Thursday, February 28, 2013
Monday, February 18, 2013
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Quinoa: Good, Evil, or Just Really Complicated?
http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2013/01/quinoa-good-evil-or-just-really-complicated
"Can vegans stomach the unpalatable truth about quinoa?," thunders the headline of a recent Guardian piece. Hard to say, but reality check: It isn't just vegans who enjoy quinoa. Like many occasional meat eaters I know, I've been eating it for years. Quinoa is also big among gluten-intolerant omnivores. So quinoa's truth—unpalatable or not—isn't just for its vegan fans to bear.
So what is going on with this long-time staple of the Andes and newly emerged favorite of health-minded US eaters?
First, the good. Quinoa is the grain-like seed of a plant in the goosefoot family (other members include spinach, chard, and the wonderful edible weed lambs quarters), and its appeal is immense. Twenty years ago, NASA researchers sung its praises as potential astronaut chow, mainly for its superior nutrient density. No less an authority than the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization hails it as "the only plant food that contains all the essential amino acids, trace elements and vitamins and contains no gluten." The FAO is almost breathlessly enthusiastic about quinoa—it has declared 2013 the International Year of Quinoa and even runs a Facebook fan page for it.
And quinoa has generally been a success for the people who grow it. Unlike other southern-hemisphere commodities prized in the global north, like coffee and cocoa, quinoa, for the most part, isn't grown on big plantations owned by a powerful elite. A 2003 Rodale article describes its cultural place in the Andean highlands, an area that encompasses parts of Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador:
Quinoa (pronounced keen-wá), a seed grain, has been cultivated in the Andean region for over 7,000 years and was considered sacred by the Inca Empire. The crop was relegated to status of animal feed by Spanish colonists, perhaps because of its religious significance and, later, shouldered almost completely out of production by cereals such as barley and wheat and other crops such as potatoes and corn.
Colonial agriculture never really worked very well in the highlands, despite the introduction of agrichemicals. "Pesticide and fertilizer use in Ecuador ... increased dramatically over the years," Rodale reports, "leading to depleted soil and a rise in associated health problems." But the new technologies failed to bring prosperity—"the farmers' yields were low, their return was almost nonexistent, and their children were suffering from malnutrition."
But then, in the 1990s, a variety of projects linking Andean smallholder farmers to do-gooder US importers began to crop up to re-establish traditional quinoa production for export markets. Today, by all accounts, the crop remains a financial success for Andean smallholders. In another recent piece—not the vegan-baiting one—The Guardian reported the price farmers get for their quinoa crop has tripled since 2006. "The crop has become a lifeline for the people of Bolivia's Oruro and Potosi regions, among the poorest in what is one of South America's poorest nations," the newspaper reported.
So what's the "unpalatable truth" that's causing all the handwringing? Escalating prices, while boosting farmers' incomes, are also helping drive down quinoa consumption in the Andes—including among the very farmers who grow it. Quinoa growers have "westernized their diets because they have more profits and more income," a Bolivian agronomist involved in the quinoa trade told The Guardian. "Ten years ago they had only an Andean diet in front of them. They had no choice. But now they do and they want rice, noodles, candies, Coke, they want everything!"
he economics are simple: "As the price has risen quinoa is consumed less and less in Bolivia. It's worth more to them [the producers] to sell it or trade it for pasta and rice. As a result, they're not eating it any more." In other words, farmers are starting to see quinoa as a product that's too valuable to eat—they can use the proceeds from selling to buy cheaper, but less nutrient-dense, staples like white rice. There's also a status issue—quinoa was once a subsistence product, and when people pull out of subsistence mode, there's a tendency to switch to higher-status foods, even if they're less healthy.
