Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables
sciencedirect.com
sciencedirect.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-JZkiGigDw&t=261s
research citation https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4688301/
This is just a lucky side effect, I'm 100% sure that main goal is for the pesticides industry just take their cut on the producers margin. By growing those margins, sure, but it's not something that should be forgotten.
Without these pesticides food would be significantly more expensive and less accessible to many people.
I agree that we should talk about moving away from chemical dependent farming but we need to be aware of the full picture in order to avoid glib solutions.
I think what you are saying is that they have turned to predatory behaviour in order to grow profits and protect market share.
Your point would have been better made if you had said just that, with examples.
Now looking into alternate forms of resistances while still enjoying modern treatments, theres an idea.
Doesn't follow. We can create them today. Pretty sure farmers would be very happy on not having to dedicate resources to pest control.
It's probably not even feasible long term. Pests can and do adapt. The main problem is monoculture.
Also, those resistant cultivars are probably not going to do so well when it comes to other variables: shelf life, taste, etc.
Again, after living in rural communities, they largely eat what they can get - which includes a lot of raw fruits and vegetables. Of course meat is important, but no more important than nuts, berries, tubers etc.
[1] https://aeji.journals.ekb.eg/article_17804.html
[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2017.0156...
(That is, if you don't have undetected Helminthiase or some other disease)
That's all and good, but how do you even know that? One can live with parasites for quite a while before noticing any symptoms.
I come from a 'third world' country. We really wash our fruits and specially our vegetables. Even though they might come from large farming operations, you can still have people without proper sanitization handling them after taking a dump.
Heck, there are still places where you cannot enter a body of water without worms piercing your skin and having a party in your intestines. Our elementary school curriculum was pretty extensive on diseases and specially parasites.
> The idea people throughout history didn't eat raw fruits and vegetables is also quite wrong.
They did. People also died a lot. Although a berry growing somewhere in the wilderness will probably have less of a chance of carrying diseases or parasites that infect humans (on the account of not having encountered other humans). After farming? All bets are off.
Maybe less of a chance, still deadly.
Is this claim backed by anything? Or is it just a claim by the manufacturer?
Installing ultra sonic cleaners, reverse osmosis machines, AC units, &c. in every single of our houses/flats won't be sustainable
40+ years of externalizing costs has taken its toll.
Eg: Both sides care about children, productive economy, value of education
The school I went to was a Dalton school (though basically only in name, as explained below), one of the pioneering futuristic school systems developed in the early 20th century which said that people would learn more if they are allowed to learn about what they actually care about. My school had a copy of the original book describing the Dalton school system in the library. Almost everything described in the Dalton school from 1905 would be illegal if it were done today.
My point is, I'm fairly left-leaning but I support a radical deregulation of education on all levels: this seems to be one area where we should let the free market take care of things. And of course, if it turns out that a different way of teaching works better, there's nothing (except inertia) stopping the public schools from adopting the same methodology, making it universally available.
Homeschooling is the closest to that free market in the US. Your comment prompted me to look up the homeschooling statistics [1] and I was surprised by the results for Europe. The US outstrips the rest of the world by number of children in homeschooling by a large margin.
US homeschooling outcomes are so far promising [2], so one could say it is a pretty competitive alternative market.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_st...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261885035_The_Socia...
My personal belief is that the death of the old education system is over a century overdue.
We don't need to kill it, just stop making alternatives illegal and the problem will solve it itself.
There's nothing preventing a public system from being changed and improved. Take Finland as an example. Everyone goes to the same public schools there, rich or poor. The result is one of the best education systems in the world. New methods are regularly tested and teachers have a lot of freedom to choose the ones that suit them.
Often this is addressed through a voucher system. Single Payer (or subsidizer), multiple provider.
Eg: gov't gives a voucher for $10k per head, you're free to shop for the best schooling your money can buy (perhaps even online!)
Aside: this exact concept can apply to healthcare too
So I’m curious because taken on it’s own your comment sounds a lot like a fiction a conservative American would author about what they think ‘Europe’ is like. But this might just be a result of your alternative schooling.
