official" samples contained nothing. "Testing" is not just the process of testing the sample in the lab, it takes place in a context. That context matters a lot, as this example shows. Even if your lab process is reliable, you can do a lot to influence the result before you have a sample on the plate of the technician. It's the same as with any measurement, any study: Before doing the actual measurement there is far larger and more important process that remains mostly invisible or ignored (even when it is published). Focus only is on the "numbers", because "numbers don't lie"...

My point is that anybody who knows how to test for glyphosate can go to the grocery store, buy a box of ritz crackers, an ear of corn and some canned soup and test them.

The food I eat is easily testable by an independent lab. If you make an accusation about a product you could easily test because it's freely available I am suspicious why you didn't.

There certainly are controlling interests that exist in our market and government. Regarding players like Vandana Shiva, though, it's also pretty clear that the pendulum swings in both directions; you're better off reading another critic's opinion. The New Yorker had a big piece on her, by the way.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/25/seeds-of-doubt

So this suggests that the samples submitted to the FDA for testing were not representative of ordinary food.

This reminds me of the ongoing Tetra Tech/Hunter's Point scandal [1], where the US Navy paid $300M to a contractor to clean up a development site. The contractor was required to submit samples from the site to prove they had cleaned it up. Instead, they just pulled soil from known clean places and submitted for testing.

How much of the ongoing monitoring activity that our government does relies on good faith from companies? Is this the tip of the iceberg, or do the fact that these cases get caught prove that the meta-monitoring is working well?

How can we improve this state of affairs?

[1] https://sf.curbed.com/2018/1/26/16916742/hunters-point-shipy...

Most of the world runs of on good faith and best intentions, without it everything would break down. This goes for taxes, healthcare, insurance, checks, postal mail, traffic code, currency, etc.

This also holds for an alarming number of electronic systems such as the phone network, and many ISP network configurations. While it's tempting to say no trust should be required, that's very expensive, like bitcoin.

For system to be cost effective, trust is necessary. Requiring self-control is cheap and often effective, because people want to abide by the law. Requiring submission of soil samples is rather expensive, and fairly strong control, because cheating is a very deliberate act.

We probably have to ask, how can we improve the trust? Higher morals and more transparency could be one answer.

I feel like that is an unreasonable generalization.

It's not remotely hard at all for the FDA to buy products off the shelf and test them for glyphosate. They need not and should not trust samples obtained any other way.

That seems reasonable to me. Real world test.

Fair point, it does put some management on to the FDA, but that seems reasonable.. and cost seem small.

Still the FDA can't test all shops, and there is a risk they just test the same shipment. Trusting samples from companies is easy, and fake those samples is a very deliberate crime. It's easy to fake currency, that doesn't mean people do it.

I don't think "higher morals" is a realistic solution within our current market economy - these are multi-billion dollar corporations which operate on a separate set of motivations from any of their employees.

I also don't think our only alternatives are "trust these companies to self-monitor", or blockchain.

I'm thinking about 2 kinds of solutions: 1) technical solutions which would improve the current chain-of-custody tracking (this could involve blockchain, but it doesn't have to). 2) policy solutions which might involve something like "less frequent, but more rigorous testing, with stronger penalties".

And I'm confused by your statement "Requiring submission of soil samples is rather expensive, and fairly strong control, because cheating is a very deliberate act." - but what these instances prove is that corporations will cheat anyway.

Okay, I guess my point was to say control without trust is expensive. Some level of trust in companies and institutions is necessary. And when balancing this we should consider cost.

You made the statement in the context of the currently discussed article, where not trusting the companies and obtaining samples from supermarkets would have been at least as easy and cheap. That makes it a bit hard to understand what your point is, we have a concrete example, there is no need to theorize about other scenarios. What you came up with has little or no connection to the item being discussed.

Trust is a scale issue. Beyond a certain scale, beyond a certain degree of abstraction, it just doesn't exist anymore. Everything DOES break down, and has been doing so since the Roman Empire broke down, and even before that into prehistory.

If we like to retain what structures and expectations we have, the one thing we can't expect is to trust the largest and most unaccountable aggregations of power. At this point, those largest powers aren't governments, certainly not the FDA.

I helped get a device through part15 testing during an internship and was shocked to find that you don’t need the same firmware (like at all. You can run totally different oses and everything, they don’t have to share a single line of code.) As long as you say “this is pretty much the same as what we’re shipping to users” you’re fine. They don’t really have anyway to double check it and to be honest I wouldn’t be totally surprised if a lot of devices used different power levels and generally behaved differently in the field just by mistake.

