We’ve talked about high fructose corn syrup many times here at Biofortified. There’s a lot of subjects to be considered, including whether we should be growing so much corn in the first place. The biggest concern about HFCS, though, judging by popular magazines and websites, is health. People are worried that corn syrup is worse for us than other sugar sources, which has resulted in the latest marketing scheme of switching corn syrup for
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We’ve discussed labeling many times at Biofortified, usually looking at things from a practical perspective, such as in the posts What’s in a label? and Labeling GMOs. I argue that anything that is scientifically proven to be a hazard should be a mandatory label. For example, a label that a product contains nuts is justified by severe allergic reactions, even though the additional label may add to the cost of a product for people who don’t have allergies. Any label that doesn’t have a proven hazard is simply a label of preference, so should not be mandatory. Instead, voluntary labels are appropriate. For example, producers may choose to label products as free from animal products if they think the cost of sourcing non-animal ingredients, testing, and labeling will be rewarded by additional purchases of their products by vegetarians and vegans. Non-vegetarians shouldn’t have to pay for a label is based on preference, not science. Practical concerns are not the only reason to label or not label foods, however. Ethics definitely comes into play. Do people have a right to labels, such as labels that indicate a product contains ingredients derived from genetically modified organisms?
Continue reading… 
In Part 1 of Pest Control, I discussed what a pest was and how they were divided into categories as well as how those categories overlap. Identifying pests and how they cause damage is only one part of the puzzle. There’s another part of the puzzle that comes along when you start treating the crops and when talking about pesticides, it’s one that’s the most frequently overlooked. Economics need to be taken into account when treating crops because, believe it or not, going easy on the pesticides can actually be beneficial to farmers. The latest paradigm for pest control in agricultural situations is called ‘integrated pest management’, which I’ll refer to as IPM from here on out. It takes an economical approach to pest management by sampling pests, looking at how they damage crops and what numbers of a pest are sufficient to damage a set of crops. This is much better than randomly spraying pesticides at anything which looks like it might be eating your crops because it takes into account how much money you’ll spend and save on treatments. It also encourages a conservative use of pesticides which not only lessens a pest’s exposure to pesticides and selection pressure for pesticide resistance but also lowers the amount of pesticides sprayed in the field. Although not all farmers use IPM (although most figures I see are well over 50%), it’s the best way to deal with pests because you know roughly how much money you’re saving by treating versus spraying randomly and you limit the amount of pesticides you spray on your fields. Since I’m the resident entomologist on Biofortified, and because the main pests in almost all agricultural systems are insects it only makes sense for me to write something about pests and how they’re managed in agricultural situations. My role here on Biofortified is to write about the basic biology of pests, but I will be discussing management from time to time. To say that insects are pests would be far too simplistic because of their sheer diversity. The two families of parasitoid wasps I’ve been discussing, the Braconids and Ichneumonids consist of about 180,000 species together. If you want something to compare this to, there are roughly 10,000 mammalian species. There are a lot of insects around us, and they all have different ecological roles. While some insects feed on crops, others feed exclusively on other insects which makes them the enemies of our enemies and thus…our friends. Even in a monoculture system, there are interactions between pest animals, their environment and people. Understanding these interactions is key to understanding things like why we need pesticides or why your town is inundated with ladybugs every year. So…what, exactly constitutes a pest?
Below you can find my results with a through explanation of what I’ve done and why. The results are posted without all the commentary at Produce Pesticide Rankings which has all of the results and Pesticide Produce Rankings Tables which has comparisons of my results to the EWG results. You can download the original USDA data yourself or check out the Latest PDP Findings of Interest to Consumers. See Produce Pesticide Rankings Part 2 for the real scoop on which produce is the most and least safe. |
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