Also your schooling is described as being not available where you are yet still what you went through which seems a bit of a conundrum as well. Was it actually illegal, or do you think you might have been exposed to biased propaganda by the institution coloring your view on what the educational system in your country is actually like?
I'm half Croatian, half Australian, and speak with an American accent due to my childhood friends. I went to an international school (IB) followed by a Dutch high school (VWO). (Basically I'm an alien everywhere I go.)
My school called itself a Dalton school, but upon reading the book by the creator of the original Dalton school (Education on the Dalton Plan, Helen Parkhurst, 1905) I was absolutely blown away by how radical and futuristic this school sounded, and how short my own school (which supposedly was the same kind) fell of that mark. I investigated why my school did hardly any of the things Dalton schools are supposed to do, and found out that they were against Dutch law.
As you say, Europe is not (yet) a monolithic entity, and perhaps there is even a country here where letting kids do what they want isn't considered a crime. Hopefully I was wrong to generalize in this regard, I would certainly be happy to hear about it.
As for my bias, I admit freely that I absolutely hated school, consider it an abomination and a crime against the human spirit, and almost certainly would have left if it weren't illegal (they send the police after your parents). I say "almost" because I did rather enjoy the part where you get to see your friends every day—although at the time it wasn't clear to me that this would go away with graduation, or how much I would miss it.
To be clear I have no problem with people willingly submitting themselves to such a thing, it's the coercion part that I can't stand for.
As an immigrant to the US who's been to a dozen or so states, I'd add it's also inaccurate to talk about the US as a uniform thing or group of people
Yeah, that's why they're adamant about the dangers of freedom of speech.
Functioning roads and schools supported by taxes is supported by 99.9% of people. People only object to paying high taxes for wasteful, inefficient bureaucracies and corrupt deals to pay well-connected insiders or campaign donors excessively for providing services.
Everyone wants roads and schools. Conservatives complain when they realize they're paying taxes for a campaign donor to rebuild the same road every year. Liberals complain when they realize the owner of the construction company is now a billionaire. Both want the road, neither want corruption and injustice, they just focus on slightly different aspects of the same dysfunction.
An AC unit is more sustainable than a furnace burning fossil fuels and electric heaters. They are just as sustainable as heat pumps.
So here in the PNW, we typically only heat during the winter. Most people here have never had AC in the summer time. So typically, power usage in the summer here is really low. Most of us just turn off the furnace for a number of months. We know it's fall when we finally turn on the heat.
Now that more and more people are getting heat pumps, I suspect that the energy saved during the winter is going to be offset quite a bit by people running their AC in the summer. I don't know how much that will be, but I know I'll be running my new AC unit this summer. Hopefully I won't need it more than a couple of weeks. But it's been hotter the last few summers, and if the trend continues, we'll be running the AC a lot more.
Meanwhile, look at what is built in the south today. The same sort of buildings you might see from alaska to phoenix to orlando to upstate new york. Only they might have installed central air for that floorplan in phoenix or orlando. They aren't building structures fit for the particular environment, they are building structures that are cheap to build in the market and don't really fit too well anywhere, and shoehorning it into whatever environment it sits with AC.
They're also not particularly efficient in terms of space utilization, making them unfeasible for sustainable, 'walkable' neighborhood development.
Recently in CA in my neighborhood, someone decided to paint their spanish style home dark brown. I can't help but think going from ivory white to dark brown is going to increase their AC bill in the summer. Just using basic physics with consideration to the environment can go a long way.
https://theconversation.com/amp/emissions-inequality-there-i...
This is all a moot point in the face of stagnant population growth. It would be no less sustainable for the West to consume more by virtue that the demand isn't infinite and technological innovation increases efficiency all the time.
The reality is pesticides and other crop technologies substantially increase efficiency of the land we're using. This means per capita: we're using less land (more back to nature), losing less crop (less fuel/maintenance wasted), and requiring an increasingly smaller percentage of the population to tend to crops.