After doing that, when ever I hear about things being “tested” to standards from some arm of a government I instinctively think of that. I don’t know how you could practically improve on it either.

Random sample testing after the product ships with large fines for violators.

Jail time for CEOs and board members of violators.

Huawei does this with their phones during rf emissions testing don't they? And the same is said about cars during crash tests.

I know Huawei did exactly this when their phone network equipment was being tested for approval and adoption by mobile phone networks.

> cars during crash tests

The IIHS at least buys its cars from dealers like any consumer would, rather than getting them direct from manufacturers, to prevent them from sending specially modified cars for testing.

Depending on what rules apply to your particular transmitter and if you're not just doing FCC but also testing for other countries' standards, sometimes you cannot run the production software in order to actually test the radio as required.

Granted, you're right, it's the honor system that what ships to customers works like the test subject did, but it's not always entirely due to malice.

Oh no, I wasn't saying it's malicious, just that many government tests work on good faith when you wouldn't necessarily expect it.

> Tetra Tech/Hunter's Point scandal

Every time I read about that place a little scene plays in my head.

Sergeant Carter: Gomer Pyle! Come here!

Gomer Pyle: Yes Sarge!

Sergeant Carter: This bucket of luminous watch dial paint has gone bad. Take it to the hazardous materials station.

Gomer Pyle: But that's all the way across the base. And you took my motor pool privileges away.

Sergeant Carter: Just do it Pyle!

...

5 minutes later ... Gomer dumps a bucket of black sludge into a hole in the base commanders flower garden. And tosses the bucket in the trash.

> this suggests ...

Not quite. It suggests that it’s possible that regular food has glyphosate residue. But samples “brought from home” may have been contaminated elsewhere. This is why we depend on rigorous controlled tests.

It’s also possible that the “official tests” were rigged, and suspiscions about that led the testers to go rogue, and that glyphosate really IS in our food in larger concentrations than we are led to believe. That seems more plausible.

> Not quite. It suggests that it’s possible that regular food has glyphosate residue. But samples “brought from home” may have been contaminated elsewhere

It doesn't matter to the consumer where in the supply chain the food got glyphosate on it. If it has residue by the time I get home, I don't want to eat it.

Yes, but it rather matters in terms of how to keep it out.

It matters when you want to discuss blame and solutions.

Yes. but the first step is to acknowledge it. That is the point the parent is talking about..

> It doesn't matter to the consumer where in the supply chain the food got glyphosate on it.

It does if the food got it, not from anywhere in the food supply chain, but from the home's own supply of Roundup, which has found its way in small quantities into all kinds of places.

> samples “brought from home” may have been contaminated elsewhere.

Or they may have been contaminated at home, if the home has Roundup somewhere around.

The usual solution to self reporting systems is audits. The entire tax system works this way. It won't catch everything, but does manage to put some teeth in the process and can catch systematic cheating.

In this case, occasional random (and where warranted, targeted) sampling and testing by the agency would detect whether provided samples are routinely doctored.

Audits and fines. i.e. If you cheat and you get caught cheating, you get a punishment much larger than the cost of following the rules in the first place.

Here is the money quote that these articles seem to be based off of. From an email detailing progress on developing testing methods:

>"I spiked a batch of broccoli at 0.002 ug/g and could detect the glyphosate pretty well but I did need to manually integrate some of the peaks. I used broccoli because it’s the only thing I have on hand that does not have glyphosate in it. I have brought wheat crackers, granola cereal, and corn meal from home and there’s a fair amount in all of them.”

There is another email talking about the one corn sample being 6.5ppm, above the 5.0 threshold, also in the context of testing methods.

So the corn sample could be an issue, but the headlines about it being everywhere, in implied high concentrations, seems premature unless I missed something in these emails. The tester used the broccoli because it had none and he could test detection down to 0.002 ppm, FAR below the 5.0 threshold. When he says there was a fair amount in everything else he had, we still don't know what that means. Was it .02ppm, .2ppm, 2.0ppm or what? The tone of the email and it's reply (not quoted above) doesn't suggest worry about a high rate to me.

I hate articles like this. Zero useful data. Zero useful sources. And zero information about the levels of glyphosate which were found.

That's fair, if a bit strong - this one has more [1].

"Separately, FDA chemist Narong Chamkasem found “over-the-tolerance” levels of glyphosate in corn, detected at 6.5 parts per million, an FDA email states. The legal limit is 5.0 ppm."

Here[2] are the FOIA documents they're citing.

The original article does link directly to an email with the 6.5 ppm figure[3].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/30/fda-weedkill...

[2] https://usrtk.org/pesticides/fda-foia-documents-regarding-gl...