In urban areas, the situation is varied—The Guardian found quinoa to be ubiquitous in the Bolivia's largest city, La Paz, "where quinoa-based products from pizza crusts and hamburgers to canapes and breakfast cereals are displayed, Bolivia's growing middle class appear to be the principal consumers." But in the Peruvian capital, Lima, quinoa is emerging as a luxury product—it sells at a higher per-pound price than chicken, and for four times as much as rice, the paper reports.
Then there are land and environmental issues. As demand for quinoa surges, farmers are scrambling for new land to cultivate to take advantage of higher prices. The push is squeezing out older forms of sustainable agriculture, and putting serious pressure on soil fertility, as Time reported in this 2012 piece:
Traditionally, quinoa fields covered 10% of this fragile ecosystem, llamas grazed on the rest. Now, llamas are being sold to make room for crops, provoking a soil crisis since the cameloid's guano is the undisputed best fertilizer for maintaining and restoring quinoa fields. (Other options like sheep poop appear to encourage pests.)
So can people like me, who prefer to avoid foods that are environmentally and socially destructive, eat it with a clear conscience? Not entirely. In a short period of time, quinoa has gone from a local staple to a global commodity. "When you transform a food into a commodity, there's inevitable breakdown in social relations and high environmental cost," as Tanya Kerssen, an analyst for Oakland-based Food First told Time last year.
But that doesn't mean we should stop eating quinoa; it just means we shouldn't eat quinoa without thinking it through. The Andean region is now governed by progressive, equality-minded politicians like Bolivian president Evo Morales—himself a former quinoa grower now serving as Special Ambassador to the FAO for the International Year of Quinoa. In Bolivia, the government is buying quinoa and "incorporating the plant into a packet of foods supplied to thousands of pregnant and nursing women each month," The New York Times reports. And in Peru, the government is placing it in public-school breakfasts, The Guardian adds. Such programs can help ensure that non-wealthy Andeans aren't priced out of the market for this nutrient-dense regional foodstuff. (Of course, another option would be for the region's governments to just accept quinoa as a luxury good for the rich and focus on cheaper staples like rice and beans for the poor—but no one seems ready to embrace this option.)
While the Andes region will always be known as the birthplace of quinoa production, it needn't be the only place that produces quinoa. The FAO points out that it's an extraordinarily diverse crop, with 3,000 varieties that thrive in a variety of climates. The organization calls it "crop with high potential to contribute to food security in various Regions worldwide."
In other words, Andean farmers could focus on growing it for themselves and for the region's teeming cities, and farmers in other regions could begin growing it for their surrounding markets. Already, quinoa is being grown successfully in the Colorado Rockies, and farmers in the Pacific Northwest are testing it out, too, NPR reports. According to the FAO, it's also "currently being cultivated in several countries in Europe and Asia with good yields." By adding supply, these initiatives could push the price of quinoa down to a level that's still profitable to Andean farmers but affordable to regional consumers. Globally, it's not hard to imagine a future in which quinoa pays farmers in multiple growing areas a decent return on their labor while remaining affordable for consumers of all income levels.
On the other hand, a global expansion of quinoa production could also cause its price to crash—as happened to coffee in the late 1990s after Vietnam charged into coffee farming, causing a global glut. If a quinoa glut drove prices low enough, Andean farmers' investments in land and processing infrastructure would be wiped out.
Ugh. Like every other globally traded commodity foodstuff, quinoa is devilishly complicated and prone to tragedy. For now, I'll keep eating it in moderation, but I won't take it for granted. Or stop trying to learn more about it—and neither should any of it eaters, vegan or not. Meanwhile, I'm wondering what unpalatable truths might be lurking within chia seeds.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Saturday, December 1, 2012
How to get rid of chemicals in fabrics
http://oecotextiles.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/how-to-get-rid-of-chemicals-in-fabrics-hint-trick-question/
Can you wash or otherwise clean conventional fabrics to remove all the toxic residues so that you’d end up with a fabric that’s as safe as an organic fabric? It seems a reasonable question, and sure would be an easy fix if the answer was yes, wouldn’t it? But let’s explore this question, because it’s really interesting.
