by Carey Gillam
The FDA, like the USDA, has spent decades skipping any testing for glyphosate residues, despite the fact that looking for pesticide residues in food is also part of the agency’s mandate for public protection. Since 1961, the agency has been conducting what it calls the Total Diet Study (TDS) to monitor levels of about 800 contaminants and nutrients in the average U.S. diet. The agency says that to conduct the study, it buys, prepares, and analyzes about 280 kinds of foods and beverages from representative areas of the country, four times a year. The program began as a way to monitor for radioactive contamination of foods, but over time it expanded to include pesticides, industrial and other toxic chemicals, and nutrients. The FDA also conducts a “residue monitoring program” that measures pesticide levels in thousands of samples of fruits and vegetables as well as other commodities. “The ongoing nature of the study enables us to track trends in the average American diet and inform the development of interventions to reduce or minimize risks, when needed,” the FDA states on its website.27
But while it has spent years analyzing levels of other types of pesticide residues on food, the FDA, like the USDA, has steadfastly avoided testing for glyphosate residues in the American food supply. Never once, even as glyphosate use on food crops was skyrocketing in the 1980s and 1990s, not even one time, did the FDA look for glyphosate—despite knowing that glyphosate residues were bound to show up in food. Tim Begley, a high-ranking official in the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, wrote to Michael Kashtock, another top official in the FDA’s food safety office, in January 2013 about illegal uses of glyphosate in Canada, Mexico, Thailand, and Brazil on “some grains, soybeans, citrus, tropical fruits including mangoes.” The European Union found a “hit rate” of about 10 percent in cereals, Begley wrote. The agency should start developing a method so that at some point it could test for glyphosate, he said.28
Still, it was only in February 2016, nearly a year after WHO’s classification of glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen, and with public pressure mounting for government accountability, that FDA officials said they would do some limited testing for glyphosate residues on a handful of foods that included corn, milk, and eggs. And that was nearly two years after the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) sharply rebuked the agency for its failure to look for glyphosate. In its 2014 report, the GAO also hammered the FDA for not telling the public that it was skipping over glyphosate testing. And—in a worrisome note—the GAO also made clear that even if the FDA had been testing, there was no surety the results would be reliable because the agency’s practices were deeply flawed. According to the criticism leveled by the GAO, there were significant limitations to the credibility of the FDA data on chemical residues that the agency did look for. “FDA’s ability to reliably identify specific commodities that may be at high risk of violating pesticide residue tolerances is limited,” the report stated.29
In its defense, the FDA cited the costliness of testing for glyphosate, just as the USDA had done. The start-up costs for glyphosate testing at six FDA testing laboratories would be around $5 million, according to a statement the FDA gave the GAO.
Considering the stakes, not to mention the fact that the FDA’s federal budget is around $5 billion, the excuses and inaction frustrate many moms, such as Laura Bowman of Scottsdale, Arizona. Bowman is not a member of any of the burgeoning “food movement” organizations that have sprung up in recent years, but she does consider herself fairly well educated on the dangers of pesticides and other chemicals, and she does her best to protect her family from them. She banned the use of Roundup to control weeds in her yard long before the recent controversies flared, but she feels it’s nearly impossible to keep glyphosate out of her family’s meals. “I feel like it’s in almost everything we consume and our kids consume … and the frustrating part is our government does nothing about it,” said Bowman, who tries to serve organically grown foods to her husband and two daughters whenever possible in an effort to minimize consumption of pesticide residues. “You try to do the small amount you can do, but so much of it is out of our control.”30
Canadian authorities also ignored glyphosate in annual residue testing for years, but after WHO’s glyphosate classification they jumped into action, and in early 2017 the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) announced the results: with a little more than 3,100 foods tested for glyphosate, residues of the weed killer were found in roughly 30 percent of the samples. The CFIA assured consumers there was nothing to worry about because only 1.3 percent of the samples showed residues above the tolerance levels. Still, the results were upsetting to many. Roughly 4 percent of the grain products tested had such high levels of glyphosate that they violated legal limits, the CFIA report showed.31
It’s not just glyphosate residues that people worry about, of course. Fears about a range of chemical residues in food have been growing in recent years. Pesticide residues can be found in everything from mushrooms to potatoes and grapes to green beans. One sample of strawberries examined by the USDA in an annual testing program found residues of twenty pesticides in the berries. In fact, roughly 85 percent of more than 10,000 food samples tested by the USDA in 2015 carried pesticide residues. Most of those foods were fruits and vegetables, both fresh and processed—foods consumers generally consider healthy. Residue levels higher than what the government allows have been found in spinach, strawberries, grapes, green beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, and watermelon. Even residues of chemicals long banned in the United States were found as recently as 2015, including residues of DDT or its metabolites found in spinach and potatoes.32 U.S. regulators have also reported finding illegally high levels of the neonicotinoid insecticide thiamethoxam in rice.
