Pesticides in Food

Pesticides in Food

by Jack Kittredge

Globally, some 2.5 million tons of pesticides are applied annually—most targeted at agricultural crops. Approximately 250 basic chemicals made by more than 50 companies are registered for use as pesticides in food and feed production in the United States.

The main categories of chemical pesticides are chlorinated hydrocarbons, such as DDT and dieldrin; organophosphates, such as parathion; carbamates, such as carbaryl and aldicarb; and inorganic pesticides made from basic elements, such as copper, lead, arsenic, and mercury. Organophosphates, the most common group in use today, work by interfering with the normal transmission of nerve impulses. Although they do not persist in the environment like chlorinated hydrocarbons, organophosphates as a class are highly toxic, which is why some were produced as nerve agents during World War II. Alarmed by the potential of these chemicals to harm the developing nervous systems of infants and children, environmental groups have called for a ban on many of them. Of all these substances, only copper is allowable under organic certification standards, and its use is limited to highly controlled conditions.

As a result of growing popular concern about pesticides, the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 (FQPA)—born in a rare burst of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill—passed both houses of Congress in a period of eight days without a dissenting vote. The law mandated a broad overhaul of federal pesticide regulations to better assess and prevent risks to public health, particularly for children. It directed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to apply "an additional tenfold margin of safety" for infants and children except when "reliable data" indicate that a less stringent standard would be safe.

The law requires the EPA to reexamine the allowable levels of hundreds of pesticides on individual crops and ultimately come up with about 9700 new application-level determinations. It also requires the EPA to take into account the aggregate risk from different sources—drinking water and pest control efforts in the home, for example, as well as food residues—and to consider the cumulative effects of pesticides that act in a similar manner.

The FQPA mandates that pesticides be screened both as carcinogens and as endocrine disrupters. Endocrine disrupters are chemicals that imitate the body’s hormonal system and consequently disrupt chemical communication. Many scientists believe that the alarming rise in hormonally driven cancers, such as cancer of the breast and prostate, may be due to the ability of many synthetic chemicals to act as endocrine disrupters, and particularly to the ability of synthetic chemicals to imitate estrogen. The reported significant decline in sperm count of the average male over the last 60 years is also likely to be due to endocrine disrupters.

The FQPA has been the subject of an intense battle since the EPA moved to begin implementation. The stakes for both industry and the general public are huge. Depending on how tough the EPA is in restricting pesticide use, farmers and other users may have to switch to more expensive alternatives. The chemical companies that produce pesticides have been conducting a high-pressure campaign to scare farmers with warnings that "sooner or later, virtually all pesticides and pesticide uses will be jeopardized." All seven environmental and farm worker representatives to the EPA advisory panel on the reassessment process resigned en masse, charging that pesticide industry and agribusiness interests had "hijacked" the process.

The relatively simple goal of ensuring Americans that their food supply is safe turns out to be difficult to translate into practice. "The science here is enormously challenging," commented a senior EPA official. "The act requires us for the first time ever to look at all the exposure pathways for these chemicals. . . . All of it is very controversial."

An analysis made by the Environmental Working Group of more than 110,000 government-tested food samples and detailed government data on children’s food consumption found that multiple pesticides known or suspected to cause brain and nervous system damage, cancer, or hormone interference are common in foods many children consume.

• More than a quarter of a million U.S. children aged 1–5 ingest a combination of 20 different pesticides every day. More than 1 million preschoolers eat at least 15 pesticides on a given day. Overall, 20 million children aged 5 and under eat an average of 8 pesticides every day.

• Some 610,000 children aged 1–5 consume a dose of neurotoxic organophosphate insecticides that the government deems unsafe. More than half of these unsafe exposures are from one pesticide—methyl parathion.

• Preschoolers’ eating habits are even more dramatically different from those of adults than previous data indicated. When weight is taken into account, kids aged 1–5 consume 30 times more apple juice, 21 times more grape juice, and 7 times more orange juice than the average person in the population.

• Ten years after the Alar scare, apples are still loaded with pesticides. The average apple has residues of four pesticides after it is washed and cored. Some have residues of as many as ten. More than half of the children exposed to an unsafe dose of organophosphate insecticides get it from apples, apple sauce, or apple juice.

A Consumers Union report in February 1999 confirmed the findings of the Environmental Working Group study. Using U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics based on 27,000 food samples from 1994 to 1997, Consumer Reports looked at the foods children are most likely to eat. Almost all the foods tested had pesticide residues within legal limits, but parathion on peaches, green beans, pears, and apples accounted for most of the total toxicity on the foods analyzed.

A preliminary look at the data from the 1998 pesticide residue monitoring program of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which studied over 7000 food samples looking for detectable residues of 355 pesticides, gives no reason for hope. A third of the foods tested had detectable residues, and almost 2% had residues in excess of allowable levels. Almost of half the fruits showed residues, and 1% of domestically grown fruits (and almost 3% of imported fruits) had illegal residue levels. Blackberries, strawberries, kiwis, and melons had particularly high levels. The residues on vegetables exceeded legal levels for 1.4% of the domestically raised vegetables and for 3.6% of imported ones. Particularly frequent violators were peppers, peas, string beans, potatoes, collards, and kale.

No organic foods were listed in the FDA study. The January 1998 Consumer Reports article on pesticide residues, "Greener Greens? The Truth About Organic Food" (pp. 12–17) concluded: "Our side-by-side tests of organic, green-labeled, and conventional unlabeled produce found that organic foods had consistently minimal or nonexistent pesticide residue. . . . Buying organic food promotes farming practices that really are more sustainable and better for the environment—less likely to degrade soil, impair ecosystems, foul drinking water, or poison farmworkers" (emphasis added).