[3] https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Over-the-tolera...

This is part of the reason why people believe in conspiracy theories. This issue should be absolutely clear - either there is a harmful level of pesticides in our food or not. Any ambiguity should be investigated by the police as a public endangerment crime. There should be zero room four doubt in cases like this.

> either there is a harmful level of pesticides in our food or not

That is an impossible standard even if we had far better methods. One, "damage" is a continuum. Two, who is affected is a wide range. Three, we only test chemicals individually, and set threshold levels individually, but in reality mixing chemicals very often leads to vastly different effects. For example, when lead and mercury were tested together (LD testing) it was found toxicity increased a thousandfold compared to each one alone. But there is no way to test a meaningful number of combinations, and that would still leave out what happens in the extremely complex biochemical environment of a human body in any case.

For the foreseeable future, maybe forever even in 10,000 years of solid scientific progress (because complex stuff remains complex), will be be able to do more than do guesstimates - and they will all be on a population level, don't even try to say anything definite about an individual.

That means calling for "solid proof of damage" before anything gets banned is a sure way to stall any action almost indefinitely. I recommend a look at the history of lead (which has not yet ended at all). The most "solid proof" I can think of is a large scale and long-term human experiment, unthinkable. Even then you could raise doubts about the context/environment, methods, selected participants, etc. "Solid proof" is a lot less solid than a lot of people think, the text book examples of easy primitive physics experiments make it seem as if it's easy to find out things "for certain".

Many farmers routinely use Roundup and other herbicides to clear their fields of weeds before crops emerge in the spring. But what's more alarming is they’re also using glyphosate on crops shortly before they are harvested, in order to desiccate (dry out) the plants and make them easier to harvest.

Glyphosate kills parts of the crop that haven’t ripened evenly, and dries the crop. This allows Combine harvesters to move more quickly and cover more ground during harvest, and may reduce drying costs. But applying glyphosate so close to harvest makes the likelihood of finding residues in food even higher.

From https://www.soilassociation.org/our-campaigns/not-in-our-bre...

Some interesting factoids here.

- The US legal limit of glyphosate are vastly higher than the EU, ranging up to 10000% in some cases (cattle). (EU) [1] (US) [2]

- Glyphosate has been declared a probably carcinogen by the World Health Organization.

- Monsanto is the developer of glyphosate. The former head of the FDA, appointed by the last administration to a newly created position tongue in cheek referred to as 'The Czar of Foods', officially "Deputy Commissioner of Foods the FDA", was Michael Taylor. [3]. Michael Taylor was a Monsanto VP whose career was in large part started by legally arguing that companies ought be allowed to knowingly allow at least some percent of carcinogens into processed foods.

- US regulatory agencies test thousands of products for hundreds of different chemical residues. Even though glyphosate is, by far, the most widely used chemical herbicide, it was never tested for until after the WHO declared it a probable carcinogen and private tests showed extremely high levels of glyphosate even in products where it should not be present in, such as honey. [4].

- Regulatory capture sucks.

[1] - http://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/pesticides/eu-pesticides-data...

[2] - https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=1&ty=HTML&h=L&m...

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_R._Taylor

[4] - https://www.huffingtonpost.com/carey-gillam/fda-suspends-gly... (I am reluctant to link to a Huffington Post article, but this is far above their normal standards of quality, and provides a clear and factual overview. Searching for 'US glyphosate testing' turns up countless other sources if one would prefer not rely on Huffington.)

Measurement techniques are getting better and better and we'll find more and more articles finding x in y. I have not analyzed this case but did just finish reading a highly relevant piece on measures of toxicity that included glyphosate. Highly recommended for your mental models.

https://thoughtscapism.com/2018/05/07/measures-of-toxicity/

That's a very interesting and informative article. However, after reading it I came away more confused than I was before -- especially when looking at their "Acute toxicity" and "Chronic toxicity" tables.

According to the acute toxicity tables, caffeine is only slightly more toxic than lead, and Vitamin D3 is 5 more times toxic.

According to the chronic toxicity tables, both caffeine and Vitamin D3 are about 3 times more toxic than lead.

The dangers of lead exposure are widely appreciated, so I suppose the main difference must be that lead accumulates in body tissue while caffeine and D3 don't, and that's what makes lead so much more dangerous?

I wish there were some more tables that showed us the more relevant dangers of these substances, with issues such as accumulation in body tissue, route of administration, and other relevant factors taken in to account.

