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Tag: organic
Report: Stop Eating Pesticides
Consumer Reports discusses how to stop eating pesticides. Use CR’s exclusive ratings to get the health benefits from fruits and vegetables while minimizing your risk from toxic chemicals.
Sinking your teeth into a crisp apple or chomping on a stalk of celery is something you should be able to do without thinking. After all, the best nutritional science shows that eating a variety of fruits and vegetables—and plenty of them—is a crucial component of good health. But produce sometimes comes with potentially harmful pesticide levels.
That’s according to a new Consumer Reports analysis of five years of data from the Department of Agriculture collected from tests on fruits and vegetables to detect about 450 pesticides. In some cases, those levels exceed what CR’s experts consider safe.
One way is to choose organic produce. “CR recommends buying organic when possible, to reduce your pesticide exposure and protect the environment and farmworkers,” says Charlotte Vallaeys, the senior policy analyst at CR who led our new pesticides study. Organic standards permit some pesticides, but they can be used only after nonchemical methods, such as crop rotation, have failed. Even then, farmers can’t use pesticides that could be harmful to people or the environment.
Organic diets quickly reduce the amount of glyphosate in people’s bodies
Environmental Health News discusses why organic diets quickly reduce the amount of glyphosate in people’s bodies. A new study found levels of the widespread herbicide and its breakdown products reduced, on average, more than 70 percent in both adults and children after just six days of eating organic.
These reductions were achieved after just three days on the organic diet, which is in line with animal studies showing most glyphosate leaves the body after five to seven days, though a smaller amount remains in and is eliminated more slowly from bone and bone marrow.
Published today in Environmental Research, the paper is the most robust examination of glyphosate levels in people after a dietary switch and provides important information about how people can avoid exposure to the herbicide, the main ingredient in Bayer’s weed killer Roundup. The findings are timely as Bayer, which purchased Roundup-maker Monsanto in 2016, recently agreed to a $10 billion payout to tens of thousands of current and potential future lawsuits from groundskeepers and farmers claiming they contracted non-Hodgkin lymphoma after using Roundup.
While other studies have tested for glyphosate in cereals and other foods on grocery shelves, few have measured the pesticide in human bodies related to diet.
“Despite glyphosate being in such widespread use in agriculture, in our yards, on school playgrounds and in city parks worldwide…the U.S. government has done so little to understand our exposure,” Kendra Klein, study author and senior staff scientist at Friends of the Earth, told EHN.
Food Companies Step Up Funding for Organic Farming Research
Civil Eats discusses how Food Companies Step Up Funding for Organic Farming Research. Clif Bar, King Arthur Flour, Organic Valley, and others are providing university endowments to counter a system stacked in favor of conventional agriculture.
For almost 20 years, Stephen Jones developed wheat varieties for white commodity wheat flour, but he never liked it much. So when the Washington State University (WSU) researcher was offered the chance to move to Washington’s Skagit Valley 10 years ago, he gladly shifted gears. Jones founded The Bread Lab, a multi-disciplinary research center at WSU that works with local farmers, chefs and consumers to breed new organic wheat and barley varieties with higher yields, better taste, and more nutritional value.
Jones doesn’t miss working with the commodity market. “I like the model of keeping value where it’s produced,” he told Civil Eats “If we grow wheat here, let’s use it here in a way that makes sense economically and environmentally.”
The Bread Lab recently produced the “approachable loaf,” a whole grain bread made with just seven ingredients that’s soft, sliced, and retails for no more than $6 anywhere in the country. Jones said he was inspired to create the bread after learning that people frequenting the Skagit Valley food pantry weren’t taking his lab’s artisanal loaves because they didn’t recognize it as bread—that is, it wasn’t soft, sliced, or packaged in a recognizable wrapper.
Plant, restore soil, repeat. Could nature help curb climate change?
The Christian Science Monitor discusses whether nature could help curb climate change, by planting, restoring soil, and repeating. “Nature-based solutions” are the latest climate buzzwords, offering a strategy to fight climate change that is gaining widespread and bipartisan support. But what does it mean to do this well? This story is part of an occasional series on “Climate Realities.”
Just off Highway 880 at the edge of Hayward, the cityscape changes abruptly. Businesses and parking lots give way to large swaths of pickle grass and pools of water stretching out to the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay.
