The Ecology of Pizza
(Page 2 of 7)
June/July 2006
By Sandra Steingraber
The almost universal presence of farm chemicals in U.S. waterways and the 130 different pesticides found in groundwater are classic examples. But farmers don’t pay for the economic consequences of erosion, leaching and drift. Instead, the cost of filtering silt and poison out of tap water is passed along to water utilities, and ultimately to everyone who pays a water bill.
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The externalities of conventionally grown food add up. According to Cornell University professor David Pimentel, U.S. farmers spend about $10 billion on pesticides each year to protect about $40 billion of food crops, and the external costs of pesticide use add up to another $10 billion. Included in Pimentel’s exhaustive inventory are costs for lost work caused by poisonings of farm workers, treatments for pesticide-induced cancers and the maintenance of complex regulatory systems to monitor pesticide residues in everything from applesauce to lake sediments.
Pimentel points out that his calculations did not include many public health costs, so the actual figure is even higher. A recent study of Canadian farm families, for example, found that exposure to certain weed killers raises the risk of miscarriage. A study from Missouri found a link between pesticides and poor sperm quality. Another found that women exposed in the womb to the now-banned pesticide DDT have more difficulty becoming pregnant than those who weren’t exposed. Other studies reported on DDT’s continuing presence in amniotic fluid and its association with premature birth. In California, Iowa and Minnesota, studies have shown that living near pesticide-sprayed fields raises the risk of birth defects. In Washington state, agricultural insecticides turn up in the dust of nearby homes and in the urine of the children who inhabit them. All these consequences are expensive to address — financially and emotionally.
Pizza: A Natural History
This brings us back to pizza, that food beloved by children and pregnant women. I conducted an experiment by making two pizzas with the same recipe (below). The first was assembled from conventionally grown foods purchased at a local supermarket, the second from organically grown alternatives purchased at a cooperative grocery store. Then I calculated the cost of the ingredients, per pizza. Now let’s look at some of the externalities of producing each ingredient.
Wheat flour (Triticum vulgare)
Wheat flour is the most-consumed food in the United States. (Unfortunately, most people consume refined white flour, rather than whole-grain flour. Whole-grain flour is much more nutritious, as the chart in the Image Gallery shows. — Mother) Pesticides have allowed wheat fields to grow to gargantuan sizes. Vast fields growing only a single variety of one kind of crop allow pest populations to expand to equally vast proportions — at which point only chemical poisons can keep them in check. U.S. growers spray more than 10 million pounds of pesticides on wheat fields each year.
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