Let’s start by looking at one common type of fabric: a lightweight, 4 ounce cotton printed quilting fabric. In this case the answer is no (and as you’ll find out, our answers will always be no, but read on to see why).
The toxic chemicals in conventionally produced (versus “organically” produced) cotton fabric that cannot be washed out come from both:
1. the pesticides and herbicides applied to the crops when growing the cotton and
2. from the dyes and printing inks and other chemicals used to turn the fibers into fabric.
Let’s first look at the pesticides used during growing of the fiber.
Conventional cotton cultivation uses copious amounts of chemical inputs. These pesticides are absorbed by the leaves and the roots of the plants. Most pesticides applied to plants have a half life of less than 4 days before degredation.(1) So pesticides can be found in the plants, but over time the chemicals are degraded so the amount to be found in any bale of cotton fiber is highly depending on time of harvest and how recently the crop had been sprayed.
Gas chromatography easily shows that common pesticides used on cotton crops are found in the fibers, such as: Hexachlorobenzene, Aldrin, Dieldrin, DDT and DDT. (2) Look up the toxicity profiles of those chemicals if you want encouragement to keep even tiny amounts of them out of your house. With time, as the cotton fibers degrade, these residual chemicals are released.
We could find no studies which looked at the fibers themselves to see if pesticides could be removed by washing, but we did find a study of laundering pesticide-soiled clothing to see if the pesticide could be removed. Remember, this study (and others like it) was done only on protective clothing worn by workers who are applying the pesticides – so the pesticides are on the outside of the fibers - NOT on the fibers themselves during growth. The study found that, after six washings in a home washing machine, the percent of pesticide remaining in a textile substrate (cotton) ranged from 1% to 42%. (3)
If you’re trying to avoid pesticides which are applied to cotton crops, you’d do better to avoid cottonseed oil than the fiber (if processed conventionally) because we eat more of the cotton crop than we wear. Most of the damage done by the use of pesticides is to our environment – our groundwater and soils.
Before we go further, let’s do away with the notion that organic cotton, woven conventionally, is safe to use. Not so. There are so many chemicals used during the processing phase of fabric production, including detergents, brighteners, bleaches, softeners, and many others that the final fabric is a chemical smorgasbord, and is by weight at least 10% synthetic chemicals (4), many of which have been proven to cause harm to humans.
The chemicals used in conventionally processed organic cotton fabrics make the concerns about pesticides used in growing the crop pale in comparison: If we use the new lower chemical inputs that GMO cotton has introduced, it’s now possible to produce 1 lb. of conventionally grown cotton, using just 2.85 oz of chemical pesticides – that’s down from over 4.5 oz used during the 1990’s – a 58% decrease. So to produce enough cotton fiber to make 25 lbs of cloth, it would require just 4.45 lbs of chemical pesticides, fertilizers and insecticides. Processing that fiber into cloth, however, requires between 2.5 – 25 lbs. of chemicals. If we take the midpoint, that’s 12.5 lbs of processing chemicals – almost three times what it took to produce the fiber!
There are over 2,000 different kinds of chemicals regularly used in textile production, many of them so toxic that they’re outlawed in other products. And this toxic bath is used on both organic fibers as well as non-organic fibers – the fibers are just the first step in the weaving and finishing of a fabric. (Make sure you buy organic fibers that are also organically processed or you do not have an organic fabric. An organic fabric is one that is third party certified to the Global Organic Textile Standard. ) Fabrics – even those made with organic fibers like organic cotton IF they are conventionally produced and not produced according to GOTS - contain chemicals such as formaldehyde, azo dyes, dioxin, and heavy metals. Some of the chemicals are there as residues from the production, others are added to give certain characteristics to the fabrics such as color, softness, crispness, wrinkle resistance, etc. And these chemicals are designed to do a job, and do it well. They are designed to NOT wash out. The dyes, for instance, are called “fiber reactive” dyes because they chemically bind with the fiber molecules in order to remain color fast. The chemical components of your fabric dye is there as long as the color is there. Many dyes contain a whole host of toxic chemicals. The heavy metals are common components of fabric dyes. They are part of the dye and part of the fabric fiber as long as the color remains.
