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EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices
- stogot 4mo agoCompanies that poison the people like this should be sanctioned, along with their owners. Greed and profiteering
- spwa4 4mo agoWasn't the EU fresh from a scandal that they voted all sorts of laws, sued lots of EU companies, and then allowed Chinese companies to import lots of stuff that obviously violated all those laws for 20+ years? From safety regulations to baby toys with lead paint. The EU will probably do nothing again.
- throwaway67678 4mo agoWhen it comes to safety regulations as with everything else, some countries do not succeed, others do not try
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- Saline9515 4mo agoThe EU has allowed large scale imports of chinese fake honey for the last 20 years. All of the beekeeper associations complain about it, regularly conduct lab tests with honeys from supermarkets, most of them being not honey, or mixed with fake honey. The EU of course has done nothing : the beekeepers aren't powerful enough to distribute the right bribes to the right people. Meanwhile the consumers buy glucose syrup at 15€/kg. But hey, we have USB-C! It evenS out, right?
- Hikikomori 4mo agoIts up to individual countries to do it no? They've been testing honey here recently and several brands got removed from stores.
- Saline9515 4mo agoNo, it's up to the EU to stop imports from China. It's not possible for individual countries to do it: - Lab testing is complex, requires to identify the DNA of pollens in honey and few countries can do it at the moment. - Honeys are mixed, so it's trivial to receive fake honey in a country that allows it, mix it, and reexport to another one that forbids it. Same happens with olive oils, no one cares. - Many brands just lie, given that there is no enforcement regarding food traceability and safety in general in the EU (it's a meme to reassure consumers). Where I live a brand advertising "locally made honey" was found to sell glucose syrup : nothing happened.
- Hikikomori 4mo agoDoes the EU have a centralized food testing agency?
- Saline9515 4mo agoIt does have a food safety agency, but this is a classic international trade problem that is solved at the border since the EU is a trade union.
- spwa4 4mo agoOr in this case - purposefully NOT solved. Who wants to bet "Mercosur" agricultural products won't be checked at the border and will - surprise - turn out to have "issues". Has the forced labor agriculture in South America been solved yet? Nope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_South_America#History_of_human_trafficking_in_the_region https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_South_Ame... I guess not. Will the EU check? Hah! Has nature protection been solved yet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_in_Brazil Nope. Will the EU check? Hah! The EU makes their companies to compete against slavery. First in China, religious-ethnic slavery. Now in South America, also mostly ethnic slavery.
- WhereIsTheTruth 4mo ago+1 The downvotes aren't surprising, people who have spent enough time on this orange site tend to lose the plot
- psychoslave 4mo agoWhat's an orange site?
- WhereIsTheTruth 4mo agoThe one you are currently browsing
- flexagoon 4mo agoThey don't "poison the people" unless the pesticides are found in a toxic dose (they are not). Of course, the legal limits are purposefully designed to be well below the LOAEL, and those companies that were found to contain levels above them should face consequences. But to claim they "poison the people" isn't true.
- Saline9515 4mo agoThe toxic dose is a vague term. You may not die from exposure, but you can still have effects, such as infertility, cancers or endocrine disruption.
- fasterik 4mo agoIf we really want to be precise, we should talk about parts per million (PPM). Scientific research establishes a safe level of consumption in terms of PPM, below which there are no detectable health effects. Generally when you see alarmism about "pesticides found in food" they're orders of magnitude below the PPM that would have any effect on human health.
- Saline9515 4mo agoExactly, scientific research established that DDT was perfectly safe, too! Scientists even used to eat it to "prove" that it was safe. In reality it depends, being biology, "safe level" is also very relative since you don't know every effect the substance has on the body. That's why pesticides and other chemicals such as bisphenols are regularly phased out, since effects can appear long after "scientific research" established it was "safe". Or it can affect certain populations, such as farmers, who get a high dose, or children, who are more sensitive than adults. Others, such DDT, lead or cadmium, are accumulated in the body over a long period, and then start to show effects, even when the person has stopped eating it. Or can find their way later the food chain: Inuits would get poisoned when eating polar bear's meat, that was full of DDT from fields on the other side of the globe.
- 4mo ago
- whateverboat 4mo agoThere's always a tradeoff between eating crops that will make you sick and kill you when you are 60 vs not eating enough nutritious food that will kill you when you are 40.
- burnt-resistor 4mo agoThere are all kinds of toxic residues and contaminants in the US food supply because there's a lack of testing, lack of regulation, lack of enforcement, and a lack of the precautionary principle. Meanwhile, farmers will continue spraying RoundUp on oats just before harvest, rice grown in the US will contain arsenic from naturally-occurring contaminated soils, and almost all bread contains toxic crap banned in the rest of the world.
