Fixing Our Chemical Imbalance
Authors:
Edwin Chen
They are the legacies of an innocent and more trusting era, when the idea of “better living through chemistry” appealed to our fascination with science.
We presumed these chemicals to be harmless and allowed them into the marketplace without adequate safeguards. Now they are ubiquitous in our environment. We inhale them. We swallow them. We touch them. They are more than 80,000 strong, these chemicals — which can be used in infants’ pajamas and children’s toys, in cleaning supplies, in upholstery, in construction materials. The list is all but inexhaustible.
Finally, we will have a chance soon to begin undoing that Faustian bargain.
Pending in Congress are bills to put real teeth into the Toxic Substances Control Act. Known by its acronym, TSCA is a well-intentioned law enacted in 1976 — one manifestation of a societal awakening in the aftermath of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. That event also spawned the modern-day environmental movement and gave us the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and all of our major environmental laws.
But TSCA came with several serious defects. When lawmakers passed the measure 34 years ago, they exempted 62,000 chemicals already in use at the time. Since then, 22,000 more chemicals have entered the market. To this day, manufacturers have revealed little or no information about these chemicals’ potentially deleterious effects on human health or the environment — because TSCA doesn’t require such information.
The law gives chemicals the benefit of the doubt. This is quite different from the way the Food and Drug Administration regulates pharmaceuticals or the EPA regulates pesticides. In a classic catch-22, the law requires the EPA to prove a chemical is dangerous before the agency can restrict its use. Yet TSCA deprives the EPA of the authority to require manufacturers to produce testing data in the first place.
Little wonder that only five chemicals have been regulated under TSCA. Twenty-one years ago, when the EPA sought to restrict asbestos, a notoriously carcinogenic fire retardant, the agency was stymied by a thicket of legal obstacles. Since then, the EPA has not tried even once to ban another substance under its TSCA “authority.” Many other chemicals now in use, as we have learned belatedly, can cause cancer, learning disabilities, infertility, birth defects, and other reproductive and developmental problems.
“Chemicals need to be proven safe before we let them be used in products that, literally, touch us all,” says Linda Greer, director of NRDC’s health program. “We need to know much more about all the chemicals being concocted before we allow them to see the light of day. The days of ‘presumed innocent’ need to end.” Modernizing TSCA would be a good start, Greer says.
“TSCA reform should require new and existing chemicals to be tested and should establish safety standards,” says Daniel Rosenberg, an NRDC senior attorney. “The EPA needs to be empowered to act quickly to protect people.”
Legislative proposals have been introduced in both the House and the Senate designed to correct TSCA’s most egregious defects. The House measure would, for instance, allow the EPA to take swift action against a dozen or more chemicals we already know to be harmful to human health, such as mercury, lead, and cadmium.
For all of TSCA’s shortcomings, its journey through Congress is worth emulating today. The measure had bipartisan sponsors and passed with overwhelming support from Republicans and Democrats alike. The final tally was 73–6 in the Senate and 360–35 in the House.
Sadly, given today’s bitterly partisan atmosphere on Capitol Hill — some would call it toxic — Republican support for strengthening TSCA may be a pipe dream, especially with the chemical industry already hard at work behind the scenes to derail the reform effort. But human health should not be held hostage to special-interest politics. Death and taxes are inescapable. Dangerous chemicals should not be.
Strong TSCA Reform Bill Debuts in the House
Updating the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA): Q&A with Daniel Rosenberg
Toxic Chemicals Everywhere
Continue here: Fixing Our Chemical Imbalance
I Was a Victim of the Peanut Butter Recall
This week an Iowa company recalled 380 million eggs due to a salmonella outbreak. Last year, our online editor wrote about the personal impact of a similar outbreak and recall of his favorite food.
Yesterday, my wife forwarded me an “Important Announcement Regarding Your Recent Purchase of Peanut Butter” that she got from Fresh Direct, the online grocery service here in New York City.
This was not a good e-mail.
As my wife will tell you, peanut butter is very important to me. She even mentioned it in our wedding vows (along with my love for the Pittsburgh Steelers). If I had to choose one thing to eat for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t even be a close contest — peanut butter would top the list.
And you know what? Compared to a lot of the other things that I love to eat, it’s not even that bad for me . Unless, of course, it’s packed with Salmonella.
“Dear Valued Customer,” the Fresh Direct e-mail started, “We are writing because you recently purchased a product affected by a newly expanded recall announced by the Food and Drug Administration.”
I really didn’t like where this was going. Turns out, the tub of “Freshly Ground Peanut Butter, Honey-Roasted” that we ordered a week ago is now on the FDA’s list of recalled products . The e-mail instructed us not to eat it and to throw it out immediately (and, appropriately, offered us a refund).
Unfortunately, as I alluded to earlier, I can work my way through a container of peanut butter pretty quickly — especially when it’s honey roasted. There was almost nothing left for us to throw out.
