Pesticides

Attacking pesticides is sexy. Many activists, lawyers and journalists have made careers out of propagating a simple, compelling narrative about the chemicals farmers use to produce our food.

Eight years after Rachel Carson's bestseller Silent Spring sold half a million copies and turned environmental protection into a cultural juggernaut, Earth Day was inaugurated as an annual event.

New York City Council Member Ben Kallos sure knows how to play the game. In his quest to get glyphosate (Roundup) banned from parks and other public spaces, he uses a tried and true method.

When my wife and I found out she was pregnant with our first child, our thinking about food safety seemed to shift overnight. Fears that we once disregarded suddenly morphed into potential threats we had to assess for our son's sake.

On a personal level, it’s Saturday morning.

Pick just about any newspaper or journal and during the course of a year, one or more articles will be devoted to the benefits (or not) of organic foods and the downsides (or not) of conventionally grown food with pesticides and herbicides.

Scaring old people is a time-tested strategy to scrounge up votes ("He'll take away your Medicare!") or to steal money ("Your Social Security number has been compromised. Please send payment.")

By Michael Dourson, Bernard K. Gadagbui, and Patrician M. McGinnis

How do you know when a "study" isn't really a study? When the people who performed it wrote up a brochure hyping its results before actually bothering to publish a scientific paper.

We had a really bad flu season this year. The CDC just announced that about 80,000 Americans were killed.