And these chemicals are found in the fabrics we live with. Studies have shown that the chemicals are available to our bodies: dioxins (such as the 75 polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs) and 135 polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs)) were found in new clothing in concentrations ranging from low pg/g to high 300 ng/g in several studies. (5)
How do these chemicals get into our bodies from the textiles? Your skin is the largest organ of your body, and it’s highly permeable. So skin absorption is one route; another is through inhalation of the chemicals (if they are the type that evaporate – and if they do evaporate, each chemical has a different rate of evaporation, from minutes or hours to weeks or years) and a third route: Think of microscopic particles of fabric that abrade each time we use a towel, sit on a sofa, put on our clothes. These microscopic particles fly into the air and then we breathe them in or ingest them. Or they fall into the dust of our homes, where people and pets, especially crawling children and pets, continue to breathe or ingest them.
In the United States, often the standards for exposure to these toxins is limited to workplace standards (based on limits in water or air) or they’re product specific: the FDA sets a maximum limit of cadmium in bottled water to be 0.005 mg/L for example. So that leaves lots of avenues for continued contamination!
The bad news is that existing legislation on chemicals fails to prohibit the use of hazardous chemicals in consumer products -–and the textile industry, in particular, has no organized voice to advocate for change. It’s a complex, highly fragmented industry, and it’s up to consumers to demand companies change their policies. In the United States we’re waking up to the dangers of industrial chemicals, but rather than banning a certain chemical in ALL products, the United States is taking a piece meal approach: for example, certain azo dyes (like Red 2G) are prohibited in foods – but only in foods, not fabrics. But just because the product is not meant to be eaten doesn’t mean we’re not absorbing that Red 2G. Phthalates are outlawed in California and Washington state in children’s toys – but not in their clothing or bedding. A Greenpeace study of a Walt Disney PVC Winne the Pooh raincoat found that it contained an astounding 320,000 mg/kg of total phthalates in the coat – or 32% of the weight of the raincoat! (6)
Concerns continue to mount about the safety of textiles and apparel products used by U.S. consumers. As reports of potential health threats continue to come to light, “we are quite concerned about potentially toxic materials that U.S. consumers are exposed to everyday in textiles and apparel available in this country,” said David Brookstein, Sc.D., dean of the School of Engineering and Textile and director of Philadelphia University’s Institute for Textile and Apparel Product Safety (ITAPS).
The good news is that there are fabrics that have been produced without resorting to these hazardous chemicals. Look for GOTS! Demand safe fabrics!
(1) “Degradation of Pesiticides on Plant Surfaces amd It’s prediction – a case study of tea leaves”, Zongmao, C and Haibin, W., Tea Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Zhejiang, China. http://www.springerlink.com/content/vg5w5467743r5p41/
(2) “Extraction of Residual Chlorinated Pesticides from Cotton Matrix, El-Nagar, Schantz et.al, Journal of Textile and Apparel, Technology and management, Vol 4, Issue 2, Fall 2004
(3) Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology 1992 (23, 85-90)
(4) Laucasse and Baumann, Textile Chemicals: Environmental Data and Facts, Springer, New York, 2004, page 609.
(5) “Dioxins and Dioxin-Like Persistent Organic Pollutants in Textiles” Krizanec, B and Le marechal, Al, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Smetanova 17, SI-2000, Maribor, Slovenia, 2006; hrcak.srce.hr/file/6721
(6) http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/greece/137368/toxic-childrensware-by-disney.pdf
Can you wash or otherwise clean conventional fabrics to remove all the toxic residues so that you’d end up with a fabric that’s as safe as an organic fabric? It seems a reasonable question, and sure would be an easy fix if the answer was yes, wouldn’t it? But let’s explore this question, because it’s really interesting.
