Re:Antibiotics in Meat Could Be Damaging Our Guts
by sampo on Saturday May 26, 2018 @02:05PM
(#17163424)
Glyphosate is also used as a "desiccant" to prepare the crop (talking about crops like grains, corn, beans, but also others) for harvest. You spray a desiccant to either kill or at least harm the crop plants, a little before harvest so that in the subsequent days the plants start to wilt and dry in the field. Then you can harvest a drier crop, need to spend less effort to dry it post-harvest, and a drier crop is less susceptible to spoilage.
Your very purpose is to "desiccate", that is to kill or harm, the plants before harvest. So you don't need to care about concentrations (expect from the point of view of regulations, how much glyphosate residue is allowed in the food products).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_desiccation#Glyphosate
Using glyphosate like this is banned in some countries (Switzerland, Nordic Countries come to mind), but it is widely used in most of the world. It has nothing to do with GMOs, it is widely used to desiccate wheat, for example, and there is no GMO wheat anywhere in commercial production.
I am no expert, but I'd guess this is the main source of glyphosate residues in food.
Uh, being able to tolerate more glyphosate was the entire reason for genetically modifying a lot of the GMOs currently in widespread use.
In other words, glyphosate is used at many times the concentration it used to be used at precisely because of the introduction of GMOs (because that was the whole point of introducing those particular GMOs).
>insect damage in crops, which provide entry points for molds to attack the crops. And some of the toxins produced by molds are really potent.
Insect damage is easy to see (at least on whole produce, not counting processed foods); glyphosate residues on the other hand is hard to detect.