- nozzlegear 4mo agoI agree the situation is shitty in the US, but what does that have to do with pesticides banned in the EU? It seems entirely superfluous to this to this story.
- nickff 4mo agoThis article is about the EU food supply, and does not appear to attribute the contaminants to US exports. Why are you bringing American cultivation practices into this? If anything, this OP demonstrates that the EU regulations are futile (though that may be an overstatement).
- bijowo1676 4mo agoEU generally leads the developed world in regulation, that has become a meme and a joke. but for Food related stuff, EU standards and regulation are truly superior for consumers, relative to US and other countries
- flexagoon 4mo ago> but for Food related stuff, EU standards and regulation are truly superior for consumers, relative to US and other countries That is mostly a myth. EU and US take different approaches to setting food safety regulations, which means they have different lists of banned substances. The EU bans a lot of substances that have no evidence of actual adverse effects just out of an abundance of caution or sometimes even because of uninformed public perception, which is why their regulations seem more comprehensive, but the vast majority of that has no real positive effect on consumers. https://blog.ansi.org/ansi/differences-between-eu-and-us-food-standards/ https://blog.ansi.org/ansi/differences-between-eu-and-us-foo... In terms of actual food safety, the US is basically the same as the EU (it technically ranks even higher than most EU countries on the "Quality and Safety" criterion of the Global Food Security Index, but the top countries are all very close) https://insights.economistenterprise.com/sustainability/project/food-security-index/ https://insights.economistenterprise.com/sustainability/proj... (Before anyone accuses me of something, I live in the EU and generally prefer EU in terms of lawmaking and regulations. It's just that food safety specifically is a point of comparison which is much less true than people usually think)
- ofrzeta 4mo agoFor spices and tea it really makes sense to buy organic (not that there are no fraudsters but still).
- Jensson 4mo agoJust buy from places where these laws are in effect instead of imports from other countries where they legally use these pesticides.
- account42 4mo agoYou can but that makes grocery shopping more cumbersome so it's valid to ask why you have to put in that effort.
- kuerbel 4mo agoIt also makes sense for anything coming out of third world countries, pesticides kill and harm lots of farmers there. https://www.publiceye.ch/en/topics/pesticides/pesticide-giants-make-billions-from-bee-harming-and-carcinogenic-chemicals/the-pesticides-that-poison-farmers https://www.publiceye.ch/en/topics/pesticides/pesticide-gian...
- darth_avocado 4mo agoOrganic is just green washing, it doesn’t mean no chemicals. Plenty of organic products contain toxic chemicals and heavy metals. Organic oats have been found to contain glyphosate. Organic spices have been found to contain heavy metals.
- Saline9515 4mo agoOrganic means that no non-organic pesticides have been used in production. There are still organic ones available, which are less dangerous. Especially to the farmers who are the first ones to get exposed to the poisons we spread on the fields.
- luqtas 4mo ago
- andrewstuart 4mo agoI carefully check the label and try to only buy Australian made 100% food. I never buy any food ever from China.
- CoastalCoder 4mo agoDoes that meaningfully restrict which foods / ingredients you can get?
- andrewstuart 4mo agoNo. Australia produces vast variety of food everything you could want to eat aside from more exotic stuff.
- SchemaLoad 4mo agoIn terms of fresh meat and vegetables, it's pretty much all grown/produced in Australia. Anything canned / dried is often imported though. Things like rice or coffee beans you technically can buy Australian grown but you'd have to go out of your way to find it.
- verall 4mo agoIt's one of the richest food cultures in the world. If you've never tried sichuan peppercorn on mapo tofu, or pickled mustard greens on noodle dishes, I think you're in for a real treat. These do involve foods from China though..
- andrewstuart 4mo agoYou can use safe Australian ingredients to cook the recipe.
- Kirby64 4mo agoWhere in Australia grows Sichuan peppercorns? They're almost exclusively grown in China and the general regions nearby to my knowledge.
- moi2388 4mo agoOh you import food from third world countries and it’s terrible? Who would have guessed. Better keep pushing the farmers in the EU away for more of these great “trade deals”
- darth_avocado 4mo agoAre these EU farmers that are being turned away growing tea and spices?
- DocTomoe 4mo agoSome do, especially in Portugal and the Azores, for tea. And I grow my own peppers and chillies in cold Germany - why would we not be able to do so on an industrial scale? Or you buy your tea from other first-world countries, such as Japan.