Let’s start by looking at one common type of fabric: a lightweight, 4 ounce cotton printed quilting fabric. In this case the answer is no (and as you’ll find out, our answers will always be no, but read on to see why).
The toxic chemicals in conventionally produced (versus “organically” produced) cotton fabric that cannot be washed out come from both:
1. the pesticides and herbicides applied to the crops when growing the cotton and
2. from the dyes and printing inks and other chemicals used to turn the fibers into fabric.
Let’s first look at the pesticides used during growing of the fiber.
Conventional cotton cultivation uses copious amounts of chemical inputs. These pesticides are absorbed by the leaves and the roots of the plants. Most pesticides applied to plants have a half life of less than 4 days before degredation.(1) So pesticides can be found in the plants, but over time the chemicals are degraded so the amount to be found in any bale of cotton fiber is highly depending on time of harvest and how recently the crop had been sprayed.
Gas chromatography easily shows that common pesticides used on cotton crops are found in the fibers, such as: Hexachlorobenzene, Aldrin, Dieldrin, DDT and DDT. (2) Look up the toxicity profiles of those chemicals if you want encouragement to keep even tiny amounts of them out of your house. With time, as the cotton fibers degrade, these residual chemicals are released.
We could find no studies which looked at the fibers themselves to see if pesticides could be removed by washing, but we did find a study of laundering pesticide-soiled clothing to see if the pesticide could be removed. Remember, this study (and others like it) was done only on protective clothing worn by workers who are applying the pesticides – so the pesticides are on the outside of the fibers - NOT on the fibers themselves during growth. The study found that, after six washings in a home washing machine, the percent of pesticide remaining in a textile substrate (cotton) ranged from 1% to 42%. (3)
If you’re trying to avoid pesticides which are applied to cotton crops, you’d do better to avoid cottonseed oil than the fiber (if processed conventionally) because we eat more of the cotton crop than we wear. Most of the damage done by the use of pesticides is to our environment – our groundwater and soils.
Before we go further, let’s do away with the notion that organic cotton, woven conventionally, is safe to use. Not so. There are so many chemicals used during the processing phase of fabric production, including detergents, brighteners, bleaches, softeners, and many others that the final fabric is a chemical smorgasbord, and is by weight at least 10% synthetic chemicals (4), many of which have been proven to cause harm to humans.
The chemicals used in conventionally processed organic cotton fabrics make the concerns about pesticides used in growing the crop pale in comparison: If we use the new lower chemical inputs that GMO cotton has introduced, it’s now possible to produce 1 lb. of conventionally grown cotton, using just 2.85 oz of chemical pesticides – that’s down from over 4.5 oz used during the 1990’s – a 58% decrease. So to produce enough cotton fiber to make 25 lbs of cloth, it would require just 4.45 lbs of chemical pesticides, fertilizers and insecticides. Processing that fiber into cloth, however, requires between 2.5 – 25 lbs. of chemicals. If we take the midpoint, that’s 12.5 lbs of processing chemicals – almost three times what it took to produce the fiber!
There are over 2,000 different kinds of chemicals regularly used in textile production, many of them so toxic that they’re outlawed in other products. And this toxic bath is used on both organic fibers as well as non-organic fibers – the fibers are just the first step in the weaving and finishing of a fabric. (Make sure you buy organic fibers that are also organically processed or you do not have an organic fabric. An organic fabric is one that is third party certified to the Global Organic Textile Standard. ) Fabrics – even those made with organic fibers like organic cotton IF they are conventionally produced and not produced according to GOTS - contain chemicals such as formaldehyde, azo dyes, dioxin, and heavy metals. Some of the chemicals are there as residues from the production, others are added to give certain characteristics to the fabrics such as color, softness, crispness, wrinkle resistance, etc. And these chemicals are designed to do a job, and do it well. They are designed to NOT wash out. The dyes, for instance, are called “fiber reactive” dyes because they chemically bind with the fiber molecules in order to remain color fast. The chemical components of your fabric dye is there as long as the color is there. Many dyes contain a whole host of toxic chemicals. The heavy metals are common components of fabric dyes. They are part of the dye and part of the fabric fiber as long as the color remains.