It definitely is a "waste" of resources, when looking at it from a rational perspective. Humans like to enjoy life though.
So don't ever eat out or make anything nice? Do you only eat rice and beans?
> or going to a casino are a total waste of resources
I broadly bucket expenses like that as "entertainment", which I guess isn't directly productive, but at the same time is arguably appreciated by the people who enjoy it. Hacker news arguably falls under this, mind you. There's a non-negligible amount of resources (server costs, paid moderator(s), and opportunity costs of all the participants) that's spent on it. So if you really want to put your money where your mouth is, you'd get off hn ;)
"we fucked up big time, but the rich will be able to shield themselves with additional waste, while the poor can suck it up"
I bought one because my relative wanted to have this particular model in his 3D printing... cave (for lack of a better word) and it broke down after a few weeks.
are apparently 2 popular consumer brands in Korea.
I just searched aliexpress for "ultrasonic food cleaner", they probably work but no idea how they compare.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001039347867.html?spm=a2g0o...
>As a general rule of thumb, you will require between 50watts to 100 watts per gallon for your ultrasonic jewelry cleaner to achieve efficient cleaning.
Organic salad I can buy here (Switzerland) comes marked as pre-washed and ready to eat in many cases.
I'm not sure how controlling for income/wealth would matter, given that the study is all nurses and they control by ethnicity.
After more carefully reading the paper, I think the premise of my original comment was completely wrong though. The study apparently had no information on whether the participants were eating conventional or organic produce. Rather, they categorized by type of fruit or vegetable, converting the average results of tests for residues to a score from 0 (best) to 6 (worst) with a somewhat arbitrary heuristic. For example, grapefruit scored 0, and spinach scored 6.
That eliminates the spurious correlation I speculated about, though others may exist; it would be interesting to know which specific fruits and vegetables accounted for most of the effect. That heuristic also increases the risk of data dredging; I wonder how many versions they tried before they got their result. As to the residues, it seems they considered all pesticides equally, even though some are strongly suspected to be much more dangerous than others. It would be interesting to repeat the analysis considering only residues of those suspected to be most (or least) dangerous, to see if their effect gets bigger (or smaller).
Again, it's very dicey comparison. I'm not advocating convention > organic, but feel the need to pushback on people that think organic > conventional
This is a very grey subject and it should be debated as such.
ETA: link, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25502-w
See: https://research.wur.nl/en/publications/cocktails-of-pestici....
The best tactic you can follow in the US is to try and buy imported produce from countries with stricter pesticide laws.
I don't know much about the US rules. But I also know here it's popular to say "well just because it's organic, doesn't mean it's without pesticides".
But in general the few times I've checked different researches on pesticide residue organic scores consistently better.
Up until very recently, organic included the use of rotenone, which is a 'naturally occurring' poison that causes parkinson's in mammals.
Modern synthetic pesticides are far, far from great but they're still better than their natural counterparts.
Far too much generalisation there. There are thousands of synthetic pesticides, and dozens (hundreds?) of "natural" ones (ranging from gelatine to roteome).
A broad brush comparison is useless
Needing to ban a 19th century pesticide in the 21st century is not a broad brush, but proof of the growing common misconception that naturally occurring means safer than synthetic - the entire basis of the Organic label.
https://www.global-organics.com/post.php?s=2018-02-02-are-pe....
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/food-for-thought/organic-do...
"This includes herbicide, insecticide, nematicide, molluscicide, piscicide, avicide, rodenticide, bactericide, insect repellent, animal repellent, microbicide, fungicide, and lampricide."
Some solid and oily toxins are considered technically insoluble in water since so few milligrams will dissolve in a liter. Unlike familiar things that are obviously soluble in grams like salt or sugar.
Now the pesticides are developed to be highly toxic in milligram amounts, but the advantage is that there is likely only to be a few milligrams on the farm produce that needs to be washed off.
Solubility is a function of solvent temperature and volume, so the hotter and the greater number of liters or gallons, often astronomically more of an "insoluble" material can be taken up into a solvent compared to the very minuscule amount soluble when cold.
