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.