Is the food you buy safe to eat?

[GoldenBrain]

Haha, I wouldn't classify a good portion of what people eat these days as "food".

This comment is one I agree with so much that it prompted me to start a new thread rather than completely hijack the fortune cookie thread.

Is the food you buy safe to eat? Do you even know where your food comes from or what's been sprayed on it?

My hope with this thread is simply to get people thinking about the foods they are consuming so to start things off I'll post a little bit of doom and gloom info on a popular weed control product.

Below is a link to a publication from the well established Food and Chemical Toxicology Journal. It sites a study on the popular weed control spray Round Up. The study found that the main chemical glyphosate in Roundup is carcinogenic at a rate of 1 part per trillion. That's really scary news since most things carcinogenic are so at rates in the parts per million which is bad enough.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...78691512005637

I could go on about this study but lets move on instead to genetically modified crops. Below is a link to an article in the Huffington Post which is reporting on a study relating Roundup ready crops and health problems. There are all kinds of studies now on the negative effects of GMO crops so I let you the reader look up those studies rather than posting a wall of links.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0..._n_827135.html

Put the two together and you have a real health problem. For those who don't know, Roundup ready crops are designed in a lab to be resistant to Roundup. This means that farmers can spray tons of this stuff on their fields to kill weeds without harming the food crops. Roundup has a surfactant built into the product to aid in the absorption of said product into the plants so it kills weeds systemically. This means that the food crops are also absorbing this weed killer, however due to their engineered resistance they don't die. This is why it is not recommended to use cow manure anymore for garden fertilizer because it can kill your garden. It isn't that the manure is bad per say, it's the weed killer in the manure that passes through the cow that's bad. Had any beef lately? Do you know for sure it wasn't eating Roundup ready Alfalfa?

Scared yet? Maybe not for some but I will continue to grow ALL my own produce and raise ALL my own animals. I feel bad for those who can't due to lack of garden space so I would encourage those folks to at least consider buying locally grown organic. Also I would recommend asking the seller all kinds of questions about how they grow and what they spray on their produce.

Okay, my rant is over so let the comments fly... Please feel free to site other studies or personal stories if you feel motivated.