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The term chemical applies to all the basic substances that make up the world around us, including trhe more than one hundred fundamental elements, such as iron, lead, mercury, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Chemical compounds, or combinations of different elements, include such things as water, acids, salts, and alcohol. Many of these compounds occur naturally. Many of the synthetic manmade chemicals in the plastics are toxic during their production, use, and disposal. To rely on industry for health studies of chemicals is suicidal. Public information from the EPA is generally not in step with current knowledge. For those who value their health and that of their children, the EPA cannot be a prime source because of industry/political pressure. Testing for low-dose toxicity and long-term health effects on the thousands of existing chemicals is quite rare. At the same time, new ones are being created at an alarming rate without adequate testing. The total worldwide output of synthetic chemicals is staggering.
Chemical Dumbing Down of Society----------------------------------------MSG part 1----------------
How The Food Industry Is Deceiving You part 1
A chemical reaction is defined as a process in which one substance is chemically converted to another. Fire is a chemical reaction; it converts one combustible substance--paper, gasoline, hydrogen, and so forth--into a totally different substance or substances. Many chemical reactions occur unceasingly, both around us and inside us. Starting with DDT and thalidomide and the fear of Red Dye #2, we have been over-burdened with deadly this and toxic that to the point where there is hardly the mental room left for remembering our e-mail address! The American Cancer Society spends millions of advertising dollars that come in from donors including the very corporations that create the carcinogenic chemicals. Industry also pressures legislators to reduce restrictions in the name of jobs. Their huge ACS donations are not only tax deductible, but are used by the corporations to give themselves a benevolent appearance and to relieve their conscience. The Food Quality Protection Act and other statutes require EPA to develop and implement a screening and testing program on chemicals to assess their endocrine-disrupting properties. However, industry has made sure that EPA is grossly under-budgeted for implementation activities for its endocrine disruptor-screening program. But EPA had only $3.2 million for all endocrine disruptor work in Fiscal Year 1999, and the proposed figure for FY 2000 was $7.7 million.
Industry has not expressed a willingness to contribute resources to the EPA. Some estimates put the cost of screening up to $1 million per chemical. Unfortunately, quite a bit more than cancer is at stake. For many years toxicologists have known that the greater the quantity of a toxin, the greater the risk of a negative health effect like cancer. Though widely dispelled by current science as a myth, it is still heard frequently from industry and those dependants upon industry cash. Chemicals can have many different deleterious health effects at high and/or low doses. Extremely low doses of some chemicals called endocrine disruptors (EDs) can have permanent severe consequences. The most vulnerable to this attack on the endocrine system is the embryo and very young. EDs disturb the endocrine system's normal operation in orchestrating many essential bodily functions.
EDs mimic hormones, which can operate in concentrations of parts per trillion. One can begin to imagine a quantity so infinitesimally small by thinking of a drop of gin in a train of tank cars full of tonic. One drop in 660 tank cars would be one part in a trillion; such a train would be six miles long. It has been observed in nature that endocrine disruptors have the capability of skewing the physical and psychological qualities of an animal's sexuality. The outcome of such interference in the endocrine system of an embryo, infant, or child by one or any combination of these synthetic chemicals is generally permanent and may not be evident until after puberty. Damage done to a fetus can be passed on to its descendents. It is not known how many chemicals are endocrine disruptors. Combinations of EDs can have a synergistic effect, in that the total toxicity is greater than the sum of the parts. The list of deleterious health effects includes physical deformities, cancer (brain, breast, cervix, colon, testicles), early puberty, immune deficiencies, endometriosis, behavioral problems, lowered intelligence, impaired memory, skewed sexuality, low sperm count, motor skill deficits, reduced eye-hand coordination, reduced physical stamina, and much more. These have all been evidenced in animal studies and many have been noted in human studies. Since we live in a sea of man-made toxicity, there is great difficulty in pinpointing exactly which chemical or combination of chemicals was the cause of a cancer or deformity. A sea of toxicants surrounds us on a day-to-day basis. Synergistic effects of combining more than one makes them even more potent; extreme lack of human testing data; inadequate testing of new chemicals; nonexistent testing of older "grandfathered" existing chemicals; connecting cause and effect is difficult, as many effects are not known until after puberty.
