Children Gardens... and Lead!

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The health threat posed by toxic metals was recently brought only too close to home, when a group of urban crop raisers discovered a connection between...

. . . if we're letting the lead industry getaway with dangerous pollution, we should do something about the lead industry ... "

Dr. John Gofman,
MOTHER NO. 67, page 121

Some 5,000 years ago, the human race smelted the first lead-silver alloys, and thus began soiling its own nest with the heavy metal. In fact, at the high point in their history, the Romans were using so much lead in pots and aqueducts (indeed, the very word "plumbing" comes from the Latin word for lead, plumbum) that the toxic element may well have contributed to the downfall of their empire. Yet in spite of the fact that people have long recognized the health dangers of processing and using lead, we now mine and employ an almost astronomical quantity of the metal. (Compare the 80,000 tons of lead produced each year during Roman times to the 3,000,000 tons produced—annually—today!)

Lead is, in short, omnipresent in modern society (the metal has even polluted the polar icecap), and perhaps that's the reason most of us have seemingly forgotten that it exists. We're constantly exposed to the heavy metal, in the form of house paints . . . industrial emissions . . . exhaust from automobiles . . . colored ink in newspapers, magazines, comic books, and even candy wrappers ... ceramic glazes ... the solder used to seal food cans . . . old water pipes . . . and more.

But a new grounds—well of concern about the dangers of this widespread element is beginning to take hold in our country. And the movement was spawned, ironically, by an investigation of one of the least suspected means of human lead ingestion . . . gardening.

Now you may well be shocked by the notion that growing one's own food—an The health threat posed by toxic metals was recently brought only too close to home, when a group of urban crop raisers discovered a connection between. . . activity that's come to be symbolic of wholesome, self-reliant living-can actually be hazardous to human health. But don't get too alarmed. Lead toxicity is a problem only in some gardens and for some people (primarily small children) . . . and, as we'll explain, the hazard can be identified and dealt with in those instances. However, there is real cause for concern about all the means by which lead finds its way into your own and your children's lives, especially since many other sources of exposure to the toxic element are likely much more significant than is any that can come from a home vegetable plot.