By Molly Tankersley, News Staff
While browsing my favorite source for green news, Grist.org, last week, I came across a headline that made me pause. “Chemical banned in Europe is probably on your apple,” it read, right under the week’s environmental news.
I debated reading it because it meant I would have to reconsider eating that apple my roommate left in the fridge for breakfast, but my curiosity got the best of me.
Environmental Working Group (EWG), a nonprofit health and environmental advocacy group, recently released a report that questioned the safety of the pesticide diphenylamine and its potential links to cancer. The EWG sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency requesting that the agency stop using diphenylamine until it conducted a scientific assessment, as required by the Food Quality Protection Act every 15 years.
As it turns out, diphenylamine, or DPA, is sprayed on American apples after they are harvested in order to keep them in top shape from farm to kitchen table. It has likely been on most non-organic apples you’ve eaten and in apple juice or applesauce. It is unsettling to hear that this chemical Americans are ingesting at the rate of nearly 10 pounds of raw apples per person per year is banned in Europe, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
Effective in March, the EU has banned fruits containing more than 0.1 part per million of DPA because it is thought that DPA may combine with nitrogen on the surface of apples to form nitrosamines, a group of cancer-causing chemicals.
These chemicals could be making their way into our diets at alarming rates. The US allows up to 10 parts per million of DPA residues in our food, and DPA was found on 80 percent of apples in the US, according to a 2010 USDA analysis.
The last assessment of DPA was made in the late 1900s by the EPA, finding “reasonable certainty of no harm,” but is this really the time to say good enough and keep eating?
“Americans, particularly parents of young children, deserve the same level of concern from our government,” EWG Senior Scientist Sonya Lunder said in a recent press release.
So why, in a country where about half of all men and one-third of all women in the US will develop cancer in their lifetimes, according to the American Cancer Society, is the EPA relying on outdated data to justify the use of a potential carcinogen?
If you are not already a little enraged, it does not help that the primary purpose of DPA is to keep apples looking pretty while they sit for months in storage before making it to your grocery store shelves.
There is something disturbing, not to mention unsafe, about eating produce that has been embalmed to hide the fact that it has not been attached to a tree in about 9-12 months. That granny smith in my fridge isn’t starting to look as appetizing right about now.
With a food system that places more importance on the cosmetic illusion of freshness than nutritional value, health safety and sustainability, it is no surprise that dietary risks are the leading cause of disease in the US, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
Maybe I should start judging apples by their covers.
–Molly Tankersley can be reached at [email protected].
Photo courtesy Jesse Millan, Creative Commons and Molly Tankersley.
