Comment by burnt-resistor
5 hours ago
There are all kinds of toxic residues and contaminants in the US food supply because there's a lack of testing, lack of regulation, lack of enforcement, and a lack of the precautionary principle. Meanwhile, farmers will continue spraying RoundUp on oats just before harvest, rice grown in the US will contain arsenic from naturally-occurring contaminated soils, and almost all bread contains toxic crap banned in the rest of the world.
There is some weird obsession on the internet about proving the U.S. is the worst at everything.
Believe me, the majority of “The rest of the world” does not protect its citizens from harmful food contamination.
You’re the worst at everything when you’re the only one measuring it. There are parts of the world where vegetables are grown next to where factories dump toxic waste. Pretty sure no one is measuring that.
I attribute a lot of it to the principle of "punching up".
Agreed. Nobody really talks about most other countries, while the US is pretty much top of the list of nearly every topic. So we're constantly a target.
I agree the situation is shitty in the US, but what does that have to do with pesticides banned in the EU? It seems entirely superfluous to this to this story.
This article is about the EU food supply, and does not appear to attribute the contaminants to US exports. Why are you bringing American cultivation practices into this?
If anything, this OP demonstrates that the EU regulations are futile (though that may be an overstatement).
EU generally leads the developed world in regulation, that has become a meme and a joke.
but for Food related stuff, EU standards and regulation are truly superior for consumers, relative to US and other countries
The United States has far stricter labeling standards than the EU. That's why US products appear to have more ingredients, they are required to say what their ingredients are mad from, even on identical products.
Many things that are well known memes are completely false. Not everything in the EU is better regulated. Everyone always complains about chlorinated chicken, not realizing that <5% of US chicken is washed that way as chicken now uses vinegar washes, and those that did were at concentrations deemed safe by the FDA.
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> but for Food related stuff, EU standards and regulation are truly superior for consumers, relative to US and other countries
That is mostly a myth. EU and US take different approaches to setting food safety regulations, which means they have different lists of banned substances. The EU bans a lot of substances that have no evidence of actual adverse effects just out of an abundance of caution or sometimes even because of uninformed public perception, which is why their regulations seem more comprehensive, but the vast majority of that has no real positive effect on consumers.
https://blog.ansi.org/ansi/differences-between-eu-and-us-foo...
In terms of actual food safety, the US is basically the same as the EU (it technically ranks even higher than most EU countries on the "Quality and Safety" criterion of the Global Food Security Index, but the top countries are all very close)
https://insights.economistenterprise.com/sustainability/proj...
(Before anyone accuses me of something, I live in the EU and generally prefer EU in terms of lawmaking and regulations. It's just that food safety specifically is a point of comparison which is much less true than people usually think)
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> If anything, this OP demonstrates that the EU regulations are futile (though that may be an overstatement).
Nothing said that EU farmers used these pesticides, its related to imports. And even most imports they tested were in the legal limit even though they are from areas where these things are legal.