Avocados come from Mexico, most tree nuts come from Asia, canned fish from Asia or Canada and sometimes Morocco.
I've met low-income anti-Mexican bigots who have entirely altered their diets to not include much produce, despite liking produce, because most the affordable produce available to them comes from Mexico. At least Florida oranges are still commonplace, but even cheap oranges are often carrying grown in Mexico stickers.
I'm lucky to be in CA where I can pretty reliably access (and afford) CCOF produce at the organics shop. But when I go to the Safeway-echelon grocers, even in the organics section, the US is not well represented.
Personally I don't like consuming food grown in China because if the world has outsourced all its polluting industrial activities to China, it seems likely the food has more toxins in it. Just the air pollution there alone has to permeate the food grown outdoors and all the soil.
I mean, if she meant water from the tap, it's true that it's generally not considered potable. It's clean enough for everything it's needed for, but it's just common sense to people to not drink from it. Expecting to be able to is weird because it's different. Seems kind of exorbitant to have something like potable tap water, like I'd imagine it'd be exorbitant for people that have it to upgrade to distilled tap water. The public tap water supplies being able to maintain water end-to-end pure enough to be perfectly consumable by humans is a bar probably nobody is concerned for them to surpass, because it's not really a problem.
The tap is used for everything you generally use it for elsewhere, including washing fruits, veggies, and rice. There's no problem consuming small quantities (e.g. washing teeth, using a glass that hasn't finished drying, etc.), but nobody drinks or serves a glass of water from the tap. People fill 5-gallon jugs of water at purifiers or exchange them at convenience stores and use that for drinking water and e.g. making soups, boiling/steaming foods, cooking pasta, etc.
> so how could the produce be safe to eat?
Did she mean the water it was grown with? If she did, yeah that's ridiculous. That water has to seep through the earth, so what does it matter? Why need to dump potable water? Also, a whole nation and more are living off that produce.
Yeah, but at the same time irrigation using sprinklers is going to coat the produce with whatever's left behind from the water evaporating.
Personally I think she was on the crazy+racist end of the spectrum.
But the point is, if you for whatever reason reject Mexican produce, that's actually a substantial removal of produce from your table in the US today. Especially on the low-income end, but even at the last Whole Foods I visited in IL all the Avocados, organic and conventional, were from Mexico. It's odd to me since my last FL visit included football sized Avocados grown locally, it's not like we can't grow them here.
Same as it happens when people wash their veggies at home, or use their dishes they've washed with the tap. Nobody worries about consuming small amounts. You know, it might not even be a big deal to drink from it, it's just not done. It's not that it's guaranteed to be undrinkable, it's just not guaranteed to be drinkable, and there's a difference between consuming a few milliliters to consuming a few liters.
Trying to make sense of it for myself, I can only imagine it's from believing the reason they're healthy is because they live in a perfectly sterile environment, instead of it being simply because their bodies can handle the impurities of their environment.
This piqued my interest on Mexican agriculture though and I found this relatively recent gem... US lobbyists trying to get the US government to bully Mexico into having less stringent food safety measures.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/feb/16/revealed-mo...
0: https://www.fda.gov/food/importing-food-products-united-stat...