On a recent sunny, windy March day – just before COVID-19 sent the Bay Area into lockdown – Dave Halsing stood on the trails at Eden Landing Ecological Reserve and pointed out what used to be old industrial salt ponds. He noted how they’re gradually being restored into a rich mosaic of tidal wetlands and other ecosystems in the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project.
Environmental Health News, Children’s Health, March 27, 2020
Reports: Cornucopia (Organic)
Cornucopia issues a newsletter
Cornucopia encourages consumers seeking the most ethically raised poultry to know their farmer. Our Organic Poultry Scorecard and DIY guide empower consumers to find the very best poultry options for their families. For more information, read our Organic Poultry Report.
In the meantime, Cornucopia’s Organic Dairy Scorecard helps consumers identify authentic organic farmers whose cattle truly graze on pasture. Grazing animals on healthy organic pasture, rather than in feedlots, can help steward soil health, sequester carbon, and protect our waterways.
A coalition of organic farmers, certifiers, and NGOs recently sued the USDA for denying a 2019 petition to prohibit hydroponic operations from organic certification. Plaintiffs include the Center for Food Safety (CFS), OneCert, the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, and some of the longest-standing organic farms in the US: Swanton Berry Farm, Full Belly Farm, Durst Organic Growers, Terra Firma Farm, Jacobs Farm del Cabo, and Long Wind Farm.
While the threat to organic family-scale farming has dramatically increased over the last two decades, Ikerd sees new hope for transformational change. As corporate interests continue to find new ways to tighten their grip, Ikerd’s perspective reminds us what’s on our side: a growing body of research supporting the wisdom of regenerative organic agriculture and an increasingly passionate chorus of farmers and consumers. Use Cornucopia’s scorecards to make your food purchases count!
The Cornucopia Institute, 2-20-2020
The Cornucopia Institute discusses all things organic. This email includes:
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What Consumers Need to Know About Regenerative Organic Certification. While the USDA organic label encourages soil stewardship, it no longer explicitly requires it. Labels from the Real Organic Project and Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC), add-on certifications for farms that are already USDA certified organic, alert consumers to farmers who responsibly steward the soil. In an interview with David Bronner, CEO of Dr. Bronner’s and a board member of the Regenerative Organic Alliance, we illustrate how ROC overlaps with Cornucopia’s mission.
- National CSA Day
Op-ed: Yes, food is grown in sewage waste. That’s a problem.
This Environmental Health News article discusses how some food is grown in sewage waste. That’s a problem.
You may not realize it but some foods you eat may have been grown in soil containing toxic sewage wastes. Labeling is not required.
In 2019, about 60 percent of sewage sludge from 16,000 wastewater processing facilities in more than 160 U.S. cities has been spread on our soils – farmland and gardens, as well as schoolyards and lawns.
The U.S. Environmental Protect Agency (EPA) allows this use of sewage waste, claiming it has beneficial use because it contains properties similar to fertilizer—certain heavy metals, phosphorus and nitrates—that could enhance soil conditions.
The agency does not require testing for other chemicals in the sewage waste. Yet, millions of tons of sewage are processed annually and the waste can contain upward of 90,000 chemicals plus and an array of pathogens, including mixtures of lead, mercury, arsenic, thallium, PCBs, PFAS, highly complex, superbugs, mutagens, pesticides, microplastics, radioactive wastes, pharmaceuticals, personal care products, steroids, flame retardants, dioxins, and/or their combinations.
How Coal Country Becomes Solar Country
This The Atlantic article discusses how coal country is becoming Solar country. In one Colorado county, solar-energy-training classes are helping ease the transition from fossil fuels to renewables.
In Colorado’s North Fork Valley, solar energy—along with a strong organic-farm economy and recreation dollars—is helping to fill the economic hole left by the dying coal industry, which sustained the area for more than 120 years. When the mines still ran, graduating seniors could step immediately into well-paying jobs. But in the past five years, two of Delta County’s three mines have closed. Approximately 900 local mining jobs have been lost in the past decade. Ethan Bates, for example, another senior in the solar-energy-training class, is the son of a mine foreman who lost his job when the Bowie Mine outside Paonia closed in 2016. Now, he’ll graduate as a certified solar-panel installer.