Yipes! According to this article in the Washington Post, the standards for the USDA organic seal are getting relaxed, and the scariest thing, for me, is the hexane used to process organic baby formula.
The whole point of organic food, to me, is to limit the amount of pesticides and other toxic chemicals in my system. For babies, this is even more important as they have smaller bodies and so will have a larger percentage of chemicals in their system if they should ingest these chemicals. Using a chemical like hexane, a known neurotoxin, in the processing of baby formula is simply unconscionable–other than breastmilk, which may not be available if a mother is sick, unavailable or has any of the many well documented problems with breastfeeding, there are no other alternatives to baby formula. This also means that many parents, thinking they were doing better for their kids by choosing the more expensive organic formulas, may not have been giving their children any advantage at all.
It was bad enough when it was discovered that organic formulas had excess sugars, but at least sugars are a naturally occurring substance. Today’s news is an order of magnitude worse, in my opinion, as it shows the willingness of federal agencies to be influenced by the food lobbies…leading them to undermine the very youngest citizens most in need of protection.
We’re not talking much here. Just a drop; a drop of gasoline with every meal. Who hasn’t gotten their hands dirty at the gas station and grabbed a potato chip before washing?
You know it’s happened before
I was asked by our political director Alexis to write an article covering the current media hooplah about a simple hydrocarbon called hexane.
Article: http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_18565.cfm
As a by-product of every petroleum refinery on earth, there is a lot of cheap hexane out there and when you consider how efficient this alkane can be, the idea of just dumping it off the shores of Somalia seems so wasteful. For a while we used hexane as a cleaning agent for removing grease in the printing industry as well as a solvent for rubber cement, but since print media is dead and I’m a little too old to still be sniffing glue, hexane needs another gig. Free showers for the homeless? Clean our bullets for a second go? Glue the streets of Detroit to prevent emigration?