- DocTomoe 4mo agoIn the end, it is up to the consumer. Local variants exist. But supermarkets are convenient and cheap.
- psychoslave 4mo agohttps://unric.org/en/un-poverty-expert-europeans-impoverishment-most-visible-on-food-front/ https://unric.org/en/un-poverty-expert-europeans-impoverishm...
- account42 4mo agoBut we absolutely need to shut down our farms to lower emissions so that we appear "green". It's totally worth to become food dependent on questionable countries for that.
- nozzlegear 4mo agoThe report itself[†] blames the pesticide residue on a "boomerang effect" from EU countries: EU countries export these banned pesticides to third countries, those countries use the banned pesticides on the food they grow, and then the EU countries import that food. In effect, EU companies are still profiting off of the sale and use of banned pesticides on food that Europeans will eat. [†] https://www.foodwatch.org/fileadmin/-INT/pesticides/banned_pesticides_on_the_menu_residues_found_in_tea_rice_and_spices.pdf https://www.foodwatch.org/fileadmin/-INT/pesticides/banned_p...
- LorenPechtel 4mo agoObject on "blame"--it is actually only saying that this scenario is possible, it is not establishing that it actually is the cause.
- ars 4mo agoI checked the list of pesticides in the article, and almost all of them were banned because of the effect on pollinators, not because of human health. So using these pesticides only on products for export makes utterly no sense!
- Jensson 4mo agoThey were never used in EU, what happened was that EU exports the pesticides and then they are used in other countries and then those food products are imported into EU. So EU makes pesticides that itself bans from being used on their own fields. Which isn't that weird, it isn't the chemical that is banned it is using it as a pesticide that is banned.
- mhitza 4mo agoThat is one reason why I, at least try to, check the label and avoid products with non-EU ingredients. Also one of my worries with the mercusour trade deal. And any deal that involves meat imports from the US, with specific laxer regulation requirements (at least what Trump would like).
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- kryptoncalm 4mo agoMore relevant is that 14 out of 64 samples had levels above the legally allowed limit (MRL), of which 12 pesticides that are not approved in the EU (page 12 of report). This is more severe than products 'containing' pesticides, which could as well be advancements in measurement. Problematic products are: Peppers, dried (6x), Cumin (3x), Rice grain (2x), Tea leaves and stalks (1x), Non-fermented tea leaves (1x), Mix of spices (1x).
- Etheryte 4mo agoCumin always shows up on these lists, whether it's with heavy metals or something else. It's to the point where I've more or less just stopped cooking with it because I don't trust it to be safe.
- dylan604 4mo agoGet yourself a dehydrator and try making it yourself. I've started doing this with my herb garden and the catnip I grow for my cats. They much prefer the stuff I make than the stuff from the store as much as I enjoy my fresh dried (oxymoronic??) herbs. I haven't tried cumin yet. We'll see how the peppers in this years attempt at gardening goes.
- enlyth 4mo agoI probably have a weird gene or something but cumin smells like disgusting body odour to me and any food that has any trace of it I cannot eat or I will gag This doesn't happen to me with anything else, I'm not a picky eater and will happily eat literally anything else
- ripe 4mo ago> cumin smells like disgusting body odour You're not wrong. If you smell pure cumin (without any other spices or herbs), particularly if you grind and mix it with yogurt to make a salty lassi, you get a whiff of body odor. My kids called it "the BO drink". It's a weird thing, but the smell becomes quite different in combination with other smells. It's an ingredient in many expensive perfumes, believe it or not! [1] [1] https://www.fragrantica.com/news/CUMIN-Polarizing-Note-of-Sweat-Intimacy-3722.html https://www.fragrantica.com/news/CUMIN-Polarizing-Note-of-Sw...
- amelius 4mo agoWe're reaching the point where people need to install GC/MS systems in their homes in order to be safe from food hazards.
- LaGrange 4mo agoNo we don’t. And the greatest hazard is the soul crushing disappointment that is a Dutch tomato.
- contingencies 4mo agowasserbomben + https://www.hortidaily.com/article/6022801/how-tasty-tom-succeeded-in-changing-the-negative-image-of-the-dutch-tomato-in-germany/ https://www.hortidaily.com/article/6022801/how-tasty-tom-suc... I'll settle for no soft apples.
- colechristensen 4mo agoJust a note that the majority of these detections report the lowest amount chemistry can reliably quantify. Not the danger level, the known biological effect level, the smallest amount where chemistry can say they're statically confident the substance is present in a known amount. Modern gas chromatography is ridiculously sensitive.