Naturally thorough flushing and/or repeated rinsing with fresh hot solvent will be more effective than a single bath, since the first bath sees the highest concentration of solute. Which can re-deposit upon evaporation.
I'm sure people have not thought it was that bad and have occasionally eaten something like an unwashed grape or strawberry, or even quite a number of them whether focusing much awareness on it or not.
Take fruit from that same batch and run it under good amounts of hot water and see if you can taste the difference too.
Carefully using an appropriate vegetable brush is a good idea as well.
Recently I had some issues with dry scalp, doctors weren’t helpful to diagnose the root cause, and I traced it to non organic carrots that removed or replaced by organic ones caused the symptoms to return.
I can’t buy cheap bulk carrots, but organic ones are fine.
This sounds insane but I’m starting to think the food supply isn’t as safe as we think.
Changed to organic/no carrots, symptoms went away, ate cheap carrots again, boom issues returned.
The counterpoint here is "so you'd rather everyone pay more for health care decades from now to save a few bucks on groceries now?"
> Even though there's a lot of evidence that these foods are entirely safe...
The US requirement for a lot of chemicals is "generally recognized as safe", which, in practice, means "we don't know that it's not safe yet". When we find something's unsafe, industry frequently switches to something similar that's still GRAS (because no one's been using it) but likely has the same issues. Europe takes a stricter approach.
Example: BPA in plastics, which has now been replaced with BPS and BPF.
It's clear that at least farmers and also people living in pesticides ridden areas suffer many diseases, for instance Parkinson: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6176703/#:~:tex....
The only assumption is is that in low doses pesticides are not harmful, but there is no deep knowledge of years and years of low dose pesticide exposure. And those limits might differ based upon weight, gender, age, genetics and luck.
But there are also other risks. For instance with Strawberries they might have limits of one pesticide, but they max out different ones, so you get a cocktail of chemicals that used together exceeds the allowed limits of one.
In case you haven't noticed yet, the world mostly runs on assumptions people pretend/parrot as facts and even defend their assumptions as if they actually were facts.
Common sense dictates that less harmful dosages are still harmfull, but less so. Your body repairs the damage quicker than it can spread, which works fine until the internal repair rate starts slowing down and that's not even considering any potential long term side effects.
I find it very scary that this study even exists. This is just common sense in Austria. Pesticides are bad, period.
Gasmasks, used when applying insecticides manually, are just for show. Laws outside of the US, which prohibit certain use of chemicals, are just random.
Common sense prevails yet again.
"Common sense" was that you don't eat the poison. You remove it from the food first. You also remove any soil on the food, and if the food is sold in a box or can, you don't eat that, either.
The thing I want to learn, because I'm more interested in learning than I am in reveling in how right I am, is whether common agricultural poisons can be rinsed off with a bit of tap water, or if they're too sticky or too easily absorbed for that to be sufficient. Apparently they can't be washed off this easily, which is annoying, because I rather like buying my apples without worms in them.
Counterpoint: we routinely ingest poison intended to kill living beings. Sometimes we even have said poison injected in our bodies.
Those poisons are also commonly known as antibiotics (anti: against, bio: life), antifungals, antihelminthics, etc
Not everything that harms pests necessarily harms human beings.
be careful: organic may still allow a ton of things that are bad for you, such as copper sulfate in the EU.
While the idea of organic produce is great, the implementation is deeply misleading: tell people petrol derivatives are legit in "bio" fruit and enjoy their confusion :)
The world does not look like it does.
Are you sure you're not just fooling yourself,
considering that you're still voting for people who all belong to the same social circles?
That way you can vote with your feet and your ballot.
"High-pesticide-residue FV intake was unrelated whereas low-pesticide residue FV intake was inversely related to all-cause mortality"
high pesticide consumption was unrelated (so had no effect on mortality), while low pesticide intake had inverse relation to mortality (low pesticide = high mortality)?