The USDA asserts that all these pesticide residues are nothing for people to worry about. The agency states that “residues found in agricultural products sampled are at levels that do not pose risk to consumers’ health and are safe.”33 But many scientists say there is little to no data to back up that claim. The animal studies the regulators rely on to set the allowable pesticide levels are typically conducted by, or on behalf of, the pesticide companies and look only at the effects of one pesticide at a time. Regulators do not have sufficient research regarding how consuming residues of multiple types of pesticides affects us over the long term, and government assurances of safety are simply false, say the skeptical scientists.
“We don’t know if you eat an apple that has multiple residues every day what will be the consequences twenty years down the road,” said Chensheng Lu, associate professor of environmental exposure biology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “They want to assure everybody that this is safe, but the science is quite inadequate. This is a big issue.”34
When it comes to pesticide exposures, through food or otherwise, researchers are particularly worried about children. Multiple studies suggest pesticides are harming children’s brains and bodies. Researchers found that women’s exposure to pesticides during pregnancy, measured through urine and blood samples, was associated with negative impacts on their children’s IQ and neurobehavioral development, as well as with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder diagnoses.35 Also, one study that looked at structural brain growth using magnetic resonance imaging found “significant abnormalities” in measurements of the brain and determined that children whose mothers were exposed to organophosphate pesticides showed neurotoxic effects well into the early school years, at least.36
A team of international scientists examining the effects of pesticides in food and on farms summed up the problem this way:
Recent insight into the toxic effects of pesticide exposure suggests that early-life exposure is of greatest concern, especially prenatal exposure that may harm brain development…. No systematic testing is available since testing for neurotoxicity—especially developmental neurotoxicity—has not consistently been required as part of the [regulatory] registration process…. At least 100 different pesticides are known to cause adverse neurological ef
fects in adults, and all of these substances must therefore be suspected of being capable of damaging developing brains as well.37
Philippe Grandjean, a coauthor of that report and a Harvard adjunct professor of environmental health who received his medical degree in Denmark at the age of twenty-three, believes the warning signs must be taken seriously. He urges women who are pregnant, who plan to become pregnant, or who are breastfeeding to seek out organically grown foods because their pesticide levels are far less than those found in conventionally grown foods. Grandjean is an expert in this area, traveling the world to study environmental problems and to examine children whose lives have been affected by environmental chemicals. He received the John F. Goldsmith Award from the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology in 2016 for “sustained and outstanding contributions to the knowledge and practice of environmental epidemiology.”
“Overall, consumption of organic food substantially decreases the consumer’s dietary pesticide exposure, as well as acute and chronic risks from such exposure,” the scientists’ report stated. “Pesticides undergo a comprehensive risk assessment before market release, but important gaps remain.”38 Grandjean has little faith in regulatory assurances that current limits on pesticide amounts in certain foods are safe. “Those limits are based on animal studies, looking at the effect of one pesticide at a time,” he said. “The human brain is so much more complex than the rat brain, and our brain development is much more vulnerable.”39
Though pesticide residues are invisible, odorless, and tasteless, more consumers are becoming aware of—and unsettled by—their presence. Every year for the past decade, the International Food Information Council (IFIC) has surveyed more than 1,000 Americans to gain insight into their attitudes toward food and diet. The group, which quizzes people ranging in age from eighteen to eighty, says the results show a clear and steady rise in the number of Americans concerned about chemicals in their food. More than one-third of consumers participating in an annual food industry survey in 2015 and 2016 rated chemicals in food as their most important food safety issue, and many report changing their eating habits because of their worries.40
But glyphosate stands out as among the most feared, largely because it is so pervasive, because there are ongoing questions about its safety, and because of the government’s reluctance to monitor foods for glyphosate residues. With all that in mind, the recognition that this weed-killing pesticide is in our food is more than many can stand. San Francisco resident Danielle Cooper filed a lawsuit in April 2016 seeking class action status against the Quaker Oats Company after glyphosate residues were found in that company’s oat products, which are used by millions of consumers as cereal and for baking cookies and other treats. Cooper said she expected the oat products, labeled “100% Natural,” to be pesticide free. “Glyphosate is a dangerous substance, the presence and dangers of which should be disclosed,” the lawsuit stated.41 Quaker, owned by PepsiCo, responded to the lawsuit by saying that glyphosate residues, if present, were so low as to not be a problem.
Worries about weed killer residues have also disrupted international trade. In May 2016, Taiwan authorities and U.S. food safety inspectors found glyphosate residues in oatmeal products imported by Taiwan, prompting a recall of nearly 62,000 kilograms of oatmeal.42
The concerns in the marketplace finally prompted one of the FDA’s most talented chemists, Narong Chamkasem, to run his own in-house tests on glyphosate in oats. Chamkasem had obtained a doctorate in analytical chemistry and worked for the giant Swiss agrochemical company Syngenta AG for fifteen years before joining the FDA in 2008, and he was quite familiar with the ins and outs of testing for agrochemicals. At that time, FDA scientists were working to bring the agency into the modern era of pesticide residue testing, implementing methods that were already in place in Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Because the FDA had not looked for glyphosate residues in food for decades, the tests Chamkasem ran on oats were among the first. The results were not reassuring for anyone worried about feeding themselves or their children. Just as did the private researchers, Chamkasem found glyphosate residues in numerous oatmeal products, including infant oat cereal. He presented his findings to a group of chemists in a meeting in Florida in July 2016, but the FDA did not publicize the findings at all.
