More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Simultaneously, there is a strong tendency to brand as fanatics or cultists all who are so perverse as to demand that their food be free of insect poisons. In all this cloud of controversy, what are the actual facts?
Leaving aside for the moment the question whether these legal residues are as “safe” as they are represented to be, there remains the well-known fact that farmers very frequently exceed the prescribed dosages, use the chemical too close to the time of harvest, use several insecticides where one would do, and in other ways display the common human failure to read the fine print.
As for food produced and sold within a state, the situation is even worse, for most states have woefully inadequate laws in this field.
Although chemical manufacturers are required by law to test their materials for toxicity, they are not required to make the tests that would reliably demonstrate genetic effect, and they do not do so.
The increase itself is no mere matter of subjective impressions. The monthly report of the Office of Vital Statistics for July 1959 states that malignant growths, including those of the lymphatic and blood-forming tissues, accounted for 15 per cent of the deaths in 1958 compared with only 4 per cent in 1900. Judging by the present incidence of the disease, the American Cancer Society estimates that 45,000,000 Americans now living will eventually develop cancer. This means that malignant disease will strike two out of three families.
Dr. Francis Ray of the University of Florida has warned that “we may be initiating cancer in the children of today by the addition of chemicals [to food] . . . We will not know, perhaps for a generation or two, what the effects will be.”
An example of a carcinogen belonging to the group of new, organic pesticides is a chemical widely used against mites and ticks. Its history provides abundant proof that, despite the supposed safeguards provided by legislation, the public can be exposed to a known carcinogen for several years before the slowly moving legal processes can bring the situation under control. The story is interesting from another standpoint, proving that what the public is asked to accept as “safe” today may turn out tomorrow to be extremely dangerous.