This agrees with the observation that low-pesticide residue FV intake was inversely related to all-cause mortality.
If High-pesticide-residue FV intake was unrelated to all cause mortality it could mean that there is a detrimental effect in High-pesticide-residue FV that offsets the expected benefit of FV.
European citizens have been exposed to a dramatic rise in the frequency and intensity of residues of the most toxic pesticides on fruits and vegetables sold in the EU. This report and its primary conclusion contradict official claims that toxic pesticides use is declining and that food residue levels are under control. This report also exposes a complete failure by Member States and the European Commission to implement EU Regulation and protect consumers.
https://www.pan-europe.info/sites/pan-europe.info/files/publ...
Not to mention the reduced carbon footprint (due to transportation), significant decrease in water usage, and increased efficiency.
They do, and they use them a lot, because controlling pests and pathogens is physically hard no matter how hard you try.
Vertical farming is way, way more energy intensive than regular outdoor based farming for the simple reason is outdoor farming can use the sun. That sole fact basically kills vertical farming for all but the highest of margin food (spices, some vegetables). When we get cheap energy, vertical farming will take off. Not before.
If the greenhouse uses normal soil then ofcourse it's not totally isolated, but still i'd expect them to use less
Thrips, white flies, and other insects are _very_ common.
ETA: to add info for you. CE usually implies the control is from inputs (water, nutrients, light) not physical access.
There's usually bugs. It's common to deliberately introduce predatory insects, which control the pests in the same way as in nature, with the additional benefit that they can't fly away if the pest population gets too low. Chemical pesticides are also widely used, both organic and non-organic.
Hydroponic crops are especially vulnerable to sucking pests (aphids, whiteflies, etc.), because of the large amounts of tender new growth. Without controls or natural predators, their population can just explode, much worse than anything you'd get outdoors.
it takes something like 2.5 MWh per square meter per year to raise plants indoors
Vertical greenhouses trade space efficiency for energy efficiency, you have to provide lights because they can't make full use of natural sunlight.
This only makes sence for some low-calorie foods, like berries and salads - you have to provide too much light to grow something calorious like -potato
Seems to me that collecting solar energy and then using to power LEDs close to the leaves of said plants could be doable up to a certain size (or number of floors). Our panels are inefficient but plant leaves are much worse.
There was a recent post about "World’s largest vertical strawberry farm" that recently opened[1], and the price quoted for the product was "$20 for 8 strawberries". That still seems terribly expensive, at least compared to conventional produce. What technological breakthroughs are on the horizon that would reduce that price to levels that are comparable to conventional produce?
Consumers can move past herbicides and pesticides by paying more (sometimes much more) for their food, and cooking more from scratch.
Of course this is easy for wealthy first-world dwellers. Less so for low income families in places with less diverse supply chains.
Organic farming has lower yields (those pests otherwise killed off by the pesticides end up eating a lot of the produce) and is more labour intensive - which explains the higher cost.
Additionally there is more to the picture than farmers and consumers.
In most first-world countries the large retailers (Walmart is famously the most ruthless here) mercilessly squeeze suppliers (distributors and large farmers) to supply the most produce at the lowest price. This pushes farms into consolidation and industrial production - i.e. very large scale mono-culture farming heavily dependent on chemicals.
The very low cost food that we see in our supermarkets has the effect of making orgainic produce look overpriced by comparison - often consumers these days view organic as a luxury item.
Governments too have grant-aided and subsidized farms in a way that often incentivizes "high-tech" farming.
I could go on...
Organic especially in the US, but also in the EU, doesn't mean no herbicides and pesticides[1][2]. Some of the non-synthetic insecticides are FAR more dangerous for people[3]. A popular organic pesticide from the recent past worked by destroying cell mitochondria in a vast swath of eukaryotic cells, nasty stuff.
[1] https://www.global-organics.com/post.php?s=2018-02-02-are-pe....
[2] https://www.pan-uk.org/site/wp-content/uploads/List-of-activ...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20220513165751/https://blogs.sci...