The annual global production of chemicals, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), amounts to about $1.5. Some 100,000 chemicals are now on the market and 1,000 to 2,000 new ones are added each year. Many of these end up in the food chain, in our water and in the air. We are sailing into uncharted waters. We are all part of an experimental generation, and the full effects will not be known for decades to come. According to the United Nations Environmental Program, each year, some 100 tons of mercury, 3,800 tons of phosphates, and 60,000 tons of detergents enter the Mediterranean Sea as a result of human activities. The amount of chemicals and other wastes released into the air, water and land by U.S. industrial facilities rose by 5 percent in 1999, the latest year for which data was available, the Environmental Protection Agency. EPA said the amount of toxic releases in 1999, based on the newest data available in its annual toxic inventory report, jumped 5 percent from the year before to 7.8 billion pounds. Federal law requires industrial facilities to publicly report each year the amount of 644 toxic chemicals and chemical compounds they release. The metal mining industry accounted for half the toxic releases at 3.9 billion pounds. Electric utilities were the second largest polluting sector in 1999, with just less than 1.2 billion pounds in chemical releases. The coal mining industry released 11.8 million pounds.
More than 600 million pounds of arsenic and arsenic compounds were released into the nation's land and water in 1999. Arsenic causes several types of cancer and is poisonous. The average person eats more than five pounds of chemical ingredients every year. Globally, it's a $1.5 trillion per year industry. The total amount consumed in the U.S. is now more than one billion pounds per year. About 80% of the additives now in use are flavorings. It is estimated that in the U.S., 700 chemicals are used for this purpose. France uses seven... Already, studies have determined that Americans carry measurable residues of 94 different chemical contaminants in their bodies. Scientists have found more than 100 organic compounds in umbilical cords, including halogenated hydrocarbons (including carbon tetrachloride and chloroform), plastic components and food preservatives. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 80% of Americans now living would not pass federal inspection for slaughter as cattle do...
The modern farmer looks down from the air-conditioned cab of his $100,000 John Deere tractor and says, "What's this?" He sees a little fungus growing on the plant and he says, "We ain't gonna put up with this. We know how to deal with the likes of you!" He gets into this pickup truck, heads down to the agriculture chemical supply station, and returns loaded with barrels of chemosterilants, with skulls and crossbones on their labels. Now he's ready to treat the plant. In the back of his pickup truck are barrels with labels that say things like: "Use extreme caution--do not inhale--use in well-ventilated areas--do not allow any contact with skin or hair--do not dispose of near water--keep away from livestock and feed--may cause blindness or death if taken internally--read all instructions carefully--federal law requires application in accordance with label data," and he thinks, "This looks good. I'll apply this."
Result of Chemicals in Foods
The National Cancer Institute (NCI) confirmed in July of 1988 what environmentalists have said for decades. After years of testing, it proved that the main chemical agent in some 1,500 pesticides--2,4-D--is a cause of cancer in humans, particularly American farmers who have used it since 1948. Sixty million pounds are applied to U.S. crops annually, mostly corn and wheat. In your local hardware store, it is sold under various brand names as a house and garden pesticide and weed killer. In spite of NCI's findings, the EPA has issued no change on the danger status of 2,4-D. The EPA focuses almost entirely on cancer to rule on safety. But isn't that like measuring the safety of a toy by determining only if it kills the child? And what about the effects of combining pesticides? Once inside the cauldron of the human body, what are the synergistic effects of the 300-plus agricultural chemicals approved by the EPA? They don't know. No one does. But no one doubts that the answers would be frightening. The CDC claims that 65% of all birth defects are of unknown etiology, but the vast percentage of birth defects are induced by the mother's encounters with toxic substances. The one pesticide found frequently in residue testing is Captan, which is structurally similar to Thalidomide, the sedative blamed as the agent that caused thousands of infants to be born without legs or arms in the early 1960s. The United Nations estimates that our planet is subjected to two million tons of pesticide applications every year.
At a rate of 20 million tons per decade, how can any rational argument be made that, when safely applied, they pose no threat? The chemical and cellular processes within the body's cells cannot react to the passing whims of chemists without disturbance in function. It took thousands of years for the body to adjust itself to changing environmental conditions. When these conditions are suddenly altered by the actions of men, the cells cannot make the adjustment--disease is the result. Industrial leaks, accidents and completely unregulated emissions throw billions of pounds of gases, particles and vapors into the air. Not only do we breathe them into our bodies, but they are deposited on farm lands, in water reservoirs used for drinking water and for crop irrigation, etc. They are in our food chains, thousands of different toxins in the air, from Los Angeles to Utah; from Washington State to Chicago; from Louisiana to Minnesota; from Ohio to Maine.
