Seems like the burden of proof would be to establish safety. If that’s not possible, why is it being used?
And where is this evidence you have that is is safe?
I’m sorry but it’s fundamentally irrational. Everything is chemicals. Chemophobia is by definition irrational.
> especially sprayed on our food
~~~It’s not.~~~ Glyphosate is a herbicide: if you spray it on plants, those plants die. That is in fact its purpose. [EDIT: see correction in comment below.]
— Regarding your later edit:
> Seems like the burden of proof would be to establish safety.
That is indeed the case, why do you assume otherwise?
> And where is this evidence you have that is is safe?
There are — literally — thousands of studies [1] on that subject. Wikipedia contains a summary. All national and almost all international health and safety organisations class it as safe, with the exception of IARC, which classes it as “potentially carcinogenic” (context: compared to red meat, which it classifies as definitely ”carcinogenic”). The IARC has been roundly criticised for excluding contradictory evidence, and for using misleading language, by the scientific community [2].
[1] https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=safety+of+glyphosate&...
[2] http://academicsreview.org/2015/03/iarc-glyphosate-cancer-re...
You might disagree, but it's not irrational at all. To follow your argument, if everything is chemicals - is it rational to presume everything is safe? Of course not, there are plenty of dangerous things in the world. Of course the -phobia demarks a fear as irrational, but this isn't "chemophobia".
> ~~~It’s not.~~~ Glyphosate is a herbicide: if you spray it on plants, those plants die. That is in fact its purpose.
It's also worth noting that while it's a herbicide, of course it's only effective as a herbicide at a certain concentration. Consider that <agricultural conglomerate X> intends to spray the weeds right next to the lettuce, not the lettuce itself, so they can make $$$ from that still-alive lettuce at market. It's still going to be exposed to a small amount of herbicide, just not in a "lethal" dose. Is it absorbed into the lettuce/does it make it to the consumer? I don't know. If it did, would it be harmful at that dose? Probably not, but I don't know. Does it accumulate in the body over time, to an eventual harmful dose? Don't know. But those questions all demonstrate that it's not simply an irrational fear; there is a good number of questions to answer to go from "this could be unsafe" to "this is definitely safe".
I don't have any views on Glyphosate at all, I know next to nothing about it. Just objecting to your first two points.
These are all questions that have simple, well-tested, easily-Googelable answers. The fact that you don't personally know them is irrelevant, because scientists and government regulators do.
Anyway, my impression is that glyphosate is regularly detected in the water, the plants we eat, the animals we eat, in our own bodies.
Vinegar seems to work in my experience, a chemical I can drink.
> Vinegar seems to work in my experience, a chemical I can drink.
No you can’t. Food grade vinegar does fuckall as a herbicide. The stuff you use as an actual herbicide is 20% acetic acid and I urge you strongly not to drink that. And it also has some rather unsavoury side-effects, and caution is therefore necessary.
I hate it when ppl project a domain definition to destroy a good argument that uses non domain specific language.
It is obvious to everyone that the word “chemical” refers to moieties that are synthetic, not typically present in nature or in extremely high concentrations.
So, the OP was quite reasonably saying that chemicals not naturally present at certain concentrations should be tested for safety when high concentrations are proposed to be used.
It like those pedantic ppl who say that tomatoes aren’t vegetables. Of course they are! They are also botanical fruit, so what?
Furthermore, even if we could draw a precise demarcation that would make sense, it would still be irrelevant: things can be beneficial and harmful regardless of whether they occur naturally or are synthetic. This is known as the naturalistic fallacy. In a similar vein, people tend to overstate the importance of coevolution for biological tolerance. Yes, it has its role in assessing safety but it’s not the ultimate argument that people make it out to be.
> So, the OP was quite reasonably saying that chemicals not naturally present at certain concentrations should be tested for safety when high concentrations are proposed to be used.
Sure but nobody is disputing this in the first place, so making such a statement is at best irrelevant and at worst a bad argument designed to derail a discussion.
Sadly, plutonium has side effects for us. Glyphosate may also have them, long term or short term. I don’t want to act as guinea pig. If you want, good for you.
Thalidomide was safe once. Until it wasn’t.
Replace chemicals with chemical compounds and you can have a more honest argument. And yes, putting random chemical compounds into the food chain should indeed be scrutinized.
edit: Of course it is sprayed on food [0][1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW8SrXMW7Ug [1] http://web.mit.edu/demoscience/Monsanto/about.html
(Since you assumed glyphosate was a insecticide, what did you think the purpose of the current study was?)