LD50 is a crude measure of toxicity. Salt has a very high LD50--about 3.3 g/kg. Vitamin D is less than 1% that LD50, about 33 mg/kg. However, the loads you're going to see in food are very different: you accumulate vitamin D on the order of 10 µg or so a day, but salt around 5g or so a day. As a consequence, it takes only around 40× normal salt consumption to kill you, but around 200,000× normal vitamin D consumption. Killing yourself by eating too much salt is ridiculously easy (drink a jug of soy sauce), killing yourself with vitamin D is much harder.

Don't forget that lead is quite a dense material.

Lead also never leaves your system - caffeine does.

>Shortly thereafter, a string of studies and reviews indicated that glyphosate should probably be further studied, and in March of 2015, the cancer research arm of the World Health Organization declared glyphosate a “probable carcinogen.”

That is outdated. In 2016, the Joint WHO/FAO "Meeting concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the diet."

http://www.who.int/foodsafety/jmprsummary2016.pdf?ua=1

That is also outdated. Turns out, glyphosate by itself is not as carcinogenic as Roundup, the actual product used. The chemicals used with glyphosate, like POEA, make it more harmful.

Is POEA chemically stable -- or is it likely to break down before the food is eventually consumed?

> "Meeting concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the diet."

> "...through the diet"

Because official food sample testing showed no/low levels of glyphosate? As opposed to the unofficial samples tested?

Hmmm...

Also the probable carcinogen lists contains hot beverages(Tea and Coffee), red meat, shift work, and frying food as probable carcinogens to give some context of what is on the list.

Also, "probable carcinogen" doesn't mean what most people think it means[1]:

> Group 2A: "Probably carcinogenic to humans" There is strong evidence that it can cause cancer in humans, but at present it is not conclusive.

> Group 2A: "The agent (mixture) is probably carcinogenic to humans . The exposure circumstance entails exposures that are probably carcinogenic to humans."

> "This category is used when there is limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans and sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals. In some cases, an agent (mixture) may be classified in this category when there is inadequate evidence of carcinogenicity in humans and sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals and strong evidence that the carcinogenesis is mediated by a mechanism that also operates in humans. Exceptionally, an agent, mixture or exposure circumstance may be classified in this category solely on the basis of limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans."

Here's other stuff classified as 2A[2]:

* acrylamide

* indoor emissions from household combustion of wood

* occupational exposure as a hairdresser or barber

* consumption of red meat

* drinking very hot beverages at above 65°C

Note that even category 1 contains agents ranging from asbestos and plutonium to "alcoholic beverages" and "the consumption of processed meat".

The categories merely indicate the confidence level that an agent is carcinogenic at all, not "how" carcinogenic it is. The phrase "probable carcinogen" doesn't indicate anything about how likely you are to get cancer from it, just that there is a certain level of confidence that the agent can cause cancer under certain conditions and in certain quantities.

[1]: http://ec.europa.eu/health/scientific_committees/opinions_la...

[2]: http://monographs.iarc.fr/ENG/Classification/Classifications...

I don't think the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) report necessarily rescinds the report from IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer)?

The Guardian ran an interesting article when the IARC report came out exploring how two reasonable groups looking at the same data could both come to different conclusions: https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2015/m...

I'd like somebody in the space to explain why the FDA samples are more representative of the overall food supply than the random samples from food stores. There may be a good reason. There may be reasons why in some locations, food has higher traces than the FDA sees. How about (for instance) if its imported? Not that its good, but it would help explain

I rather think that even though the FDA samples test ok, There is a moment where somebody should be regularly testing product the other side of the supply chain, for residues of pesticides and other things, and if we find them, it should be actionable if they exceed some threshold.

So.. given these people found traces in the over-the-counter food chain, is nobody now legally obligated to do .. anything?

I think the article is implying that the “official” samples were probably supplied by people who are colluding with Monsanto.

Well, it’s not fair of me to say that the article is implying that... it’s not. But that’s the conclusion I drew.

Sure. It's the conclusion I'm tempted to draw too. But I'm trying to avoid walking into the grand conspiracy, too soon. I think the influence of Monsanto and others on the actions of the FDA are way out of whack, but there are many moments of innocent misunderstanding in this kind of report. I think it's most likely the classic incompetence/malice thing, or a misunderstanding of some kind. Like, FDA testing US farm produce, the shops selling unlabelled, imported, 'US origin' but actually sourced from somewhere else, and re-bagged...

Fair enough, thanks for being healthily skeptical

Are those grocery store samples random? Getting truly random samples is hard.

As a note: the throwing out of samples might not necessarily be sinister (on the FDA's end) so much as a result of the FDA's general hamstrungedness.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/02/bug-system

Key quote in there is that before the FDA is even allowed to ask for a recall they have to prove a DNA match between whatever caused food poisoning and the specific bag of whatever.