We live in a sea of chemicals, but most of those waters are uncharted. While thousands of chemicals are widely used in industry, there's relatively little information of how dangerous many of them may be, according to a recent study by the National Academy of Sciences. "We don't know very much about the mechanics of chemical toxicity," said Philip G. Watanabae, Director of Toxicology at the Dow Chemical Co., Midland, Michigan. Since World War II, chemical production has increased ten-fold, from less than 20 billion to over 220 billion pounds per year. These compounds have been spewed into the environment. The United Nations estimates that our planet is subjected to two million tons of pesticide applications every year. At a rate of 20 million tons per decade, how can they think that, when safely applied, they pose no threat? Blind to all considerations except "yield-per-acre"--meaning "profits"--chemical manufacturers conducted practically no research as to the effect of these sprays on other forms of life, on the ecology or on the soil. As a result, we have paid the price of our good health for this criminal negligence. No one has investigated these chemicals, no one knows how concentrated they are or their long-range effects on health. No one knows how far they travel, how they combine into even more devastating compounds.
The agro-chemical industry, which utilizes chemicals, not natural methods in agriculture, was born out of a paper presented in the 1840s to the British Royal Academy of Sciences by a renowned German chemist. Baron Justus Von Liebig, who in 1831 invented the anesthetic chloroform, analyzed human and plant ash and determined that nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (NPK) were all the minerals plants needed. If fed synthetically to plants, he reasoned, farmers could force plants to grow and support healthy humans. In 1855, Liebig published Agricultural Chemistry. This book became the founding testament for the German chemical industry (richest in the world today), through which they began aggressively to market the NPK idea to farmers. The industry suppressed all opposition to their "artificial manure," that was soon exported around the world. Had Liebig known about trace minerals, fungus, and microbial life, he would have undoubtedly realized what a deadly new science he was launching.
During the closing days of the Reagan Administration, the EPA responded to the chemosterilant-food-adulteration-cancer situation. On October 11, 1988, the EPA weakened restrictions on cancer-causing pesticides in foods. This means the existing weak standards on the 2.7 billion pounds of pesticides used in the U.S. each year have been made even weaker. Three-fourths of this is used directly in commercial agriculture. The remaining one-fourth is used on American lawns. One of the most potent cancer-causing agents known to science is coursing into the nation's food supply. On February 23, 1989, the Wall Street Journal gave an unheard-of four pages of coverage to the front page leading story. The front page headline declared: "Spreading Poison; Fungus in Corn Crop, A Potent Carcinogen, Invades Food Supplies; Regulators Fail to Stop Sales of Last Fall's Harvest Laden With Aflatoxin." According to Time magazine, at least nine states have confirmed the aflatoxin corn contamination. To dilute corn, brokers are mixing the previous year's stored corn crop with the unfit harvests. In response to this toxic problem, the FDA is protecting the farmers by raising the permissible level of aflatoxin contamination on corn in interstate commerce by 1,500%! But today, with the financial pressures overriding all other concerns, the solution chosen is to just lower the standard. When it comes to business-versus-health, it's politics as usual.
The U.S. Midwest produces about a third of the world's corn crop and it is the most important commodity produced in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana. Asians and Africans exposed to aflatoxin have the world's highest rate of liver cancer. As much as 36% of the tested corn in some Midwestern states shows positive for aflatoxin. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of milk have had to be destroyed from Texas to Wisconsin, from Minnesota to Florida. Japan and the Soviet Union have rejected United States corn products and bulk shipment, unless it was certified to be exclusively the present years harvest. Corn-laden ships in New Orleans have been offloaded. Half of the petro-type nitrogen fertilizer sold in the United States is applied as anhydrous ammonia (83% N) or as ammonia solutions (aqueous ammonia). Straight ammonia and nitrogen destroys the humus in the soil. As soil vitality declines, the stress imposed by a drought is only a catalyst to reveal the soil's inherent susceptibility.
