Mmm, fresh, red, plump, juicy strawberries. You know what tastes really great with them? It’s a secret I learned as a kid. Dip them in sour cream and then dip them in brown sugar. Delish. Or dip them in homemade whipped cream, or chocolate, or both. Or, if they are fresh picked, just eat them plain. But you know what doesn’t taste good with strawberries? Cancer.

Today, the scientists at Pesticide Action Network released a document called Poison Gases in the Field: Pesticides put California families in danger. It’s about tests done with a device called a Drift Catcher that monitors the air for fumigant pesticides. They gave it a try in the California town of Sisquoc to see how well local residents were protected from airborne, carcinogenic pesticides. The answer? Not well.

You see, nature doesn’t think much of commercially grown strawberries. That’s because nature doesn’t like monoculture – vast fields of a single species, year after year. So if you want to overcome nature by growing strawberries as a monoculture, you need some potent toxins to do so. And that begins with soil fumigation, a process that uses a deadly chemical to kill everything in the soil before you plant your strawberries.

The test in this case was with a soil fumigant called chloropicrin. After a soil fumigation in which all of the application rules were followed and no equipment failure occurred, scientists measured levels of chloropicrin in the air. they found that “Average levels over the 19-day period were 23 to 151 times higher than acceptable cancer risks.”

“What’s striking about these results is what they imply about fumigation in general,” says PANNA Staff Scientist Karl Tupper. “Sisquoc is not unique in terms of how close fumigated fields are to people’s homes. The application we monitored was typical as well—there were no blunders and the amount of chloropicrin used was not abnormally high.”

“So if this is happening in Sisquoc, it’s surely happening in other California communities, and it will certainly happen with methyl iodide if it’s registered,” concludes Tupper.

Methyl iodide is another soil fumigant – and a potent carcinogen – that the state of California is currently considering allowing. Aside from cancer, soil fumigants are linked to headaches, vomiting, severe lung irritation, neurological effects, reduced fertility, birth defects and higher rates of miscarriage.

So, if we do away with soil fumigants and we don’t allow the use of methyl iodide, does that mean we can’t grow any strawberries? Hardly. Sustainable farmers work WITH nature instead of trying to overcome it, nurturing soil life instead of killing it. And it’s very possible to grow strawberries sustainably:

“Sustainable farming is all about building healthy soil,” says organic farmer Jim Cochran of Swanton Berry Farm. “I’ve been growing strawberries for 25 years, and fumigant pesticides are the last thing I’d put in my soil.”

In the next few weeks, we will likely see the passage of the food safety bill in the Senate. It’s already passed the House so this is one of the last steps before it hits Obama’s desk. It’s also one of our last chances to influence the bill. In my view, the goals of the bill are two-fold: First, to make food safer; and second, to NOT harm small businesses and small farms that don’t pose a threat to the safety of our larger food system. I think the bill does the first item very well. Admittedly, in many ways it is fighting the last battle, closing loopholes that were apparent problems in last year’s peanut butter salmonella outbreak. But they are loopholes that should have been closed long ago.

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Written by Jennifer Rogers for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

America’s bicentennial year, 1976, was one of phenomenal events and inventions: Apple Inc was founded; West Point began to admit women; my husband was born; and the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), our primary chemical safety law, was enacted. In the ensuing 34 years, much has changed. The boxy desktop computer bears almost no resemblance to the recently launched iPad; women are serving valiantly in both Iraq and Afghanistan; and my husband has gone from a pudgy baby to a gray-haired professor. Unfortunately, despite the introduction of thousands of new chemicals into the products we use every day, TSCA has undergone no revisions.  Scientists, health care providers, reproductive and environmental health advocates agree: TSCA has not kept up with the times.

When TSCA was passed in 1976, it was considered a huge step forward in the government’s ability to regulate toxic chemicals. To some degree, however, TSCA was already outdated before it was signed into law. Many dangerous chemicals were “grandfathered in” under the new law and remain in use today. Many new chemicals remain unregulated because the legislation was limited in scope.