Oats are not genetically engineered to tolerate glyphosate. But Monsanto has encouraged farmers to spray oats and other non–genetically modified crops with its glyphosate-based Roundup herbicides shortly before harvest to help dry down and even out the maturity of the crop. The company even provides farmers with a booklet telling them: “A pre-harvest weed control application is an excellent management strategy to not only control perennial weeds, but to facilitate harvest management and get a head start on next year’s crop.”43
In Canada, which is among the world’s largest oat producers and is a major supplier of oats to the United States, Monsanto marketing materials tout the benefits of glyphosate on oat fields: “Preharvest application of Roundup WeatherMAX and Roundup Transorb HC are registered for application on all oat varieties—including milling oats destined for human consumption.”44 Glyphosate is also used by U.S. oat farmers. The EPA estimates that about 100,000 pounds of glyphosate is used annually in production of oats in the United States.
Considering the growing public angst over pesticide residues in our food, one might have expected FDA officials to shout it from the rooftops when the agency decided to start a formal glyphosate residue testing project in 2016. That was not the case. The agency made it clear that until the results were in, the less that was publicly known about what it was doing, the better. I got wind of the FDA’s decision to do at least one glyphosate residue testing project through a couple of government sources who couldn’t talk to me about it openly because they said the issue was so “sensitive.” It took weeks of badgering before the FDA would even acknowledge to me that it planned to do some tests for glyphosate. I wrote a news story45 about that move that got picked up and repeated around the world, but FDA officials repeatedly refused to answer many important questions about the methodology and whether or not Monsanto had any influence in the testing project. The agency also balked at producing documents about its glyphosate residue testing work. Among the documents it did produce as a result of my FOIA requests, many contained heavy redactions, meaning many sections were blacked out.
What was revealed in these pages, however, was concerning enough. Take honey, for instance. Again, it was Chamkasem doing the work. According to those FDA documents,46 when Chamkasem examined honey samples from various locations in the United States, he came up with alarming results: he found that all of the honey examined, including “organic” honey, contained glyphosate residues. Some of the honey even showed residue levels more than five times the legally allowed limit in the European Union, according to these internal documents and research data. One brand that contained the residues was Iowa-based Sue Bee Honey, which is marketed by a cooperative of American bee-keepers as “pure, all-natural” and “America’s Honey.” One sample of honey from Iowa showed glyphosate residues at 650 parts per billion (ppb), well over the 50 ppb allowed in the European Union.
Now, honey comes from bees, of course, and beekeepers do not use glyphosate on their hives. There is no need, as weeds are not an issue in beekeeping. But bees travel many miles, and when they are near farm fields, they spend their days darting from plant to plant, including an array of crops such as cotton, alfalfa, soybeans, and many others grown in fields that are sprayed with glyphosate. The pesticide travels back with the bees to the hives, where the honey is produced. Darren Cox, past president of the American Honey Producers Association, describes bees as “flying dust mops,” picking up everything they touch. With that in mind, it’s easy to see how glyphosate levels might be high in honey from Iowa, given that Iowa is the nation’s top corn-growing state and most of the corn is genetically modified to be sprayed directl
y with glyphosate.
When Chamkasem found such high levels in honey, he wrote to colleagues in January 2016 e-mail exchanges, notifying them of his findings and pointing out that at that time there was no legal tolerance level for glyphosate in honey in the United States, so any amount of detectable glyphosate in honey would be illegal.
True, noted Chris Sack, an FDA chemist who oversees the agency’s pesticide residue testing and is considered the agency’s “residue expert.” But Sack tried to diffuse Chamkasem’s concerns: “Before you pursue the regulatory status of honey, you need to know that the agency is undecided about how to address ‘violations’ of glyphosate in honey,” Sack said in the e-mail exchange. “EPA has been made aware of this problem” and was expected to set tolerance levels for honey, Sack wrote. Once tolerance levels are set by the EPA—if they are set high enough—the residues are no longer considered illegal.47
Still, the business owners who keep the bees and sell honey are worried. They say it is frustrating to know they can’t keep their product free of a pesticide that they have no use for and don’t benefit from in any way. Many fear that if public awareness of pesticide levels grows, imported honey from countries that are not so reliant on pesticides will knock them out of the marketplace.
“I’m an innocent man with thousands of beehives. I can’t do anything about the farmers using Roundup and the bees picking it up off cotton or something,” said Nate Carmichael, a young husband and father who, along with his wife, Marcela, tends to about 10,000 hives and makes a living selling honey to grocery stores and outlets such as Walmart. The company packs around 1 million pounds of honey to sell in a good season. “I don’t understand how I’m supposed to control the level of glyphosate in my honey when I’m not the one using Roundup. It’s all around me,” Carmichael said.48