Out of 3.5 million truck drivers, four from the Northwest broke a code of silence in the industry, and told members of a House Public Works and Transportation Subcommittee in July, 1989 that it is common practice to use the same refrigerated trailers to haul food and garbage. The truckers described how loads of food are taken from farm states to Eastern cities and then exchanged for loads of urban waste that are "back-hauled" to landfills in the South and Midwest. Then the process is repeated, with the trucks again hauling food eastward. "It actually pays more to haul garbage than food," testified one trucker. For example, Indian River, a nationally recognized Florida tank company that regularly hauls liquid foods, with a fleet of more than 300 tank trucks, was regularly hauling a non-food-grade chemical for Nyacol Products, of Ashland, Mass. The substance is colloidal antimony, a pentoxide used as a flame proofing agent in textiles and plastics (shown to cause acute congestion of the heart, liver and kidneys, according to the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists). One of the tankers, owned by a nationally known carrier with a large fleet of tankers, had previously carried ethylene glycol (also known as antifreeze; it is in the family of solvents, and also is used as hydraulic fluid and as a chemical intermediate in the production of polyesters), then carried cooking oil. Another Midwest owned tanker previously had carried latex emulsion that had dried on the inside of the tanker a half-inch thick, and then carried apple juice. Robert DeLashmit heard truckers tell how they hauled engine oil, resin and formaldehyde in tankers that next carried refined cooking oils for his firm, Premier Edible Oils of which he is executive vice president. The truckers testified that Premium Transport supplied the Portland refinery with false information that they were hauling only juice. Yet, his company continues to use the company to haul refined kosher oils used by the baking, salad oil, margarine and the confectionery industries.
An official with a nationally known carrier that operates a fleet of more than 2,000 tankers, said the bottom line is cheap freight rates. He told a Yakima Valley, Washington, juice processor that tankers were hauling their juice South but backhauling asphalt emulsion North. "They just didn't want to hear that," he said. Don Roberts, a trucker from Kansas City, says he alternated food loads such as juice with chemicals more dangerous than those reported by the Northwest tank truck drivers. Roberts has hauled insecticides to the Yakima Valley, then loaded apple juice. He took a load of highly toxic phenolic resin to Oregon, after which he took on a load of kosher cooking oil. Other times, Roberts said, he dropped off a load of the wood preservative, Pentachlorophenol, containing the potent carcinogen dioxin, in North Dakota and then drove to Yakima to pick up apple juice. "Other tank companies were doing the same thing," Roberts says. "We hauled anything that was liquid. It was legal. There was no reason not to." The drivers who came forward to expose some of the hauling practices said they lied or falsified paperwork to hide the fact they had just hauled a chemical. Food companies, they said, never tried to verify the information. "If people are telling you this is not widespread, it's a blatant, outright lie," says a cleaning specialist at a large tank wash facility on the West Coast. This man cleans hundreds of tankers for carriers around the country, and he says many of them are hauling chemicals before going on to load a food-grade commodity.
These are not the "food-grade chemicals" that industry insists are being hauled, he says. Cleaning procedures for tankers can run into the hundreds of dollars. Even though the insides of these tankers are cleaned with various types of caustic washes, only a few trucking companies pay the additional expense that goes with cleaning internal valves and replacing various gaskets--most of the companies who do cleaning just use hot water. Determining the toxicological impacts of many of the chemicals that have been hauled is not an easy task, because many of the chemicals hauled are trade names or proprietary formulations--substances not found in handbooks or research literature. They don't even know what's in some of the stuff being hauled in tank trucks that also haul food.
Lettuce grown in the fall and winter months in Southern California or Arizona may contain higher levels of toxic rocket fuel than is considered safe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to independent laboratory tests commissioned by Environmental Working Group (EWG). In the first-ever tests of perchlorate in supermarket produce, 18 percent of lettuce samples contained detectable levels of perchlorate, and an average serving of these contaminated samples contained 4 times more than the EPA says is safe in drinking water. EWG estimates that by eating lettuce, 1.6 million American women of childbearing age are exposed daily during the winter months to more perchlorate than the EPA's recommended safe dose. EWG's findings of perchlorate in retail produce confirm previous tests on greenhouse-grown lettuce seedlings by the EPA and field-grown vegetables by a San Bernardino, Calif. farm whose irrigation water supplies were contaminated by defense contractor Lockheed Martin's abandoned rocket-testing facility.
Perchlorate, the explosive component of rocket and missile fuel, can affect the thyroid gland's ability to make essential hormones. For fetuses, infants and children, disruptions in thyroid hormone levels can cause lowered IQ, mental retardation, loss of hearing and speech, and motor skill deficits. Currently there are no enforceable perchlorate safety standards but EWG argues that a national safety standard should be no higher than one-tenth the EPA's currently recommended level.