As a result, one of the primary deficiencies of TSCA is that the chemicals we encounter in our daily lives—in our water and baby bottles, food containers, children’s toys, household cleaners, and personal care products—are not tested for safety and these chemicals are harming the reproductive health and fertility of women, men and children. Lower-income and communities of color are disproportionately and adversely affected by chemicals in consumer products whether through workplace exposure, specific marketing of niche products, or through products sold in and to their communities. For example, dollar stores, typically located in lower-income communities, are often the last stop for consumer products that can not or will not be sold in other stores. These products, including house wares, toys, jewelry, and food and drink containers, often have been recalled or discontinued. However, these products end up in dollar stores with little regulation or oversight. Likewise, environmental and reproductive justice organizations have long been concerned with the toxic chemicals found in skin lighteners and hair relaxers, products marketed specifically to women of color.

Pregnant women and children are another group among the most vulnerable to toxic chemicals.  We know that the short- and long-term effects of early exposure to even low levels of toxic chemicals have been linked to a host of health problems including childhood cancer, early puberty, reduced fertility, and learning and developmental disabilities, including autism and ADHD. … Read more

The latest women’s movement story from the New York Times Magazine has a farming theme. “The Femivore’s Dilemma” by Peggy Orenstein describes how somewhere between the workforce and the housework some women are raising chickens, growing vegetables, raising chicks. tending gardens. Sounds lovely?

Maybe. but As Orenstein unpacks the story, it’s clear that the only women who are actually happy in this picture have husbands who pay the bills…The backyard garden’s nice, but it’s mostly a status symbol.

Those women who actually try to live off their farming find the whole enterprise frustrated by lack of credit and cash. In other hands that would have been the perfect segue to talk about most of the world’s farmers – also women. You know, the ones who produce half the world’s food with near to no access to credit

or power…

Those women, in the Magazine’s story, are inexplicably invisible.

If the Times really wanted to talk dilemmas — there is no shortage. But the one we need to be talking about isn’t what will it take to make status symbol farming satisfying — it’s how do we empower the world’s women farmers. Raising chickens isn’t the key to feminist liberation. But women’s security just might be key to ending hunger.

The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter.com.

As food consciousness hits Americans—and wealthy Global Northerners everywhere—it’s not just cooking that has seen a resurgence. Farming is experiencing a new cachet that it hasn’t seen in ages. Dirt is cool, rather like those ill-fitting thrift-store clothes—it proves that you don’t care about social status or glossy magazines… right?

Raising some tomatoes in the backyard isn’t exactly new—my mother did so when I was younger, and though she hardly kept us afloat through the fruits of her labor, it was nice to have fresh veggies on the table.

Peggy Orenstein had a piece this weekend in the New York Times Magazine, titled “The Femivore’s Dilemma.” She starts her article by talking about all her hip friends—cracking wise about “the Vatican of locavorism” and laughs, “Apparently it is no longer enough to know the name of the farm your eggs came from; now you need to know the name of the actual bird.”

Her feminist friends are now not just staying home to raise the kids, but finding liberation in raising chickens, growing food, and making other necessities. But her casting of backyard hobby gardening as fulfilling the holes in the lives of feminists who wanted to work, as is usual for middle-class feminists, leaves out the fact that fighting to get jobs was a goal of the privileged. Other women were already working, not for fulfillment, but for survival.

In the same way, backyard gardening, in Orenstein’s view, is a new way for feminists to find fulfillment, a way to do more work than just the housework but less work than a full-time job. Meanwhile, Warwick Sabin points out:

“It used to be that keeping a few free-range chickens, tending some grain-fed hogs, and raising a small vegetable garden was how people simply survived. Now these are often vanity projects for young hipsters and retired hedge-fund executives who have discovered the forgotten pleasures of “heirloom” tomatoes and artisanal sausage. Incredibly, we’ve reached a point in our society where things that humans have done for thousands of years—grow a vegetable, smoke or cure a piece of meat—now provide the grounds for smug satisfaction.”

My mother gave up her garden when she had to go back to work to really put food on the table. The backyard tomatoes weren’t going to keep my sister and I going, and my father’s income suddenly wasn’t enough for us. And there lies the problem, the tension between the hipness of foodie-gardening and the real work of producing food: gardening in your backyard is a hobby, not work that can pay your bills.

More at GlobalCommentl.

