Unsafe food causes many acute and life-long diseases, including cancer. World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that foodborne and waterborne diarrhoeal diseases kill about 2.2 million people annually, including 1.9 million children.
Wherever you may be, you’ll hear news that the meat is tainted by hormone and antibiotics or vegetables are contaminated by pesticides, herbicides and Salmonella bacteria. Those reports are common in the United States and the situation isn’t that much different in Hong Kong and China. Greenpeace issued a statement that 30 out of the 35 samples of fruits and vegetables randomly purchased from five supermarkets in Beijing contained pesticide residues. An independent, third-party lab even found pesticides banned by the Chinese government and those defined “extremely hazardous” by the WHO, for example, phorate, endosulfan, triazophos and carbofuran.
Small amounts of phorate can cause nausea, confusion, dizziness, and at very high exposure levels, respiratory paralysis and death. Endosulfan has been known to cause major physical deformations in newborn babies.
Today, one of the headlines on the Hong Kong English newspaper The Standard says “Pesticide Peril Lurks in Produce.” The article claimed that 92 percent of fruits and vegetables in Hong Kong and Guangdong supermarkets are contaminated with pesticides. While not everyone gets access to organic fruits and vegetables or has a backyard for growing plants, the best we could do is to be very careful handling our food.
(Photo courtesy of Greenpeace Hong Kong)
WHO issued Five Keys to Safer Food, educating the public to keep clean, separate raw and cooked, cook thoroughly, keep food at safe temperatures and use safe water and raw materials. Greenpeace gave tips on how to remove the pesticide residues on fruits and vegetables. For example, when handling vegetables such as bok choy, cut off the stem, soak the leaves for 5 minutes, then rinse them off. For vegetables with uneven surface such as cucumber, use a soft brush to clean it while soaking it. Greenpeace recommends soaking fruits that are eaten raw for 10 minutes but not anything more than 30 minutes to avoid losing nutrients and flavor.
It seems like we are running out of clean, healthy food to eat. Maybe we all should live on earthships, grow our own vegetables and revert back to the basic, simple lifestyle our grannies used to have.
I love the idea of Earth ships!
I plan to own one soon if I can!
I want an earthship too!