Join Us For Coffee With Lindsay Dahl from Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families

by Ileana Rodriguez, Development Director

Photo of Lindsay Dahl courtesy of
Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families

We're so excited that Lindsay Dahl, Deputy Director of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, is going to be in the Triangle on Monday, March 18th.

She'll be here to talk about things you can do to protect your family from toxic chemicals and what we can do to update our broken federal toxics laws. As someone who specializes in toxic chemicals reform, she’s got lots of knowledge to share with us!

We’re going to be meeting for coffee, dessert and conversation Monday night. We hope you can join us! To RSVP, visit this link or send an email to Ileana.

Here are the details:

Where: Straw Valley Café, 5420 Durham-Chapel Hill Blvd, Durham, NC 27707 [map & directions]
When: Monday, March 18 at 7 pm

It’s an easy way to get lots of your most pressing toxics questions answered - and get a night out, too!

Ana and I will be there along with our friends from MomsRising. We hope you will join us, too. It’s going to be fun!

Visit this link to RSVP.

I'll take my superfood without the side of malathion, please.

Photo by mystuart via Flickr

by Fawn Pattison, Executive Director

Is it blueberry season yet?

As soon as spring starts to poke its nose out, I start daydreaming about the delicious things I'll be eating from my garden and from the farmer's market this summer. Chief among my food fantasies: Blueberries.

What's not to love about a blueberry? They're small, cute, delicious, packed with vitamins and antioxidants, and they grow like crazy here in North Carolina. Here's something I don't love: the side-dressing of pesticides that come with conventionally-grown berries.

I got a jarring reminder of why I buy organic berries at yesterday's meeting of the NC Pesticide Board.

The Board was hearing the case of a farmer from Bladen county who had violated pesticide rules by sending workers in to harvest blueberries too soon after a pesticide application. The grower had applied a pesticide formula that included malathion - a notorious nerve poison - and had the berries harvested before the required 24-hour pre-harvest interval was up. One worker was hospitalized with suspected pesticide illness (though the exact cause could not be confirmed). The Ag Department's inspector came out several days later and collected samples. Those samples showed malathion residue. The grower was fined $800.

Just a moment. About those berries... Board member Benson Kirkman asked if the blueberries could have been on a farm stand for sale the same day.

Yes.

Uncomfortable silence.

The berries were in fact harvested too early. But only by a few hours. Just 24 hours after an application of pesticides that could still be detected several days later - pesticides that may even have made workers sick - EPA rules allow those same berries to be harvested and put up for sale.

That's why blueberries landed on the "Dirty Dozen" pesticide list in 2010, and it's also a very good reason to buy organic blueberries this summer.