EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices

Might be worth noting that the house you mention was built 20 years ago. https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/housing-planning/2026/05/...

And indeed, rules against mobile homes are actually enforced in Dublin, but outside the pale we definitely had a different experience.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/06/19/forgive/

Ireland supposedly cares about nature too, but you can still buy truckloads of turf off the side of the road in Offaly. Good luck getting those rules enforced.

When we still lived in Dublin I got pretty tired of having to push my baby in her pram in the street because the pavements (sidewalks) were completely covered in cars, even in the city centre trying to get to the YMCA creche.

Our experience wasn't limited to "victimless" crimes though. I think when you're threatening your neighbours and letting dangerous dogs loose on other people's land where there's kids or sheep then authoritarianism is called for.

It really is a place where crime is legal.

A presupposition of confession is that you have contrition and the resolve not to sin and wish to receive absolution (which doesn't remove the need for temporal justice btw). Premeditation and without remorse turns that confession into an empty act, and indeed, another sin.

Calvinists also believe in confession. Indeed, it doesn't even require the uncomfortable encounter with a priest. You can just do it privately in their view.

This touches on the purpose of sacraments in the Catholic Church. They are meant to be visible signs that give assurance and certainty that something has taken place. If a human being were to show perfect contrition (very rare), then there is no need for the confessional (and ultimately, God is not bound by the sacraments). But for the penitent, the confessional gives assurance of absolution, provided there is some measure of requisite contrition. You don't have to wonder about your eternal fate after leaving the confessional.

The idea that Catholic societies are corrupt or and Calvinist societies are tidy and ordered is a stereotype, and it is silly and ahistorical to claim that you need authoritarianism to bring order to Catholic countries. Catholic societies have a greater tolerance for the messiness of human life. It views itself like a field hospital ready to provide people with means to get back up and to heal. Calvinists, on the other hand, are strangled by their constant anxiety about whether they are part of the elect or not. That can translate into rigidity, rigorism, scrupulosity, and OCD. These, in turn, can resort in a backlash of moral laxity.

(Another stereotype is the Protestant work ethic. Apparently, no one ever heard of the Benedictines and their influence on Europe. There is also a healthy attitude toward work and an unhealthy one.)

As for the animal welfare, true, but there are also labels specifically for that that.

From Wikipedia:

> Pesticides are allowed as long as they are not synthetic.[28]

See also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48451194

But "organic" also targets soil health, biodiversity, animal well-being, and the environment in general.

Some synthetic pesticides / herbicides / fungicides hardly break down in the environment. Which leads to accumulation of a cocktail of such chemicals in soil & ground/surface waters. Ultimately appearing everywhere in air, drinking water & food. Not unlike microplastics, PFAS etc. How this affects humans' health is largely unknown.

Generally, chemicals produced by plants also break down naturally. So they don't accumulate in soils over time.

So it's kind of "exclude nature as much as possible, cleanroom style" versus "work with nature to keep things in a healthy balance".

And then, after all of that, you still have: the solution to pollution is dilution.

What's toxic on a fruit tree for human consumption, is likely not toxic on thousands of cubic yards of dirt or millions of gallons of ground water.

Capitalism is the most effective driver of progress known.

Capitalism has lifted enormous numbers of people out of absolute poverty and is a great positive for the world.

Inequality is an unavoidable side-effect of capitalism.

The optimal risk:benefit tradeoff depends on the resources you have available.

It can be rational behavior for a poor person to take greater risks with their health than a rich person, because the value of wealth has strongly diminishing returns. I personally believe we should have state-enforced wealth redistribution to limit this scenario to a reasonable minimum, but I'm not so naive as to think eliminating it entirely would be the globally optimal solution. In practice, "everybody gets identical protection from pesticides" means "everybody is poor".

Chinese tea is again a whole different world from Indian tea, and has a much broader spectrum of complexity. You could spend a lifetime learning about Chinese tea.

Different countries do buy different types and qualities of tea. The US is big market for low quality (dust, stalks) tea for tea bags.