If the FDA has extremely rigid chain of custody rules for what samples/test they're allowed to talk about in public and you had a billion dollars riding in them only reporting the best samples it might not be that hard to fuck with that chain of custody and disqualify anything you knew about.

I've noticed that Monsanto appears to be on an astroturfing campaign. Half of the ads appearing in my Reddit front page are promoted posts that are pro-glyphosate. They point to legitimate news articles, for example, that report on a study finding that glyphosate is not a carginogen. Of course, these studies contradict other studies that glyphosate is a carcinogen or otherwise a concern.

In truth, I was ready to believe the pro-glypsophate studies until a contrary consensus formed. Because of this astroturfing campaign, I now have doubts.

I recently read the great line: "Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance."

http://blog.danieldavies.com/2004/05/d-squared-digest-one-mi...

I think this is the guy that gave me the gem.

    If a source is known to lie then the proper weight to place on information from that source is zero.

AKA: You don't try and second guess anything that say, you ignore everything they say.

But it's tempting to assume the information is false, and if you do that, you could be making a big mistake. I assume by "zero weight" you mean you don't assume it's true or false, which is quite distinct.

One way to look at it is that every statement is true, given sufficient context. The question is, how should it be interpreted, and what is it a true statement about? Generally, when a liar says something, it is intended to either make you believe it is true, or make you believe it is false, or confuse you. So there is true information being provided, it's just not the face value of the statement.

By weight I mean the multiplier used when summing it with all the other things you know.

Meaning you don't use information from sources that lie to make decisions. Full Stop.

Policy by aphorism is fraught:

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Howard_H._Aiken

There are no credible studies indicating that glyphosate is a carcinogen, and it would be a little bit surprising it if was, since it targets a metabolic pathway not present in animals. Meanwhile, many of the herbicides that glyphosate displace, plenty of which remain in use, are known human carcinogens.

The most widely reported declaration of glyphosate's carcinogenicity, by IARC, was disavowed by the WHO, IARC's parent organization.

My concern is best summed up by this comment from above:

Every time the jury is out on a topic where one side has a vested interest and a billion dollar budget to protect it, you can be reasonably sure what the outcome will be. See: pesticides and bees, fossil fuels and climate change, food packaging plastics and cancer, pain treatment meds and addiction. The answer in all those cases is the harmful effects eventually became known, but the jury was out long enough for the vested interests to make a ton of profit and cause a ton of damage which they'll never pay for repairing. All made possible with a series of comparatively small investments to buy scientific research to keep the jury out.

Even in non-borderline cases like tobacco, lots of money and power can really confuse the issue. This is definitely not as clear cut as tobacco, and I’d like the option to opt out of the lengthy, massive “trial period” in which the public gets to play guinea pig. The problem with this is that it’s very difficult to do that when the compound in question is unexpectedly ubiquitous.

This isn't so much an argument as it is innuendo. If you get glyphosate carcinogenicity wrong, you increase carcinogenic agriculture, because that's what the market alternatives to it are: clearly known human carcinogens.

That isn’t so much an argument as a false dichotomy, predicated on a system of agriculture which allows a near 50% rate of wasteage in the West. The alternatives include less productive, yet still sufficiently productive methods which do not include carcinogenic compounds.

Edit: Your state of being persuaded is immaterial, because what I said isn’t really controversial. One known alternative to herbacides is tilling, hardly a radical new invention and notably not carcinogenic. As I said up front, it would take more effort to produce crops, but simply by reducing waste you can more than make up for that. The use of ground cover, litter, and other established techniques all allow for large scale farming without herbacides.

There are other alternatives, and adjunct techniques as well, for example:

http://plen.ku.dk/english/news/2015/crops/

Stop wasting so much food because it isn’t pretty enough, and you can stop truffing carcinogens. That seems fair.

It would be a false dichotomy if glyphosate hadn't literally displaced herbicides that were known to be human carcinogens and allowed anyways, but it did, so your logic isn't persuasive.

And what you're proposing is letting perfect be the enemy of the good. No matter how sustainable and green your alternative is, "less productive" anything won't fly in today's world economy. Until we change 8 billion humans' economic motives, maybe we can start with getting the facts straight on one substance.

I like tilling, but it requires lots of diesel fuel and it increases evaporation.

The future is probably robotic weed picking. That still requires fuel, but perhaps not as much.

Is there some reason that EV’s can’t till? If you’re farming there’s lots of sunlight for solar, and nuclear is a good option too.

This is actually somewhat common too.

Like chlorine being replaced by other disinfectants in drinking water. https://www.npr.org/2011/01/07/132743638/disinfectant-to-cle...