We need to gain a better understanding of our food production systems, the full chain, precursors (seed, fertiliser and chemical suppliers), farms, processors, distributors, retailers.
We need to stop thinking in terms of pure cost. We need to stop thinking in terms of good and evil (good organic farmers vs evil corporations or whatever). We need, as a society, to gain a proper understanding of the complexity of the food chain, of the trade-offs involved in various methods. Of the advantages and disadvantages...
It's appalling that there are chemical residues in our food, possibly to an extent that it has health implications visible in a study such as the one cited.
It's amazing that in most countries food is now much much more accessible for the vast majority of the population than it was, say, a century ago.
To a large extent these are two sides of the same coin.
Yeah, I think that's the interesting thing here. People don't routinely starve in droves anymore and malnutrition is increasingly rare. On the other hand there's creeping fragility in the food system(s), unknown knock on effects of chemicals applied to lots of staple crops, and land/water use issues.
It seems to me like a lot of smart people are actually working on these things but progress is as always uneven and happening in fits and starts.
It's a very complex system with complex trade offs. But, and this is crucial, not so complicated that the issues cannot be understood by an adult with high school education.
As it is, there is very poor understanding among adults in the rich world of where their food comes from, how it is grown or reared, what food/fertiliser it is given, what chemicals it is treated with and how much, how it is processed, how it is packaged, the margins along the way, and the power dynamics along the chain
Even educated adults can be shockingly uninformed, witness Gweneth Paltrow style fantasies about imagined health benefits of organic food, or on the flip side, total ignorance about the quantity of chemicals that go into the production of conventional food.
The increased frailty of our food chains and environment means that collectively we need to get educated, realise the high environmental and health cost of chemically intensive farming and start exploring alternatives. And not with this dumb "organic good, chemical bad" mentality but properly evaluating the trade-offs in each system
It's hard to envisage a world where we feed 8, 10, 12 billion people without some chemical input, but it's certainly a good idea to try at least move in that direction
It seems like with current projections global population might peak around 9.4 billion in the 2600s and then fall back down to around ~8.8 by the end of the century. If we can manage river water carefully, I think it's going to be fine in the medium to long run.
Looks like I misremembered the projected peak population.
And yes, long to medium run it's going to be fine if we can carefully manage river water carefully. And if we don't exhaust soils in key agriculture heartlands, and if we don't cause too much icecap collapse, and if we don't trigger desertification of vulnerable areas (southwest USA, various parts of sub-Saharan Africa etc) and...
> And if we don't exhaust soils in key agriculture heartlands
I think that's probably solvable if it doesn't happen at exactly the wrong time.
> and if we don't cause too much icecap collapse
This seems like a thing we could adapt to, even if it's highly undesirable. Building out a bunch of artificial reefs, locks, dykes, and flood plains seems very doable. We might end up with some 22nd century Venices, and a few less islands but not the end of civilization.
> if we don't trigger desertification of vulnerable areas
This seems harder to adapt to without moving a lot of people.
How is this even relevant?
I'm not suggesting processed food necessarily uses poorly washed vegetables, just that its out of one's control - it certainly strikes me as possible that industrial scale processes might do a better job at removing chemical residues than a typical home cook giving store bought produce a quick rinse.
I feel like our best bet to reduce the need for pesticides would be using GMO techniques to make our crops resistant to pests but the same people pushing for organics tend to dismiss GMOs out of hand.
Oh come now. I don't really think we can use a country who had to suddenly switch from using inputs to making due without them as a good test case for organic farming. Those are absolutely less than ideal conditions.
Everything I've read on organic farming and permaculture nearly always yields higher per acre output (maybe at a higher labor cost, I dunno).
Some of our cereal crops aren't good candidates for going organic but it absolutely makes sense for a lot of of fruits and vegetables, especially the soft skinned varieties that are more apt to absorb pesticides.
You'd really need to cite some sources on that
Again, it certainly wouldn't replace the cereal crops, but for fruits and vegetables that are perishable and prone to absorbing pesticides, I could easily see small scale local agg replacing our current system if the price of carbon were accurately reflected (i.e. carbon tax)
It's about cultivating vegetables in a specific, labour intestine, urban environment, and is partly speculative.