Toxic heavy metals, chemicals and radioactive wastes are being recycled as fertilizer and spread over farmers' fields nationwide--and there is no federal law requiring that they be listed as ingredients, The Seattle Times reported. Local farmers concerned about poor yields and sickly cattle knew the issue in the central Washington town of Quincy, population 4,000, when Mayor Patty Martin led an investigation. "It is unbelievable what is happening, but it's true," Martin told the newspaper, which published a series about the practice. Until now, the state Department of Agriculture sampled fertilizers only to see if they contained advertised levels of beneficial substances. But the state is currently testing a cross-section of fertilizer products to see if they threaten crops, livestock or people, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported. "The key question is what toxics are, as it were, along for the ride in fertilizers," said Tom Fitzsimmons, director of the state Department of Ecology. Use of industrial waste as a fertilizer ingredient is a growing national phenomenon, The Times reported.
In Gore, Okla., a uranium-processing plant gets rid of low-level radioactive waste by licensing it as a liquid fertilizer and spraying it over 9,000 acres of grazing land. At Camas, Wash., lead-laced waste from a pulp mill is hauled to farms and spread over crops destined for livestock feed. In Moxee City, Wash., dark powder from two Oregon steel mills is poured from rail cars into silos at Bay Zinc Co. under a federal hazardous waste storage permit. Then it is emptied from the silos for use as fertilizer. The newspaper called the powder a toxic byproduct of steel making but did not identify it. "When it goes into our silo, it's a hazardous waste," said Bay Zinc's president, Dick Camp. "When it comes out of the silo, it's no longer regulated. The exact same material." Federal and state governments encourage the recycling, which saves money for industry and conserves space in hazardous-waste landfills. The substances found in recycled fertilizers include cadmium, lead, arsenic, radioactive materials and dioxins, the Times reported. The wastes come from incineration of medical and municipal wastes, and from heavy industries including mining, smelting, cement kilns and wood products.
Mixed and handled correctly, some industrial wastes can help crops grow, but beneficial materials such as nitrogen and magnesium often are accompanied by dangerous heavy metals such as cadmium and lead, the Times said. "Nowhere in the country has a law that says if certain levels of heavy metals are exceeded, it can't be a fertilizer," said Ali Kashani, who directs fertilizer regulation in Washington state. Unlike many other industrialized nations, the United States does not regulate fertilizers. That makes it virtually impossible to figure out how much fertilizer contains recycled hazardous wastes. And laws in most states are far from stringent. Canada's limit for heavy metals such as lead and cadmium in fertilizer is 10 to 90 times lower than the U.S. limit for metals in sewage sludge, while the United States has no limit for metals in fertilizer, the newspaper said. "This is a definite problem," said Richard Loeppert, a soil scientist at Texas A&M University and author of several published papers on toxic elements in fertilizers. "The public needs to know."
The U.S. food-safety system consists of a hodgepodge of agencies that mostly monitor fields, factories and shipping ports to ensure food makers and sellers follow quality and safety rules. When the Environmental Protection Agency checks pesticide levels, for instance, it tests a watermelon's rind to see if the farmer sprayed the right kind and amount. But people don't eat the rind, so that testing says little about what chemicals we actually absorb. Enter the Total Diet Study. It measures traces of chemicals in the average diet--levels about 1/20th of what other food-monitoring programs can detect--both in packaged foods and after consumers wash produce, mix up ingredients and properly cook a meal. This year-in, year-out monitoring enables health officials to spot whether changes in food production or the environment affect food quality. In response, they can launch medical research, alter regulations or, if a problem is bad enough, recall a brand.
* A pesticide sprayer was sent to jail after FDA discovered he used an illegal bug-killer on 19 million bushels of oats headed for top-selling breakfast cereals.
* Baby-food carrots were recalled because they absorbed lead while growing in an old apple orchard, where a lead-based fruit pesticide had seeped into the soil years earlier.
* Insecticide was found in teething biscuits that were supposed to be organic, free of conventional chemicals.
And ever wonder why cereal always comes in plastic bags inside the box? Because this testing once uncovered PCBs leaching into wheat cereal by contact with its package, a box made of recycled paper that contained the cancer-causing pollutant. So far this year, FDA has discovered traces of illegal pesticides on some grapefruit, tomatoes and collard greens, not enough for a health risk but a mystery yet to be solved. Now the World Health Organization is urging other countries, even poor, developing ones, to adopt FDA-style testing so they can better target scarce resources to improve food safety. WHO's top priority is learning more about so-called "persistent organic pollutants"--a class of chemicals, including the widely banned pesticide DDT, that remain in the environment for years without breaking down. "Few countries have sufficient information on the exposure of their populations to the many chemicals that find their way, either intentionally or unintentionally, into food," says the WHO's Dr. Gerald Moy.