Chances are, the peanut butter was just fine, and so am I. (Thank goodness my wife doesn’t crave peanut butter as much as I do — she didn’t have any.) But it’s scary to get a reminder of how vulnerable we are to problems in the nation’s industrial food chain. Somehow, when you buy freshly ground peanut butter from a grocery service in New York City, you aren’t expecting it to be connected to a processing plant in Blakely, Ga. But that’s the way it works.
I’ve tried in recent years, after reading books such as Fast Food Nation and Omnivore’s Dilemma , to be more aware and conscious of the food that I eat and where it comes from. My wife and I try to buy organic as much as possible, and we love getting the fresh produce at the farmer’s markets around New York City.
We even joined a veggie co-op two summers ago, and I came to really enjoy visiting the church basement where the veggies were delivered once a week and picking out our share (although I have to say, I got a little tired of the endless string of lettuce). NRDC has a great Eat Local web feature that helps you find what’s fresh in your area season by season, and even offers recipes from chefs around the country using only fresh foods.
But when it comes to peanut butter … well, for me, it’s always in season, and I don’t pay much attention to where it’s coming from — although clearly, I should.
And so should the FDA. This peanut butter recall has been yet another reminder that the FDA, like so many other government watchdog agencies, was “one of many hobbled by the Bush administration’s antiregulatory efforts,” as a New York Times editorial put it yesterday . The folks over at Food and Water Watch also criticize the FDA for its handling of the matter. (And of course, peanut butter isn’t the only place where the FDA has been found lacking, as NRDC’s effort to get the agency to ban the chemical BPA from food packaging shows.)
If you want to see how badly the nation’s system of safeguards has been decimated, look no further than Deepest Cuts , a December NRDC report that evaluated the state of environmental and health monitoring programs at the end of the Bush administration in five key areas: air, water, food safety, toxic substances and human health.
The report authors found “a disturbing and pervasive pattern of program and funding cuts that make it impossible for programs to fulfill their monitoring role. … These cutbacks will keep us in the dark about threats to our health.”
I certainly can’t say that I was completely in the dark when I bought my honey-roasted peanut butter last week, but I guess, like so many people, I had the impression that someone was looking out for me. For our industrialized, highly networked food system to work, someone needs to be.
In the meantime, I guess I’m just going to have to cut back on my peanut butter consumption. Somehow.
Deepest Cuts: Repairing Health Monitoring Programs Slashed Under the Bush Administration
Food Safety Finally First on the Menu
More here: I Was a Victim of the Peanut Butter Recall
Urban Foraging: From the Local Park to Your Plate
It’s been almost 25 years since "Wildman" Steve Brill, the renowned New York City forager, was arrested for eating a dandelion in Central Park. Today, the local food craze and struggling economy have coincided to make foraging more popular — and more acceptable to the authorities. Indeed, Brill is busier than ever with his edible plant tours of Central Park (he and the city made amends), and chefs at trendy restaurants across the country are incorporating foraged ingredients into their seasonal menus. Foraging groups in Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle have created online maps showing cherry trees at municipal tennis courts and raspberry bushes in vacant lots. San Francisco (of course) has a Community Supported Foraging group, based on the agricultural co-op model. So how hard is it to round up a fresh, free meal in an urban park that’s really meant for pick-up soccer, dog-walking, and outdoor concerts? We asked expert forager and instructor Leda Meredith, author of The Locavore’s Handbook and Botany, Ballet, and Dinner from Scratch , to show us how it’s done one recent morning in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Here’s what she taught us. (See photos of some of what we picked at the end.) Lesson #1: Foraging in parks is legal…sort of. "There’s no law specifically against foraging in New York City," Meredith says. (Brill was arrested for conducting tours without a license, not foraging itself.) "Technically, there is a city ordinance against removing things from parks without permission, but that’s really meant to stop people from, say, stealing rose bushes," she explains as we approach a patch of un-mowed weeds surrounding a sassafras tree near the park’s main jogging and biking loop. Other cities tend to have similarly vague rules, and in her decade of foraging in New York parks, Meredith says she’s never once been stopped. "If a park ranger did come up to you, you’d be in the clear as long as you ate everything on the spot." Lesson #2: Avoid the "dog zone." "Notice how I reached over ," says Meredith, holding a stalk of goutweed, a celery-scented plant that can be used to flavor soups, that she retrieved from the middle of an overgrown patch. Harvesting a foot or two inside the edges of growth should keep you clear of anything Fido left behind. You’ll also want to avoid spots that have been sprayed with pesticides; most parks post warnings very clearly for the sake of children and pets, but it’s worth calling your local park to find out for sure. Be sure to rinse your bounty well when you get home — just as you would with any produce. Lesson #3: Serious foraging yields more than just a few dandelion greens. With just a little knowledge and effort, you can actually collect