And these chemicals are found in the fabrics we live with. Studies have shown that the chemicals are available to our bodies: dioxins (such as the 75 polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins (PCDDs) and 135 polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs)) were found in new clothing in concentrations ranging from low pg/g to high 300 ng/g in several studies. (5)
How do these chemicals get into our bodies from the textiles? Your skin is the largest organ of your body, and it’s highly permeable. So skin absorption is one route; another is through inhalation of the chemicals (if they are the type that evaporate – and if they do evaporate, each chemical has a different rate of evaporation, from minutes or hours to weeks or years) and a third route: Think of microscopic particles of fabric that abrade each time we use a towel, sit on a sofa, put on our clothes. These microscopic particles fly into the air and then we breathe them in or ingest them. Or they fall into the dust of our homes, where people and pets, especially crawling children and pets, continue to breathe or ingest them.
In the United States, often the standards for exposure to these toxins is limited to workplace standards (based on limits in water or air) or they’re product specific: the FDA sets a maximum limit of cadmium in bottled water to be 0.005 mg/L for example. So that leaves lots of avenues for continued contamination!
The bad news is that existing legislation on chemicals fails to prohibit the use of hazardous chemicals in consumer products -–and the textile industry, in particular, has no organized voice to advocate for change. It’s a complex, highly fragmented industry, and it’s up to consumers to demand companies change their policies. In the United States we’re waking up to the dangers of industrial chemicals, but rather than banning a certain chemical in ALL products, the United States is taking a piece meal approach: for example, certain azo dyes (like Red 2G) are prohibited in foods – but only in foods, not fabrics. But just because the product is not meant to be eaten doesn’t mean we’re not absorbing that Red 2G. Phthalates are outlawed in California and Washington state in children’s toys – but not in their clothing or bedding. A Greenpeace study of a Walt Disney PVC Winne the Pooh raincoat found that it contained an astounding 320,000 mg/kg of total phthalates in the coat – or 32% of the weight of the raincoat! (6)
Concerns continue to mount about the safety of textiles and apparel products used by U.S. consumers. As reports of potential health threats continue to come to light, “we are quite concerned about potentially toxic materials that U.S. consumers are exposed to everyday in textiles and apparel available in this country,” said David Brookstein, Sc.D., dean of the School of Engineering and Textile and director of Philadelphia University’s Institute for Textile and Apparel Product Safety (ITAPS).
The good news is that there are fabrics that have been produced without resorting to these hazardous chemicals. Look for GOTS! Demand safe fabrics!
(1) “Degradation of Pesiticides on Plant Surfaces amd It’s prediction – a case study of tea leaves”, Zongmao, C and Haibin, W., Tea Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Zhejiang, China. http://www.springerlink.com/content/vg5w5467743r5p41/
(2) “Extraction of Residual Chlorinated Pesticides from Cotton Matrix, El-Nagar, Schantz et.al, Journal of Textile and Apparel, Technology and management, Vol 4, Issue 2, Fall 2004
(3) Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology 1992 (23, 85-90)
(4) Laucasse and Baumann, Textile Chemicals: Environmental Data and Facts, Springer, New York, 2004, page 609.
(5) “Dioxins and Dioxin-Like Persistent Organic Pollutants in Textiles” Krizanec, B and Le marechal, Al, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Smetanova 17, SI-2000, Maribor, Slovenia, 2006; hrcak.srce.hr/file/6721
(6) http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/greece/137368/toxic-childrensware-by-disney.pdf
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