Don_Solo

Have you ever read an article or report about food safety and come away thinking, “What the hell am I supposed to eat then?” Lucky for me, I love to cook and have access to amazing local, organic foods, so I can generally answer that question myself. However, I just had another one of those “what the hell” moments after reading a piece on Planet Green called, “7 Foods So Unsafe Even Farmers Won’t Eat Them.” Folks, there are a few surprises on the list.

The tag line on the article is, “Grocery stores may sell them, but experts won’t eat them; what you should know about your food.” Great. More bad news. You can read the original article for the reasons the experts won’t eat these foods. I will, however, elaborate on one, because it really makes me angry.

Drum roll, please…

* Canned Tomatoes
* Corn-Fed Beef
* Microwave Popcorn
* Conventionally Grown (Not Organic) Potatoes
* Farmed Salmon
* Milk Produced with Artificial Hormones
* Conventional Apples

Microwave popcorn is a staple in every young woman’s life. While the guys are in the university cafeteria or in their apartments eating pizza after pizza, women are often gobbling down bags of seemingly healthy microwave popcorn to stave off hunger. Guess what?

It’s not the popcorn itself, but the chemically-saturated lining of the bag including a compound called perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) that, according to a recent study from UCLA, may be linked to infertility. Microwaving vaporizes the chemicals as they move from coating the bag to lining the popcorn. But it’s not like this fact is un-acknowledged. In fact the article points out that DuPont, as well as other manufacturers, have “promised to phase out PFOA by 2015 under a voluntary EPA plan, but millions of bags of popcorn will be sold between now and then.”

That’s right. Those f**kers KNOW that PFOA is bad bad bad. And we wonder why folks are lining up at fertility clinics?

Okay, off to drink my organic milk latte and plan for the end of my reliance on canned, diced tomatoes as a family staple.

Melanie Redman

Melanie Redman

Melanie Redman is a Social Mission Collaborator with more than 10 years of direct experience in strategic, leadership and advisory roles across the social mission sector in the U.S. and Canada. She...