Farmers and consumers face a new kind of chemical terror: pesticides. Since it is very difficult to detect the presence of toxic chemicals in various crops, an Israeli organization has deployed a failsafe method to root out the threat using the same kind of equipment used by America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to protect citizens against chemical warfare.
With just one test, Lab Path can detect hundreds of chemicals in peppers, eggplants, tomatoes and other crops.
Daniel Lev, who is the CEO of Yofi Shel Yerakot – a farming co-op in Israel that pays Lab Path to conduct periodic tests on all of their produce, says that these tests can “pinpoint tiny dangerous particles hidden within thousands of billions of other particles,” the Jerusalem Post reports.
The equipment has a repertoire of 300 different pesticides it can find in a variety of mixtures, and it can also monitor the air and water used in the cultivation process, according to the paper.
But it’s not cheap to employ Lab Path. Each test costs approximately $27 and hundreds of them are required each year to ensure that crops are evaluated before they are marketed to both private and industrial consumers.
Rami Sade, an agronomist for Yofi Shel Yerakot said that the investment assures consumers that the food they are eating is verifiably free of chemicals that may be harmful to their health.
This co-op, which means Beauty of Vegetables, produces about 34,000 tons of crops each year, half of which is distributed in Israel. The other half is sold throughout Europe and the United States.
While this is clever, and we are grateful to know that there are methods to verify the safety of our food, we also think that it’s a sad state of affairs when intelligence equipment has to be used to monitor our food.
As corporate conglomerates strive to dominate the food industry, growers are fighting back – in Egypt, in Israel, and in the United States, where a small-scale farmer has taken agro-giant Monsanto to the Supreme Court in order to dispute the company’s heavy-handed seed patenting process.
The war on chemicals rages on.
Image of tomato and looking glass, Shutterstock
Author: Tafline Laylin
As a tour leader who led “eco-friendly” camping trips throughout North America, Tafline soon realized that she was instead leaving behind a trail of gas fumes, plastic bottles and Pringles. In fact, wherever she traveled – whether it was Viet Nam or South Africa or England – it became clear how inefficiently the mandate to re-think our consumer culture is reaching the general public. Born in Iran, raised in South Africa and the United States, she currently splits her time between Africa and the Middle East. Tafline can be reached at tafline (at) greenprophet (dot) com.