It's not about organic farming yields in general which are generally significantly lower that those of conventional farming.
> Everything I've read on organic farming and permaculture _nearly always_ yields higher per acre output
_nearly always_
Your second assertion is accurate:
> organic farming yields are lower when comparing against most conventional agriculture
I didn't at any stage say "we couldn't properly feed everyone fruits / veg using organic agriculture" - maybe you're mixing me up with some other commenter. What I do think is that currently we are not in a position where we could feed the world's population only with organic (not just fruit and vegetable - grains, meat etc also).
Parts of Africa are facing grain shortages due to disruptions in the supply in Ukraine. This shows how tight supplies are.
Those chemicals ( and I'm no fan) do enable a massive increase in yields. There's no "simply" - I agree with you that a move away is desirable, but it is far from simple or easy.
Also there is a sentence saying that people that don't smoke are more active have lower bmi have hypercholesterolemia.
Is something off or I just can't read Sci studied anymore?
I don't believe use of the term is regulated, though. So in practice that may just be a nicer-sounding synonym for "conventional".
> Practices contained in this protocol are considerably more expensive than conventional programs that rely on highly toxic pesticides.
https://ipminstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Red-Toma...
https://ipminstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Red-Toma...
I think my supermarket apples were just plain "IPM" though, not a specific set of guidelines like that. Those guidelines seem like a tough sell overall, hard to succinctly explain the benefits to the average consumer.
Organic programs user "better" pesticides, but much much more.
Which is better? We'll, it depends on how fast those pesticides break down and what those degraded molecules are. It depends on how much volume is applied to the produce. It depends on if it accumulates in the flesh of the produce.
What if a pesticide outrageously lethal to humans, but breaks down in 2 days and you only apply it in the first 25% of the produce growing window?
Which is worse? 400 lbs of feathers accumulating on your chest at 100 lbs/week for 4 weeks or 400 lbs of steel on your chest applied once.
Silly metaphor, but the answer to incredibly difficult system problems is really "it depends". Conventional vs organic is not clear cut.
Certainly agreed. Note that the guidelines I linked above do permit certain synthetic pesticides, despite their somewhat confusing use of the word "conventional" in the text that I quoted. For example, cyflumetofen is synthetic, and it's in their lowest-risk category. Copper hydroxide products are permitted under OMRI organic guidelines, but forbidden or restricted here.
I generally like the idea of more restrictive voluntary guidelines based only on safety to the ecosystem and consumer, and not on naturalness like for "organic". I haven't seen much commercial uptake, though.
Never. The title alone makes me raise an eyebrow,
because from my perspective this isn't just obvious, but well known.
I planted a few fruit trees in my backyard, but so far only squirrels benefit.
The comment above me about community gardens is correct though.
Great Leap Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
Stalin allowed for the household plot, because.... everyone was starving due to communism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_plot During the Holodomor and in "the breadbasket" of Ukraine, people were arrested for not yielding _all_ of their produce to the state.
Now the effect of terrorizing people with scarcity of food may have caused them to try to grow more of their own food, but I'm not sure that's the best tactic.
It makes it an interesting idea that poor people own more land in poor countries and are more self sufficient. The current form of capitalism in Canada and America is creating an underclass of people that are totally reliant on the state through debt schemes or direct welfare programs. Their labour has so little value, their salaries don't even cover rent and food. Inflation will make this more apparent than ever before.
Now, in retrospect we can say it was just the process of industrialization played out in a super-compressed timeline, and not due to the inherent economic superiority of communism. But it wasn't clear at the time, it was really an open question whether communism was a economically superior system. Which made the capitalist class really afraid, and caused various forms of communist repression in the West like McCarthyism.
As an aside, it wasn't like industrialization as a process was all roses in the West either. Enclosure of the commons drove masses of subsistence farmers into brutal factory work in the cities.