DailyDirt: Are You Going To Eat That?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

There are plenty of food additives that are just fine to eat, and many of them even have scary-sounding chemical names. This doesn't mean that all food additives are bad OR that all food additives are good. While it would be much simpler to make generalizations and label things either good or bad, it's not quite that simple, unless you want to only eat food with a very limited shelf life. Some preservatives reduce food waste and have undetectable effects on the nutritional benefits of the foods they preserve. On the other hand, there are some toxic substances that should be avoided, and they can be all-natural (eg. arsenic) or have some anthropogenic origin.

• Have you ever seen pears individually wrapped in paper? Did you know there are chemicals impregnated into that paper? Do questions make these facts seem scarier than they should? [url]
• The traditional "paddy method" for growing rice in a flooded field can increase the amount of arsenic that the rice ultimately contains. Using less water to grow rice doesn't seem to be a solution because rice seems to absorb other toxic metals in the soil, like cadmium, instead. The amounts of these metals aren't that high, but it might be a good idea to try to remove these elements from farm soils before growing rice in fields that might have elevated levels of heavy metals. [url]
• Urban gardeners who want to grow their own food within city limits might want to test their soil for contaminants like lead, other heavy metals and cleaning solvents. Fortunately, there are a growing number of resources to help urban gardeners to know what might be in their soil and the possible hazards to avoid. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: additives, arsenic, cadmium, chemicals, contaminants, farming, food, gardening, health, heavy metals, pears, rice, toxic, urban gardening