What started 40 years ago as checking a few foods for fallout from nuclear testing is today a $5 million canvassing of the food supply. Four times a year, FDA employees enter grocery stores in three different cities with identical lists so long--9 dozen eggs, 6 pounds of bacon, gallons of soda, cases of baby food--they dare not shop on crowded coupon days. With a few stops at fast-food restaurants to round out the menu, they can spend $3,000 per city. They quick-ship purchases to an FDA laboratory in Lenexa, Kan., where workers sort the food, sending ingredients that need cooking on to the nearby Belton church ladies.
Inside the lab, giant blenders grind foods into mush so scientists can test for more than 300 pesticides, cancer-causing dioxins and industrial chemicals. This year, for the first time, they're also hunting acrylamide, a possibly cancer-causing chemical formed when foods are cooked at high temperatures. They count nutrients, too. Soon, FDA will learn how much folate, which prevents birth defects, women eat--the first evidence of whether recent fortification of bread and cereal is working well enough. One rule of thumb: More processing typically means less pesticide residue. A raw peach, even washed and peeled, usually has more than a canned peach, says FDA's Sack.
Second rule of thumb: The fattier a food, the more chemicals from the environment or processing can cling to it. With stick butter or margarine, for example, "you eat a bucketload of industrial compounds from that wrapper," Sack says, adding, "They're probably harmless." Finding those traces is painstaking. Donning safety goggles, Sack picks up a flask filled with smushed yellow cake. He adds in alcohols, solvents and salts--"pesticides hate salt"--and boils and siphons the now-watery mixture to leach out everything but the pesticide-containing fat. A faintly yellow, oily skin rises to the top--those few bites of cake were 15% fat, thanks to the icing. A sophisticated machine then isolates chemical molecules, separating pesticide residue from fat and identifying it. The cake harbored traces of methyl chlorpyrifos, a widely used insecticide found in virtually any wheat-containing product "unless it's organic, and then there's no guarantee," Sack says.
Down the hall, FDA metals specialist Duane Hughes burns chocolate cake, hunting traces of lead. Metals such as brain-harming lead and mercury can sneak into food through polluted soil or water. Finding them requires destroying all of a food's organic compounds, using acid and temperatures up to 880 degrees. A machine that measures the light absorption of atoms in the remaining ash tallies any metal. Contaminant traces are mostly what the Total Diet Study records, levels usually far below federal safety limits--on the order of a part per billion, the equivalent of a kernel of corn in a silo 45 feet tall.
As long as they're legal, why bother counting so low? "We learn every day that levels once thought safe are in question," responds Hughes, the metals specialist. He notes that the government is about to lower by more than three-quarters the amount of arsenic allowed in drinking water. And as levels of well-known pollutants like DDT and PCBs have plummeted in recent years, concern shifts to newer contaminants like volatile organic compounds--industrial chemicals such as the solvent benzene or petroleum byproduct toluene--found in more and more food. Even traces add up over time, warns Richard Wiles of the Environmental Working Group, a consumer advocacy organization.
Using FDA's findings, the environmental group is about to urge grocery stores to sell brands of peanut butter and other child-friendly foods that contain the fewest chemicals. Some brands contain 30 different contaminants, admittedly legal traces, Wiles says--but he contends parents would prefer peanut butter without any benzene or toluene. "Can we clean up the production processes to get rid of them?" he asks. "It's always better to reduce your exposure to these synthetic chemical contaminants when you can." The Total Diet Study doesn't hunt every threat. Food-poisoning bacteria, for instance, aren't on the list--the government tries to tackle those bugs through a mix of different programs. That's where FDA should put more focus, contends Caroline Smith DeWaal of the advocacy Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Another weakness: The program can trace the source of most foods if contamination is found, but can't always track fresh produce--so finding which farmers used illegal pesticides this year is unlikely. Still, "it's an early warning system ... because they look at foods in a way nobody else does and find things nobody else finds," Wiles says. FDA's church ladies must cook carefully to avoid altering the findings. They use steel utensils that won't leach metal into food, and a specially cleansed water supply to avoid contaminants from the local tap. They can't just wipe off a dropped biscuit--it could have picked up lead from dust tracked in on the women's shoes.
They shrug off the national importance of the sweaty work. When asked, they just say, "We're cooking for the federal government." "It's wonderful fellowship," says Martha McKarnin as she fries pork chops. And it earns the church $2,000 a year, more than traditional bake sales. "You go home and have to take a shower--you smell," McKarnin says, waving aside the smoke. But, "I'm an old farm gal, I'm used to hard work."
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