Is Home-Grown Food a Danger to Our Health?
Many of us trust home-grown vegetables more than shop-bought, while parents typically want children to eat healthily and play outside: ‘grow your own’ can be a great way of achieving both aims. But what if the chemicals we use to grow those vegetables, and to treat our lawns, are doing more harm than good?
A new Australian study from the University of Newcastle finds that while pesticide residues in the foods we buy are actively studied and tightly regulated, the same isn’t true for back garden growers. The paper — with the ominous title Pesticides in the urban environment: A potential threat that knocks at the door — describes “pesticide residues in diverse sections of the urban environment like soil” as “an open threat”. Plants can easily take-up those residues and transfer directly into homegrown food. “While applying pesticides on a small scale particularly in homestead areas, homeowners ignore the doses of pesticides used”, finds the study. “Many children and pets… are readily exposed”.
Pesticides enter the human body through skin, eyes, or ingested via food, and are known to do both sort- and long-term damage. As a study in 2011 put it: “By their very nature most pesticides show a high degree of toxicity because they are designed to kill certain organisms and thus create some risk of harm.” The term “-cide”, like homicide or suicide, comes…
