Chances are more than good that if you are getting your produce or grain products from something larger than a regional or local farm, the pesticides used by those farms may be synthetic, rather than organic. It’s a matter of cost vs. eco-friendly; so don’t get your hopes up too high, especially in this economy. Theses are businesses first, and environmentalists second (if at all).

 

Luckily, there is an ever-increasing public awareness aimed at the benefits of organic… everything. Not co-incidentally, pesticides are high on that very same list. As far as health and safety are concerned, you may not want to hear this, but the best pesticide (organic or synthetic) is NO pesticide. That method, by the way, actually is possible, if not always practical, but is also a topic for another day. The uncomfortable truth is, that more than a few organic or ‘safe’ pesticides are not as safe as you (or the retailers who sell them) might like to believe. Here are some examples:

Given the fact that the world’s first recorded landfill dates back to 3000 B.C., in the Cretan capital of Knossos, it is astonishing that the world’s preferred way of disposing of its trash has remained relatively unchanged until the most recent decades. Certainly, evidence of progress has popped up during those 5,000 years: Turkey is reported to have begun the recycling of marble facades for use as grave markers in 1000 AD; Japan began recycling waste paper in 1031; on our own soil, early patriots melted down a statue of King George III to make bullets; and as early as 1874, the city of Baltimore introduced curbside recycling. Still, these pockets of progress were isolated and stagnate. While it took the world less that 7 years to get to the moon after John F. Kennedy’s famous “We choose to go to the moon” speech, it has taken 5 millennia to get to the recycling center. Arguably, though, when change came, it came fast.