Basically you have some popular chemical so it gets studied extensively and we learn about the bad things it does. It then starts being replaced by things that have been less studied, so there's less evidence of the bad things they do but could be equally bad, better or worse.

A very good recent example being Vaping replacing smoking as a "healthier alternative"....

The other market alternative is eating organic.

"Organic" usually means even worse chemicals were used so no, that's not better.

Like what?

Not all organic food fits that description.

False equivalence. There are non carcinogenic methods of farming.

Yes, I agree that evidence to date does not show glyphosate is a carcinogen. But this:

There are no credible studies indicating that glyphosate is a carcinogen, and it would be a little bit surprising it if was, since it targets a metabolic pathway not present in animals.

is not a very strong argument. Harmful "off-target effects" are a very common cause of drug development program failures. Most chemicals that are probable human carcinogens weren't developed with the intention to target metabolic pathways in any living thing.

The evidence seems to suggest that glyphosate is basically inert in humans, doesn't it?

I've read enough literature about the carcinogenicity to assure myself that it is very probably not a carcinogen. And to my chemist's eye it looks fast to degrade, pretty benign overall. But biology is surprisingly complicated. That's why I think that the "it targets" argument means little. That's the only part I took issue with.

no? that isn't the way biology works whatsoever.

here is an example.

think of glyphosate as a key.

the key is designed to unlock a certain type of lock with a certain arrangement of pins. when the key unlocks the lock, the target dies. this is intended behavior.

but given the way that locks work -- patterns of pins -- it could very easily coincidentally work on other locks that it was not designed to unlock.

it won't be most other locks. it will be a small minority. it won't necessarily have the same result when that lock is opened as it does under its intended use. in fact, it might not even open the lock -- it might just get stuck in there real good and be impossible to remove. it might even have a beneficial effect (but probably not).

the details of this play out on the biochemical / enzyme-substrate level. another commenter pointed out how glyphosate is an estrogen-equivalent. this would not surprise me whatsoever. it wouldn't have to be a carcinogen to be wildly destructive in that context.

any time -- any time -- you have a chemical which is known to be bioactive, it's going to have an effect.

i just want to make it very clear that there is no excuse to have these chemicals in our food. they are not harmless. at best, they are an added inconvenience for the host's body to deal with.

> it would be a little bit surprising it if was, since it targets a metabolic pathway not present in animals

Maybe I'm misreading your comment, but for instance the following study (and some of its references) seems to contradict your assertion:

Glyphosate exposure in pregnancy and shortened gestational length: a prospective Indiana birth cohort study

https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-...

There are also no credible studies showing that chlorine gas is carcinogenic, so it must be safe!

Another manifestation I have seen of this behavior is this.

The claim "vaccines does not cause autism" is often made to implicitly imply "All vaccines are very safe". I mean, this belief is harbored by every single one of the "Educated" "science-believers" out there. It is so damn ridiculous that people (who often consider themselves intelligent) can be so easily misguided.

You are correct. Court documents have shown Monsanto has paid online commenters to advocate on behalf of glyphosate in a program called "Let nothing go" (including facebook). These individuals, importantly, did NOT identify themselves as being paid advocates.

[1 - actual court documents] https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/MDLLetNothingGo...

[2 - summary article ] https://www.organicconsumers.org/newsletter/organic-bytes-55...

> Because of this astroturfing campaign, I now have doubts.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the campaign were actually promoting the truth, and yet the effect it had on you was to persuade you of the opposite?

Not trying to change the subject but I see a parallel in US politics. This is how Trumpers harden their beliefs. So much true reporting about Trump’s lies, results in people becoming more loyal to him. Confounding.

Reddit is a fantastic place for astroturf to sprout. It's almost designed explicitly for it. I don't know why people trust that place or mimic their awful system (such as this forum for instance)

What I think people are missing is the relationship between GMO and Glyphosate. The first round of GMO seed available in America was Monsanto's 'RoundUp Ready' brand engineered to be sprayed with a unholey amount of RoundUp. In 2014 83% of GMO crop planted was modified to be resistant to herbisides, mostly RoundUp.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genetically_modified...

It seems to me that any sufficiently equipped lab can run these tests. How about Consumer Reports? Well Consumer Reports sucks these days so maybe somebody else...

That's a really good point. Are there independent tests corroborating this? If so, why hasn't the alarm been sounded before now? Or was it and nobody paid attention after the next news cycle?

Although not scientifically proven(?), it is believed that the chronic kidney disease (CKD) is caused by Glyphosate. CKD is largely present in North Central, North Western, Uva and Eastern Provinces in Sri Lanka.

https://www.news.lk/news/political-current-affairs/item/8198...

