Must-read recap: The New Lede's top stories

Californians of color face toxic pesticide exposure, a federal court rebukes USDA's GMO labeling practices, urban farming fights food insecurity, and EPA confirms PFAS can leach from shipping barrels.

Pesticides plague Californians of color, new study shows

Carmen Obeso was pulling weeds at a strawberry field in Ventura County, California when she smelled something strange. Nearby she spotted a machine spraying pesticides; soon, her eyes were watering and she felt sick to her stomach. Obeso, a Latina farmworker, reported the incident to her crew leader and was evaluated at an on-site health care clinic. A doctor there reassured her that she had not been exposed to anything harmful, and the company expected her back at work the following Monday.

But Obeso didn’t feel better by the next week, nor in the weeks that followed. Her eyes continued to water and felt gritty, and her vision was changing. She knew something was wrong, but the on-site physician still insisted she was fine. Finally, Obeso went to see a different doctor, who confirmed that her eyes had been affected.

It has been two years since the spray incident, and Obeso said in a recent interview that her vision continues to worsen. She is almost blind in sunny conditions unless she wears shaded glasses, she said.

Now, instead of working in the fields, she volunteers with farmworker advocacy groups, and is one of a growing number of Hispanic/Latino farmworkers pushing for improved working conditions, including protections for pesticides.

“I feel there are other farmworkers in similar situations and they’re not able to voice it,” she said in Spanish during an interview aided by a translator. “When [the company] sprays the fields, they don’t put up postings. People go in and work and accumulate whatever was sprayed there. They might not always have acute reactions, but in the long run that’s when the consequences can be seen.”

Ventura County is known for its year-round production of roughly $2 billion worth of fruits and vegetables that feed people throughout the US and more than 70 other countries. Strawberries are the top crop, but workers also produce peppers, tomatoes, blueberries, avocados, and more.

But while these farms produce foods many consider staples of a healthy diet, the profusion of pesticides used on the fields pose significant risks to already vulnerable populations living and working in the area, according to research published this month in the journal Science of the Total Environment. These include thousands of mostly Latino farmworkers, many of which live below the poverty line and lack health insurance. (Read the rest of the story.)

Court smacks USDA for lack of transparency in GMO labeling

Years of legislative and court battles over the labeling of genetically engineered (GE) foods took another turn this week when a federal court determined on Tuesday that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) erred in allowing food companies to label GE products simply with digital codes that consumers have to scan, without any accompanying disclosure options.

Under USDA rules that took full effect earlier this year, food made with genetically modified crops can be labeled simply as “bioengineered” (BE), or come with a QR code guiding consumers to more information online, among other options.

But the court said those rules did not comply with the law, and found that the USDA knew that allowing  “standalone electronic disclosure” would not provide consumers “sufficient access” to disclosures about bioengineering involved in creating certain products.

The National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard was passed six years ago as an amendment to the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1946 in order to nullify state laws mandating that foods made with GMO soybeans, corn, or other GMO crops be labeled as such. The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), which represents the interests of the nation’s largest food and beverage companies, was a key architect of the legislation. 

Though the law provides for “a mandatory uniform national standard for disclosure of information to consumers,”  the USDA did not adhere to that standard in crafting rules for how the law would be implemented, the court found. (Read the rest of the story.)

Fighting food insecurity through urban farming

On a recent sunny morning in Reno, Nevada, volunteers worked diligently to harvest fresh vegetables from plots of rich soil, collecting tomatoes, eggplants, and cucumbers while a few farm goats bleated behind them. The freshly harvested produce would be washed, sorted, and stored in a solar-powered refrigerator until ending up on the dinner plates of local families.

But this is no typical farm. The five-acre plot of land is situated in the middle of a busy suburban neighborhood, juxtaposed near a Reno intersection where cars almost constantly whiz by.

Dubbed the “Park Farm,” the operation is run by the non-profit Reno Food Systems (RFS) as a demonstration farm to train others in organic farming practices and as a means to provide local restaurants and community groups with fresh organic produce. Now in its fifth season, the farm is funded through grants and community donations and sponsorships. 

Recently, RFS established a food justice program dedicated to feeding thousands of meals per season to people experiencing food insecurity, something climate change and the pandemic have both exacerbated.

“We have a lot of communities in our area who are in what people call food deserts or food apartheid,” said Meagan O’Farrell, director and mobile market manager of RFS. “Access to nutritious food is a basic human right, and everyone deserves access.”

O’Farrell said she uses the term food apartheid because neighborhoods without access to fresh food were built by design, the outcome of housing and supermarket redlining that has left many urban neighborhoods, particularly low-income and those dominated by people of color, lacking easy access to fresh food. (Read the rest of the story.)

EPA confirms PFAS can leach from shipping containers into food, other products

Toxic chemicals knowns as PFAS leach from the walls of shipping containers into the products they contain, potentially contaminating food, pesticides, and other products transported all over the world, according to study by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The findings provide fresh evidence backing concerns that per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances used to coat the insides of shipping containers can contaminate the contents of those containers. The EPA analysis found that 8 types of PFAS compounds leached into water and methanol samples stored in fluorinated high-density polyethylene (HDPE) containers after just one day.

The EPA said the analysis provided “a clear indication” of the migration of PFAS from container walls to the liquid solutions in the container. The agency said the amount of PFAS leached into the solutions generally increased with time during the agency’s 20-week testing period.

The levels of contamination the EPA found were far higher than the updated drinking water health advisory level of about 0.004 parts per trillion (ppt) that EPA recently set for PFOA, one of the PFAS chemicals identified in the barrels.

The findings build on EPA’s 2021 study, which suggested that fluorinated shipping barrels have PFAS in their walls and that these compounds can leach into liquids stored within the containers.

In a Sept. 12 letter, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) called on EPA, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to address public health concerns resulting from this source of PFAS exposure with urgent regulatory and enforcement action. (Read the rest of the story.)