enough produce to significantly reduce your carbon footprint. In a good week, an expert like Meredith can forage enough wild edibles to meet half her veggie needs. "I filled two shopping bags in just a couple of hours here this weekend," says Meredith, who lives a few blocks away from Prospect Park. That means no fossil fuels were used to transport her meal. It’s true that greens — including dandelion , the foraging poster child, which is used in salads and can also be sautéed — make up a pretty big percentage of the typical yield in the spring, but plenty of other choices abound, too. As in many urban green spaces, Prospect Park also has fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, and root vegetables. That’s a comforting fact, says Meredith, considering that that if all of the regular food supply routes were cut off in an emergency, New York City’s stores would run out of food in about two days. Of course, if a disaster struck in the middle of the winter, you’d be out of luck. Lesson #4: It’s a great hobby for cheapskate foodies. As she stops to point out some lamb’s quarters growing among the grass in the park lawn, Meredith recalls how she recently saw the same green at the famed Park Slope Food Co-op on sale for $5 per pound and labeled as "wild spinach." "I laughed because I knew the farmer must have gotten the idea after doing the weeding," she says. It’s quite tasty, and she prefers it to cultivated spinach. It’s not uncommon to find items growing wild in the park that are featured in trendy locavore restaurants and specialty markets. "Last fall I found 20 pounds of maitaki mushrooms growing here — and as I was passing by the farmer’s market on the way out, I saw some for sale for about $19 a pound." Lesson #5: Speaking of mushrooms, always err on the side of caution. Foraging dilettantes should zero in on just a few easy-to-recognize plants in the beginning, and even then, it’s best to eat a small quantity the first time, says Meredith, as we come upon a patch of pokeweed. "For instance, these shoots are delicious when they’re young, but they get toxic when they get older and start branching out." Meredith suggests taking a class to get started safely. The Yahoo! Group Forage Ahead is also an excellent place for beginners to get some expert advice; users can ask questions and even post photos. And The Eye Witness Guide to Mushrooms by mycologist Gary Lincoff is Meredith’s pick for a mushroom-specific field guide. Lesson #6: While you’re at it, make sure to help yourself to some invasive species. It so happens that many of the edible plants proliferating in parks are the very same ones that threaten to overwhelm local ecosystems. The goutweed and mugwort that Meredith likes to gather in Prospect Park were recently listed as numbers one and two on a 10 Most Wanted Invasive Plants list posted at the park’s Audubon Center, and many others, such as burdock, are also considered highly invasive. "I once saw volunteers from a conservation group pulling it up — and they were thrilled to hand it over," says Meredith, who promptly took the roots home and stir-fried them. Lesson #7: Leave less rampant vegetation alone. Of course not every wild edible is overly abundant-and you’ll want to be judicious in harvesting those. (To find specifics in your area, check with a local conservation group, or look-up specific plants in the Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health’s online database .) "Make sure to leave plenty of flowers, so the plants will seed and proliferate, and never take the last of anything," Meredith says. This is for the sake of both the ecosystem and the bourgeoning foraging community. "On Sunday, I went to a patch of pokeweed I always harvest from, and I saw that about half of it had been neatly sliced away — a sign that foraging is getting more popular — and whoever it was left plenty for the rest of us," she says. Lesson #8: If you want your food to taste good, don’t trust old field guides. "Those are edible, sure, but they’re not very tasty," says Meredith as we pass some plantain leaves poking out of cracks along a concrete walking path. "But you see plantain leaves over and over again in some of these older books. You start to get the idea that the author never actually tried half of these plants." Chalk it up to the changing face of foraging. What used to be considered a survival skill for wilderness hikers is now the domain of sophisticated gourmets. The good news is, there are plenty of great resources that reflect the new zeitgeist. Meredith likes Brill’s Foraging with the "Wildman," John Kallas’s Wild Food Adventures , and Sam Thayer’s Foragers Harvest . Her own two books and blog also have recipes and other foraging resources. PHOTOS: WHAT WE FOUND Images from our tour of Prospect Park with urban foraging expert Leda Meredith. All photos by Kethevane Gorjestani. You don’t have to walk far into Prospect Park to find something worth foraging. Just inside the northern entrance (above), we encountered mugworth, which Meredith says can be used as a seasoning. Meredith picked and smelled some of the mugwort, which is also known as cronewort. Meredith says the leaves and flowers of the common violet are good in salads. Here Meredith finds some burdock, whose roots are a staple food in many cultures. The Japanese use it in stirfry. Meredith cuts an immature flower stalk of the burdock plant and peels off the leaves. Here’s a bonanza of plants ripe for foraging. Just off the path, Meredith found this mix of mugwort, dandelion, epazote, and lamb’s quarters. Smell can help Meredith identify certain plants. Epazote leaves like these have a strong, distinct odor. See even more of what Meredith found in Prospect Park in our photo set on Flickr .
See original here:
Urban Foraging: From the Local Park to Your Plate