Food politics are sweeping the United States. The local food movement, the slow food movement, all of it embodied in periodic sweeping pieces from lead guru Michael Pollan, whose writing is lush and pretty enough to make you feel the sensual pleasure he takes in his food—from procuring to cooking to eating, though rarely growing/killing.

Pollan and other foodies want to return to a world where cooking isn’t just an afterthought or something we pay others to do. But too often these food evangelists forget a couple of important factors. One of them being that cooking is work.

In a mostly-lovely New York Times Magazine piece last summer, Pollan sang the praises of Julia Child (revived by the Oscar-nominated Meryl Streep in “Julie and Julia”). He wrote:

Child was less interested in making it fast or easy than making it right, because cooking for her was so much more than a means to a meal. It was a gratifying, even ennobling sort of work, engaging both the mind and the muscles.

Kate Harding noted Pollan’s call for a return to cooking, though, sounds an awful lot to some of us like a call for women to get back in the kitchen. His acknowledgement of cooking as work that could be satisfying, in other words, leaves out the fact that it is also work that many people hate. She suggests:

I wasn’t around in the ’60s, but I’m guessing [feminists] made ridiculous, man-hating arguments like, “Dude, Julia Child gets paid to cook.”

….

And for women, having the option of feeding ourselves and our families without working pro bono all day is part of what allows us to function as (mostly) equal citizens.

Pollan may not have been making an explicitly gendered argument toward people getting back in the kitchen, but he did note that televised cooking has shifted from Julia Child’s glamorous-yet-comforting how-to style to daytime “dump ‘n’ stir” and nighttime competition that moves at a breakneck pace—and is made to appeal to men.

It’s been an argument made for years that cooking, when it is glamorous and well-compensated, is something for men. Chefs are male, but the everyday cooking in the household is something for women to do. When men do the work, in other words, it is labor to be compensated (if chefs do often make very little in comparison to the waitstaff at fancy restaurants) and congratulated; when women do it, it is part of everyday life.

Out of the kitchen and into the workforce arguments always had a class (and race) division to them: many women had already been working and didn’t find it particularly liberating. Many of them, often women of color, worked as domestic laborers as well—getting paid, if not very well, to do the same work they then did for free at their own home. Well-off women were already recognizing in their own way that cooking was work, and we still recognize this when we watch cooking shows on TV or go to restaurants, fancy or otherwise.

Now back-in-the-kitchen arguments have their own class dimension. They imply the time to spend in the kitchen as well as the money to buy fancy ingredients. Ethically produced local food tends to be more expensive partly because the people who produce it are being paid decently, so despite the lack of middlemen we pay much more for organic produce from the farm around the corner.

More at Global Comment.

Mrs. Obama’s campaign to prevent childhood obesity did not mention food marketing to kids.  But check the latest research.

Researchers at UCLA took a careful look at the correlation between watching commercials on TV and childhood obesity (Their paper is in the February 2010 American Journal of Public Health).  Kids who watch commercials on TV are more likely to be obese than kids who watch non-commercial TV.  Commercials, of course, are largely for junk food and kids see a lot of them.  The authors conclude:

steering children away from commercial television may have a meaningful effect in reducing childhood obesity…The existence of many high-quality, enjoyable, and educational programs available on DVD for all ages should make it relatively easy for health educators and care providers to nudge children’s viewing toward less obesogenic television content [my emphasis].

Relatively easy?  They have to be kidding.  Food commercials are ubiquitous in kids’ lives.

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This post originally appeared on Food Politics.

I received this note yesterday from Michael Jacobson, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, about his latest column in The Huffington Post:

How would you feel if you had to pay $8.50 a gallon for gasoline?

Then why on Earth would you pay that much for water and high-fructose corn syrup?

That’s how much Coke costs in those new 7.5-ounce, 90-calorie cans.  Calorie-counters may appreciate the small size (90 calories) but dollar-counters beware:  We did a little math and it turns out that Coke in the new can costs between 50- and 140-percent more than Coke in the old 12-ounce cans.  Basically, Coke is charging two or three cents more per ounce for Coke in a smaller can—and this from a company that throws temper tantrums when lawmakers propose a one-cent-per-ounce tax on soda!

I once asked a group of retailing executives why the cost of smaller size containers was so high (surely the containers don’t cost that much).  They said: “if customers want smaller portions they ought to be willing to pay for them.”  Oh.