It is also believed that the world is flat, and that magic crystals will protect your computer from viruses.

I would prefer to eat most weeds than glyphosate.

Also, what do this imply politically? Testing for Round-Up in our food supply is now a states rights issue?

That's not how it works. Weeds don't somehow get into grains when they're collected. What they do is reduce yields of the crops we're actually interested in collecting. Lower yields for the same farming effort means higher prices. So what ultimately happens when the consumer sees two identical loaves of bread on the supermarket shelf and one is $2.50 while the other is $3.50?

The cost of grain input is essentially 0 (as a fraction of finished product sticker price). The cost is in baking and transportation. Corn is the cheapest product in USA.

If productivity goes down you need more land to produce the same output.

Agriculture has a relatively fixed supply and demand every cycle because of nature and basic human needs. It's not a matter of defects affecting the bottom line, it's a reduction of invaluable output. Because natural forces flex and largely define the output for a given season, anything that can increase it is critical. Efficient agriculture technology is the only reason the world didn't collapse a la Malthus.

The best concept to replace chemicals in food production that I've seen is the use of UAVs or other robots to mechanically remove weeds and pests. Those tasks were done by humans for a long time, but we switched to chemical alternatives because human labor isn't practical for the scale of food production humanity demands.

So when weeds reduce the food supply and drive prices up, what then? Then there’ll be articles about how only rich people can afford food.

Corn is insanely cheap to produce. Delivery and preparation is expensive.

And Dr Oz panned for railing against GMO and favoring organic food...

And to the commenters saying "there is no evidence that GMO foods are harmful" or "non-USDA organic food is causing harm", you have to wonder at where does the burden of proof really lie in case of things that I am ingesting?

The thing about science is that it's fairly easy to prove something is harmful. It's darn near impossible to prove something is safe. Organic food isn't 100% safe, and is more likely than conventional to be contaminated with pathogens such as e coli. But after 25 years of use with no proof otherwise, I'd say GMOs have met the burden of proof.

Whether you believe glysophate is carcinogenic or not, this scandal demonstrates how the FDA works for industry, not the people.

If they had the taxpayers best interests at heart, they would not be concealing or halting research around a widespread potential carcinogen in our food supply.

This reminds me of all the news reports of tests showing arsenic presence in rice (often due to rice being grown on soil where arsenic had been used as a pesticide for non-food crops such as cotton in the past).

But what (if any) health effects did the detected amounts of arsenic in rice have? How how much arsenic in rice would be safe? The FDA investigated these questions and finally came out with a report: [1][2]

Among their findings:

"In the general population, limiting levels of inorganic arsenic to 200 ppb or higher would not change the cancer risk significantly. Setting a limit below 200 ppb of inorganic arsenic in rice and rice products would decrease the risk. Setting a limit of 150 ppb of inorganic arsenic in rice and rice products would decrease the risk between 0% and 23%. The risk reduction is between 2% and 47% at a limit of 100 ppb of inorganic arsenic in rice and rice products. Finally setting a limit at 75 ppb of inorganic arsenic in rice and rice products would decrease the risk between 17% and 79%. The percentage of risk reduction is dependent on the product (see Table 5.6)."

"Setting a maximum level for inorganic arsenic in rice and rice products could affect availability in the U.S. market. For example, were we to set a maximum level of 100 ppb in these foods, the availability in the marketplace might decrease by 4% to 93%, depending on the type of rice."

"In the general population, the cancer risk would decrease in proportion to decreases in serving size and frequency of consumption of rice and rice products. Conversely, the risk would double over a lifetime if the consumption frequency were increased from 1 serving per day to 2 servings per day during that entire period (see Table 5.9)."

"Eliminating rice and rice products from the diets of infants and of children up to 6 years old could reduce the lifetime cancer risk from inorganic arsenic in rice and rice products by 6% and 23%, respectively. In other words, the risk model predicts that an infant not fed any rice or rice products has an approximately 6% lower chance of developing lung or bladder cancer from arsenic contamination of these foods, over the lifetime, compared with an infant who is fed these products (see Table 5.7)."

Based on their research, the FDA proposed a limit of 100 parts per billion for inorganic arsenic in infant rice cereal.[3] Unfortunately, they did not propose any limits on arsenic in rice or rice products apart from infant rice cereal, so how much rice is safe to eat is still an open question.

Still, their research and report are quite helpful in understanding the risk of arsenic exposure in rice, so consumers can now make informed decisions in regards to their own rice consumption. I hope the FDA will do something like that for glyphosate in food.

