The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a proposal this week to ban a controversial pesticide that is widely used on celery, tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables.
The EPA released its plan on Tuesday, nearly a week after a ProPublica investigation revealed the agency had laid out a justification for increasing the amount of acephate allowed on food by removing limits meant to protect children’s developing brains.
But rather than banning the pesticide, as the European Union did more than 20 years ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed easing restrictions on acephate.
The federal agency’s assessment lays out a plan that would allow 10 times more acephate on food than is acceptable under the current limits. The proposal was based in large part on the results of a new battery of tests that are performed on disembodied cells rather than whole lab animals. After exposing groups of cells to the pesticide, the agency found “little to no evidence” that acephate and a chemical created when it breaks down in the body harm the developing brain, according to an August 2023 EPA document.
PSA: You can soak your fruit and veggies in a baking soda solution to break down residual pesticides.
I still want better regulation on pesticides, but that’s my stopgap.
It’s so nice of the US to offload corporate responsibility to individual citizens. None of the money of course. But you all need to do your part to keep the quarterly earnings up!
I’ll sacrifice mine and my family’s life to the line! All praise the line, line go up!
I just want a you tube channel of some guy with a spectrogram machine testing user voted products available via retail. Lets let videos go viral when they discover lead in mayo.
That’s what people usually say, but I wonder what rigorous scientific testing has been performed for this pesticide. Not all are equal.
Never heard of this. Not with an intention to call you out but rather curiosity, is this substantiated?
It depends on who you ask tbh. I looked this up a while back* (but less than a year ago) and science basically said that water + scrubbing certain produce is fine and recommended, and adding anything else doesn’t really do much. I’ll try to find the article I read.
*Just wanted to add that the reason I looked it up was because of a post my friend made on Facebook asking people how they prep their produce (and chicken) - way too many people said they do soap and water…
Edit: here is a guide from science from 2010 (PDF WARNING)
https://www.nifa.usda.gov/sites/default/files/resource/Guide to Washing Fresh Produce508.pdf
Edit 2: here is a guide in more detail
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/washing-vegetables
Thanks. I recall the healthline article. While it doesn’t address removal of pesticides, I guess you could conjecture that water is sufficient (or no less effective) than a baking soda bath?
Totally random and off-topic, but I like your username. Was literally looking up how potentially toxic acetanilide is the other day when we received a small shipment of it at work. Do you have a fun origin story for your username or any fun facts about the substance?
Haha thank you! I created it in college during one of my chemistry courses. We were using it for some experiment (I assume, I don’t remember at this point lol). Anyway at that point in time I made a few usernames and passwords that were fun chemistry stuff.
The reason I was interested in it was because of the connection with acetaminophen (you may have learned that acetaminophen is a metabolite of acetanilide).
Very cool stuff. Thanks for asking! Made my day :)
That’s very cool! Chemistry was always my most difficult subject (biology major). We use acetanilide at work as standard reference material for stable isotope analysis of particulate organic matter (e.g., phytoplankton/marine snow), basically as a quality check since it has similar carbon and nitrogen signatures. Always excited to learn interesting science facts! :)
That sounds like a lot of fun!
Big baking soda won’t fool me again.
Baking soda is for baking, I’m not leaving an open box in my refrigerator or washing my fruit with it. if you want more profits just raise the price and shrink the weight like everyone else.
You either need to add /s at the end or make your comment so literally dripping with sarcasm that it slaps the reader in the face…