Friday 1 October 2004

Pesticides in Your Food

The Pesticide Action Network is offering a fabulously scarey poster entitled Pesticides in Your Food that nicely summarises the current state of affairs in the UK. You can download the PDF for free or buy a print to hang in your kitchen. Honestly, I would buy a print if I could think of a public place I'd be allowed to display it. The download page has a comprehensive list of links to documents backing up their claims. Definitely worth browsing. The truth is that you can often detect pesticides in food samples but they don't usually exceed the Maximum Residue Levels (MRL) set by the government. The key issue is do you trust the MRL's?

Well, personally, I don't trust these MRL's. The food industry lobby is strong and the government panders to business interests. There are plenty of examples where pesticides are later found to be much more harmful than orginally recognised. I'm sure some of the pesticides residues are alright but you are consuming a cumulative cocktail of about 500 of them. Delicious! We're buying much more organic foods these days.

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