Also, such research and limits are prime examples of good work done by a government agency to keep us all healthy in the face of a food industry and "free market" which are clearly not able or willing to effectively regulate themselves.

[1] - https://www.fda.gov/Food/FoodborneIllnessContaminants/Metals...

[2] - https://www.fda.gov/Food/FoodScienceResearch/RiskSafetyAsses...

[3] - https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/u...

> Still, their research and report are quite helpful in understanding the risk of arsenic exposure in rice, so consumers can now make informed decisions in regards to their own rice consumption. I hope the FDA will do something like that for glyphosate in food.

My cynical side thinks that is far too nuanced a finding for consumers to be able to make informed decision. People tend to like black and white answers like "no carbs", "no gluten", or my personal favorite "no chemicals".

What food products do FDA chemists consume from the market is a question that would give us a lot of insight.

Not surprised, what goes around comes around, sigh. This might change evolution gradually, in a bad sense.

When the FDA and Monsanto have a revolving door of executives why is anyone surprised at this ?

how could someone run these tests at home? does it require expensive equipment?

I'm not aware of cheaper assays that may have been developed. So, yeah, it'd likely require buying a GC-MS (>$50,000), plus a gas source, whatever MS software, and some training.

Alternatively, for ~$50 there are many core facilities at universities and elsewhere that'll happily run whatever sample you send them and email you back the results.

serious question so why doesn't everyone have cancer?

A radioactive source could be distributed to the pockets of every living person, and while tons of people would get cancer there would still be some people who didn't. Carcinogens raise your risk of cancer.

Another reason to go organic.

Most forms of organic farming still use pesticies, just different ones, with similar or worse health risks.

>In head-to-head comparisons, natural pesticides don't fare any better than synthetic ones. When I compared the organic chemicals copper sulfate and pyrethrum to the top synthetics, chlorpyrifos and chlorothalonil, I found that not only were the organic ones more acutely toxic, studies have found that they are more chronically toxic as well, and have higher negative impacts on non-target species. My results match with other scientific comparisons. In their recommendations to Parliament in 1999, the Committee on European Communities noted that copper sulfate, in particular, was far more dangerous than the synthetic alternative. A review of their findings can be seen in the table on the right (from a recent review paper). Similarly, head to head comparisons have found that organic pesticides aren't better for the environment, either.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/pesticide...

Glyphosate is an herbicide, not a pesticide.

No herbicides, fungicides and insecticides are all pesticides.

Sounds good, but the example given chlorpyrifos, is an insecticide. In context it was very clear that a mistake was made, and not by me.

Organic pesticides are nasty stuff as well.

"In 2010, a study was published detailing the progression of Parkinson's-like symptoms in mice following chronic intragastric ingestion of low doses of rotenone. The concentrations in the central nervous system were below detectable limits, yet still induced PD pathology.[31]

In 2011, a US National Institutes of Health study showed a link between rotenone use and Parkinson's disease in farm workers."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotenone

Rotenone is no longer an organic pesticide.

[Even in America. It can only be used as a "fishkill"]

source: http://npic.orst.edu/NPRO/#

Only in Europe. Its still approved by the USDA.

Source(failed petition to remove it): https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Rotenone%...

What does "organic" mean if a specific substance can become "not organic" without changing?

You have a point. I think "not organic" in this context is shorthand for "not allowed in organic agriculture." Scanning the reg, the USDA's list is titled "Prohibited Natural Substances."

If you think the term "organic" is silly: in German the word that's used means "biological".

I hate to repeat myself, but it bears repeating: glyphosate is an herbicide and not a pesticide. It’s significant, because pesticides organic or otherwise are something designed to kill animals, not plants. We’re animals, not plants, so herbicides are generally far less toxic than pesticides to us. While we’re quite different in many ways to insects, we share a lot of metabolic machinery; the same is not true of us and plants.

Google pesticide please.

Google Rotenone, the example used. It’s... wait for it... an insecticide!

Just another form of eugenics

I bet you they also detect dihydrogen monoxide at near lethal dose levels in food samples, due to farmers spraying it on the crops. Some of that stuff even makes it into the rivers and flows into the ocean and can be detected in the fish in the sea.

HN is not Reddit.

Sorry, the point I was trying to make, immaturely, is that detecting contamination with potentially toxic substances doesn't necessarily mean it's dangerous. There's a lot of variables at play here and sometimes it spreading widely could mean it's because it's actually harmless or could even be necessary.

With regards to glyphosate we have data of people who attempted to commit suicide by drinking quantities large enough to spray on 4000 sqft of cropland, or multiple times more of that.

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