27 ms·

Ok preferring to support local agriculture is one thing, and probably admirable in many cases, but how much of an idiot does someone have to be to stop eating p

Ok preferring to support local agriculture is one thing, and probably admirable in many cases, but how much of an idiot does someone have to be to stop eating produce because it comes from Mexico :facepalm:. Being less healthy is really showing them!

pengaru 4y ago
One person I'm thinking of in particular said she didn't believe the water was safe to drink there, so how could the produce be safe to eat? She was elderly and had learned long ago not to drink the water when traveling in Mexico. But I'm sure there was a bunch of unstated racism underneath that, just based on who she was... Personally I don't like consuming food grown in China because if the world has outsourced all its polluting industrial activities to China, it seems likely the food has more toxins in it. Just the air pollution there alone has to permeate the food grown outdoors and all the soil.
- ldh0011 4y ago
  Yeah the pollution angle actually makes sense to me with my layman's knowledge of agriculture. Though with water specifically I wonder if Mexican (tap?) water being unsafe for humans to drink translates to the water they use for crops being less safe than American crop water. This piqued my interest on Mexican agriculture though and I found this relatively recent gem... US lobbyists trying to get the US government to bully Mexico into having less stringent food safety measures. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/feb/16/revealed-monsanto-mexico-us-glyphosate-ban https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/feb/16/revealed-mo...
  - deleted 4y ago
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- jolmg 4y ago
  > One person I'm thinking of in particular said she didn't believe the water was safe to drink there I mean, if she meant water from the tap, it's true that it's generally not considered potable. It's clean enough for everything it's needed for, but it's just common sense to people to not drink from it. Expecting to be able to is weird because it's different. Seems kind of exorbitant to have something like potable tap water, like I'd imagine it'd be exorbitant for people that have it to upgrade to distilled tap water. The public tap water supplies being able to maintain water end-to-end pure enough to be perfectly consumable by humans is a bar probably nobody is concerned for them to surpass, because it's not really a problem. The tap is used for everything you generally use it for elsewhere, including washing fruits, veggies, and rice. There's no problem consuming small quantities (e.g. washing teeth, using a glass that hasn't finished drying, etc.), but nobody drinks or serves a glass of water from the tap. People fill 5-gallon jugs of water at purifiers or exchange them at convenience stores and use that for drinking water and e.g. making soups, boiling/steaming foods, cooking pasta, etc. > so how could the produce be safe to eat? Did she mean the water it was grown with? If she did, yeah that's ridiculous. That water has to seep through the earth, so what does it matter? Why need to dump potable water? Also, a whole nation and more are living off that produce.
  - pengaru 4y ago
    > Did she mean the water it was grown with? If she did, yeah that's ridiculous. That water has to seep through the earth, so what does it matter? Why need to dump potable water? Also, a whole nation and more are living off that produce. Yeah, but at the same time irrigation using sprinklers is going to coat the produce with whatever's left behind from the water evaporating. Personally I think she was on the crazy+racist end of the spectrum. But the point is, if you for whatever reason reject Mexican produce, that's actually a substantial removal of produce from your table in the US today. Especially on the low-income end, but even at the last Whole Foods I visited in IL all the Avocados, organic and conventional, were from Mexico. It's odd to me since my last FL visit included football sized Avocados grown locally, it's not like we can't grow them here.
    - jolmg 4y ago
      > Yeah, but at the same time irrigation using sprinklers is going to coat the produce with whatever's left behind from the water evaporating. Same as it happens when people wash their veggies at home, or use their dishes they've washed with the tap. Nobody worries about consuming small amounts. You know, it might not even be a big deal to drink from it, it's just not done. It's not that it's guaranteed to be undrinkable, it's just not guaranteed to be drinkable, and there's a difference between consuming a few milliliters to consuming a few liters.
      - pengaru 4y ago
        I'm not personally concerned about it, it's just easy to see how someone could convince themselves it's a worry, especially when they want it to be for racist reasons.
        jolmg 4y ago
        > it's just easy to see how someone could convince themselves it's a worry Trying to make sense of it for myself, I can only imagine it's from believing the reason they're healthy is because they live in a perfectly sterile environment, instead of it being simply because their bodies can handle the impurities of their environment.