Countries that like strong sweet tea with lots of milk buy tea that is low grown (i.e. lower elevations) and processed using the "cut, torn curled" process rather than the older "orthodox" process. High grown (on mountains) tea is better for those who drink it without milk.

Leaves do tend to be higher quality and they have grades reflecting the size of the pieces. There is a standard system which is marked on some types of tea.

It is usual to pluck two leaves and a bud. Plucking more would add a lot of stalk which lower quality. Plucking or using just a bud produces a very delicate flavour (sivlertips). High grown silvertips is good with

Most tea is blended so will contain a mix of different things.

Why were they allowed in the first place, if "research" was enough? Science is not definitive, and what we believe to be an approximation of the truth today way be discovered to be totally wrong tomorrow. You are confusing science and religion.

Would you defend, for instance, that DDT and other organochlorine poisons are safe? They were the darling of scientists and agrobiz companies for a long time, until we discovered well that they were dangerous.

Of course, if we find a strict equivalent to a biopesticide that happens to be synthetical, it would be a good substitute. But most synthetic pesticides are not like this, unfortunately.

And what you say about the lack of studies regarding organic farming is a plain lie, it takes 30 seconds on google scholar to find it:

- Farmers in organic farms are less exposed to health effects of synthetic pesticides: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784...

- Organic farming improve soils and yields: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1658077X2...

- Review on organic food quality and health effects: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s12940-017-031...

Note that other countries may have different legislations. You are also free to eat DDT to prove that organic farming is not really safer.

People talk about how we spent generations adapting to certain aspects of diet, and so following the habits of old is surely safer, but seem to forget that evolution only really "cares" about producing offspring, not your longevity, or quality of life in old age.

Natural pesticides do not support biodiversity. It's natural fallacy.

In reality it depends, being biology, "safe level" is also very relative since you don't know every effect the substance has on the body.

That's why pesticides and other chemicals such as bisphenols are regularly phased out, since effects can appear long after "scientific research" established it was "safe". Or it can affect certain populations, such as farmers, who get a high dose, or children, who are more sensitive than adults.

Others, such DDT, lead or cadmium, are accumulated in the body over a long period, and then start to show effects, even when the person has stopped eating it. Or can find their way later the food chain: Inuits would get poisoned when eating polar bear's meat, that was full of DDT from fields on the other side of the globe.

We have all these terrible illnesses that we ascribe to bad luck, and then all of these new chemicals we haven't fully studied yet being sprayed on everything.

- Lab testing is complex, requires to identify the DNA of pollens in honey and few countries can do it at the moment.

- Honeys are mixed, so it's trivial to receive fake honey in a country that allows it, mix it, and reexport to another one that forbids it. Same happens with olive oils, no one cares.

- Many brands just lie, given that there is no enforcement regarding food traceability and safety in general in the EU (it's a meme to reassure consumers). Where I live a brand advertising "locally made honey" was found to sell glucose syrup : nothing happened.

s/is/was

The US is trying really hard to lower its position on these lists. The US has not been near the top of reading/writing/arithmetic in a long time. The US is undoing a lot of federal regulations by eliminating/reducing agencies meant to regulate things like EPA, FDA, Dept of Education.

Source for that? All I can find says EU have stricter labeling standards except for forum comments such as yours here.

Edit: > Many things that are well known memes are completely false

To me it looks like "USA shows more additives due to harsher labeling standards" is just a meme, everything I've seen says Europe has stricter requirements on what you need to say about additives. So USA having much more additives listed comes from American products having more additives in them, not everything is better in USA.

So, the issue with chlorinated chicken washing is not that the chlorine is unsafe, as such. There are two concerns. The first is cross-contamination. The second is that there is some evidence that it is essentially a cheat; it defeats common tests for salmonella but does not actually reliably destroy the salmonella. So, if you allow chlorine washing, then you can pass the tests while not fixing supply chain problems.

Reference on most American chicken now being washed with _vinegar_? As far as I know that’s fairly uncontroversial ineffective.