Category Archives: Community News

Community News: Uncle Ben and Old Lace

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Turns out most rice we eat has dangerous levels of arsenic.  This is particularly true in baby and infant food.   Arsenic is a Category One carcinogen specializing in lung, skin, and bladder cancer.  Oh, happy day.  The gist: eat less rice, no more than half-a-cup per day.

A while back Consumer Reports ran a study that turned up serious levels of arsenic in many brands of apple and grape juices.  This prompted them to do another round of tests on rice, particularly susceptible to arsenic because it’s a water plant.  What CR found was that pretty much each of the 65 rice products they tested with 223 samples—brown or white, organic or synthetically-altered, adult cereal or infant cereal—were tainted far above EPA standards.

The EPA does not regular arsenic in food.  It does so in water, though, choosing 10 parts per billion of inorganic arsenic as the threshold of acceptability.  This level was negotiated by the USA Rice Federation and chemical companies up from the 5 ppb threshold favored by scientists, and negotiation of thresholds for naturally-occurring arsenic are still being negotiated.  The cost to the rice and chemical industries of working that negotiation are far less than the cost of making their products safer, you can be sure.  Rice is a $34 billion-a-year enterprise.

Once CR released its study, the FDA, who has been studying arsenic in rice for decades, released its findings thus far.  The results are more-or-less the same. Continue reading →

Community News: You Don’t Bring Me Bananas Anymore

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Recently, our friend Eve mentioned in an offhand way that the banana as we know it is dying out. In addition to a wave of banana grief that washed over me, I also felt a small measure of relief; this was one of those news stories that I had heard a few years ago but from which I retained almost none of the scientific detail, and I had begun to think that I dreamed it. But no! The banana horror story is real, and I have collected some of its finer points here.

Black Sigatoka

Yikes! Black Sigatoka! (courtesy of APSnet)

The tragic end of the banana was built into its genes from almost the very beginning, or at least its lucrative economic beginning. In a quest to get more uniform, shippable and still edible fruit, the banana plant was made into a seedless version of its formerly wild self. That means that they are sterile and have to be grafted onto stems by human hands in order to survive. And the variety of bananas was drastically reduced as tropical nations made room for whole plantations of the anointed breed favored by the banana companies, called the Gros Michel.

But raising an army of sterile mutants has its drawbacks. For instance, they can’t naturally evolve to ward off disease, which is exactly what happened to the Gros Michel in the 1960s when it was wiped out by a fungus called Panama disease. This, of course, sent banana scions scurrying for a replacement, and they found a lesser but viable alternative in the Cavendish banana, the variety that currently graces your supermarket shelves. But—egad!—banana lightning does strike twice, and now the Cavendish is being ravaged by a fungus called Black Sigatoka (I am not making these names up, I swear). No adequate fungicide has been found. The prognosis for the Cavendish is bleak. Continue reading →

Food News: A Wackjob Farm Bill to Eat More From Your Wallet

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So we’ve got this drought in the Midwest and its attendant spiked food prices forecast for the next three years.  We’ve got the existing farm bill scheduled to croak on September 30th.

And we’ve got two new farm bills in Congress waiting to entrench our problems.

The drought is assuredly caused in part by global warming, just as last weekend’s tornadoes in Queens and Brooklyn were, just as all of the wackjob weather we’ve seen for the past few years has been, just as the wackjob weather surely to come will be.

And rather than work to protect our national food supply by making it less vulnerable to climate change, both the Republican and Democratic farm bills make our meals more vulnerable.  They also accelerate the threat.

The United States sends billions of public dollars to the growers of a few high-impact crops (corn!) through elaborate, Byzantine subsidies.  Those crops—and more specifically the unceasing monocropping that sucks ever more nutrients out of the soil without putting any back—kills soil.  Crop rotation can fix that problem, but our massive industrial agricultural machine doesn’t allow time for that.  Instead, we use astonishingly large amounts of fossil fuel-based fertilizers each year (which accelerates climate change and whose use kills the microorganisms that make soil vital) and continue to monocrop corn and a few other grains (which means a single weather trend or a single pest can wipe out entire agricultural regions, as we’re seeing in this parched summer). Continue reading →

Community News: Drought for Dinner

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The U.S. lays claim to over half of the globe’s corn exports and nearly the same for soybeans.  Nobody else comes close.  China, runner-up in the corn category, exports less than half the amount America does.  The same is the case for Brazil when it comes to the soy market.

The majority of each ends up as feed for livestock raised abroad, and additional bazillions of tons of corn and soy beyond our exports go toward the domestic production of meat that we export (it takes roughly 10 lbs of grain to grow 1 lb of meat).  All told, we shipped $53 billion dollars worth of all three—corn, soy, and meat—in 2011.

But global warming has made 2012 the hottest year since we began keeping records in 1895.  A third of the country’s counties have been declared federal disaster areas on account of drought.  Crops across the Midwest (88% and 87% of the country’s corn and soy supply, respectively) have been burned brittle and brown.  That’s driven corn prices up 45% since mid-June and soybean prices nearly 30% since the beginning of that month and nearly 60% since the end of last year. Continue reading →