pengaru 4y ago

One person I'm thinking of in particular said she didn't believe the water was safe to drink there, so how could the produce be safe to eat? She was elderly and had learned long ago not to drink the water when traveling in Mexico. But I'm sure there was a bunch of unstated racism underneath that, just based on who she was... Personally I don't like consuming food grown in China because if the world has outsourced all its polluting industrial activities to China, it seems likely the food has more toxins in it. Just the air pollution there alone has to permeate the food grown outdoors and all the soil.

ldh0011 4y ago
Yeah the pollution angle actually makes sense to me with my layman's knowledge of agriculture. Though with water specifically I wonder if Mexican (tap?) water being unsafe for humans to drink translates to the water they use for crops being less safe than American crop water. This piqued my interest on Mexican agriculture though and I found this relatively recent gem... US lobbyists trying to get the US government to bully Mexico into having less stringent food safety measures. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/feb/16/revealed-monsanto-mexico-us-glyphosate-ban https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/feb/16/revealed-mo...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jolmg 4y ago
> One person I'm thinking of in particular said she didn't believe the water was safe to drink there I mean, if she meant water from the tap, it's true that it's generally not considered potable. It's clean enough for everything it's needed for, but it's just common sense to people to not drink from it. Expecting to be able to is weird because it's different. Seems kind of exorbitant to have something like potable tap water, like I'd imagine it'd be exorbitant for people that have it to upgrade to distilled tap water. The public tap water supplies being able to maintain water end-to-end pure enough to be perfectly consumable by humans is a bar probably nobody is concerned for them to surpass, because it's not really a problem. The tap is used for everything you generally use it for elsewhere, including washing fruits, veggies, and rice. There's no problem consuming small quantities (e.g. washing teeth, using a glass that hasn't finished drying, etc.), but nobody drinks or serves a glass of water from the tap. People fill 5-gallon jugs of water at purifiers or exchange them at convenience stores and use that for drinking water and e.g. making soups, boiling/steaming foods, cooking pasta, etc. > so how could the produce be safe to eat? Did she mean the water it was grown with? If she did, yeah that's ridiculous. That water has to seep through the earth, so what does it matter? Why need to dump potable water? Also, a whole nation and more are living off that produce.
- pengaru 4y ago
  > Did she mean the water it was grown with? If she did, yeah that's ridiculous. That water has to seep through the earth, so what does it matter? Why need to dump potable water? Also, a whole nation and more are living off that produce. Yeah, but at the same time irrigation using sprinklers is going to coat the produce with whatever's left behind from the water evaporating. Personally I think she was on the crazy+racist end of the spectrum. But the point is, if you for whatever reason reject Mexican produce, that's actually a substantial removal of produce from your table in the US today. Especially on the low-income end, but even at the last Whole Foods I visited in IL all the Avocados, organic and conventional, were from Mexico. It's odd to me since my last FL visit included football sized Avocados grown locally, it's not like we can't grow them here.
  - jolmg 4y ago
    > Yeah, but at the same time irrigation using sprinklers is going to coat the produce with whatever's left behind from the water evaporating. Same as it happens when people wash their veggies at home, or use their dishes they've washed with the tap. Nobody worries about consuming small amounts. You know, it might not even be a big deal to drink from it, it's just not done. It's not that it's guaranteed to be undrinkable, it's just not guaranteed to be drinkable, and there's a difference between consuming a few milliliters to consuming a few liters.
    - pengaru 4y ago
      I'm not personally concerned about it, it's just easy to see how someone could convince themselves it's a worry, especially when they want it to be for racist reasons.
      - jolmg 4y ago
        > it's just easy to see how someone could convince themselves it's a worry Trying to make sense of it for myself, I can only imagine it's from believing the reason they're healthy is because they live in a perfectly sterile environment, instead of it being simply because their bodies can handle the impurities of their environment.