Mean Cuisine

Washington Monthly, July, 2001 by Greg Critser

"Today, for example, my stone-fruit supplier was making me almost crazy." She stopped for a second and brushed back a tear. "I'm sorry, this gets me emotional. But, anyway, she came by to tell me that she's going to have to tear out her orchard because she can't afford to maintain the operation without selling her cherries for $5 a pound. And you can't believe these cherries! The other day I got some that were so good that I simply put them in a bowl and sent them out as a finished dessert. My staff came back and said, you know, shouldn't we put a little cream on them or something? I said no--you couldn't do anymore--God has done it all already."

But doesn't the customer expect a little more? I asked. That, she explained, was almost beside the point. "Every day I consider what I do as educating each person who eats here," she answered. "Because in the end, that may be the most important thing I do. Especially in the United States, where we are heading toward a place where we will have no choices in the future. Americans are in denial that they are losing whole lines of fruit and whole geni of trees."

I asked Fish what she thought should be done about it. "Well," she said, weary just contemplating the matter. "We have to point the system toward sustainability--towards the ideals of organic. Because that's what we know is safer and healthier. I mean, the other day, I ate--I mean, barely licked, when I think about it--an imported papaya. And the next day I was sick. Was it food poisoning? Was it the pesticide that was probably on it?"

Here, then, was a full exposition of another key assumption of the modern foodie ethos: Residues of pesticides on food can easily make one sick. It happens all the time. It must. Yet the most recent research--by the academy, industry, and the government--suggests an entirely different situation: Modern pesticides, and modern pesticide use, may well be safer than most of us realize.

To the average American, indoctrinated by a steady stream of food scares, such a notion may sound heretical. So deep is the belief that pesticide residues routinely kill, maim, and poison us innocent fruit eaters that the most important single fact, virtually uncontested, gets drowned in the alarmist melee. Last March the esteemed Journal of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology put it this way: "During the past 50 years of regulating thousands of substances, there is no known case of toxicity in children from the ingestion of food additives or pesticides that were used in conformity with established tolerances. Accidental exposures, intentional abuse, illegal use, and exposure to applicators or to farm workers explain the entire inventory of cases of human toxicity to pesticides."

Other recent studies have also begun to debunk fears about long-term harm to children from residual amounts of certain commonly used agricultural chemicals found on food. Of course, not all the studies come to the same comforting conclusions, in part because there are still many chemicals whose long-term effects have not been tested. Fortunately, the Environmental Protection Agency, beginning in 1996, adopted tougher testing and tolerance requirements for pesticides and other chemicals in foods. But it is fair to say that the trend in conventional agriculture, both here and abroad, is toward the use of fewer and safer chemicals. Moreover, crops are increasingly being genetically modified to preclude the need for chemical treatment.