- forlorn_mammoth 4mo ago> that 14 out of 64 samples had levels above the legally allowed limit (MRL), of which 12 pesticides that are not approved in the EU (page 12 of report).
- l5870uoo9y 4mo agoNot a single word on where the toxic products were produced except third countries?
- RetroTechie 4mo agoLarge amounts of pesticides which are banned from use in EU and/or US, are produced there then exported. Afaik there's some EU work towards closing this loophole. But nothing major that made it into legislation (so far). No doubt Monsanto, Bayer & co have lobbyists + lawyers working to slow down or prevent that.
- nullbio 4mo agoWhy? I thought pesticides were safe? That's what the Monsanto bot told me, anyway.
- HerbManic 4mo agoI too believed Patrick Moore representing Monstanto when he said 'Round up' was safe to drink.
- blitzar 4mo ago> When the interviewer immediately offered him a glass of the herbicide to drink, Moore refused, stating: "No, I'm not an idiot," and abruptly ended the interview. Guess he just want thirsty at that moment.
- dbdr 4mo agoOnly an idiot would drink when they are not thirsty. Nothing to do with his job being to lie and manipulate opinion.
- interludead 4mo agoThe obvious question is: if these pesticides are considered too unsafe to use in the EU, why are EU companies still allowed to export them?
- ShinyLeftPad 4mo agoIsn't that the only way they can profit?
- ExoticPearTree 4mo agoProbably the law says "they cannot be used in the EU" and that's it. If the law would ban the production of said pesticides it would be a completely different story.
- maurotdo 4mo agoThis boomerang is the effect of another boomerang: nothing grows anymore without pesticides. I can see that in my crops and fruits: when I was young I could benefit from the produce my dad grew naturally. 30 years later nothing grows naturally anymore, blight, insects and diseases kill everything in a few days. We gave up, as it makes no sense to actively poison our produce when the poison comes with no hassle from bought one.
- simongray 4mo agoI don't think you can conclude much from a sample size of 1. My country at least (and probably yours too) is producing more organic products than ever before. People are also consuming organic products more than before.
- fsflover 4mo agoDon't organic foods use natural pesticides?
- xandrius 4mo agoYep but that's just always been the case: it's a world of difference between spraying the latest Monsanto v7 KillEmAll upgraded formula or supporting biodiversity such that for every major pest there is also something which eats it and gets rid of it.
- fsflover 4mo ago> or supporting biodiversity Natural pesticides do not support biodiversity. It's natural fallacy.
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- xandrius 4mo agoPersonally working at a bio farm and while it is more work than just spraying some chemical wholesale, I think it's not necessarily much harder than the past (not sure though). What I do know is that not being bio is much easier, that's all.
- nelox 4mo agoWe’ve successfully outsourced pollution too.
- dbdr 4mo agoIf a pesticide is banned to use inside the EU, it should also be banned to import into the EU products that were grown using that pesticide.
- remus 4mo agoSurely that depends on the reason for the ban? Say it is banned in the EU because of concerns about secondary environmental impact, a different country with a different ecology could reasonably decide to keep using it.
- ornornor 4mo agoCanadian lentils are sprinkled in glyphosate to kill them so they can be harvested (as the climate there doesn’t allow for this to occur naturally). They’re then harvested and shipped back to the EU where such a practice is forbidden. But it happened outside of the EU so it’s magically safe.
- _heimdall 4mo agoThis is nothing new though. A small number of poor countries manufacture goods and mine materials in pretty terrible conditions that are illegal in the countries consuming those goods and resources.
- _ink_ 4mo agoIf it is not allowed to be used in the EU, it shouldn't be allowed to export it. > Although these chemicals are not allowed on the EU market, they can still be exported from European Member States to third countries. From there, they can return to Europe as residues in imported food — a “toxic pesticides boomerang” that puts consumers at risk.
- consumer451 4mo agoThe term "blowback" has a lot of applications. For example in WW I, when chemical weapons were used and the wind changed, and you gassed your own troops. This seems like a new economic-chemical place for the term to be used.
- noIdeaTheSecond 4mo agoI hope each one of you signs this!
- CommanderData 4mo agoShitting on your doorstep is a better term than the boomerang affect in my opinion.
- everdrive 4mo agoI drink a lot of tea and I hadn't really thought about pesticides. I really don't know what's wrong with people. For so, so many products the thought process seems to be: - encounter minor problem - apply poison permanently and liberally And then when you try to say that poison is bad someone comes in clutching their pearls and shrieking "but if we didn't use poison then the product would be more expensive!" I'd rather have less of it than be poisoned.