free plant nutrients
Or perhaps because of them. I would argue that those who are exposed to small amounts of bacteria every day have a healthier immune system than those who are so fastidious, their bodies don’t build up any resistance to common bacteria, so that when the odd microbe slips through their vigilance, they get sick as a dog.
The cause was pesticide on the berries. The people who had picked blueberries before knew not to eat them in the field.
Maybe that’s the sunniest part of the property? Vegetables - especially tomatoes - need at least 8 hours of direct, full, blazing sunlight every day to produce well. If the rest of the yard is shady or semi-shady, they couldn’t grow big lovely red tomatoes at all.
That said, I think I’d try hard not to create a veggie garden in that kind of location, less out of a worry of dog pee* and more out a worry that passers-by would reach out and grab a tomato for themselves.
- We have a lot of cats in our neighborhood. You probably have a lot in yours. Cats aren’t as predictable as dogs on a leash about where the high-traffic pee areas are. So rinse your veggies even if they aren’t by the sidewalks where the dogs pee on 'em … maybe the local feral tomcat does!
That just doesn’t sound right at all. What kind of pesticide and at what concentration would make you ill if you ingested the amount adhering to a very small handful of berries?
Why is this so hard for you to believe?
I don’t know exactly what was sprayed on that particular field in Maine 20 years ago, but there are a couple dozen things it could have been, and maybe a combination of several of those.
Here is an article from 1988, a couple years before I was there, about a regulatory change to permit greater use of pesticides on Maine blueberries.
Here is a report from 2005, about the fungicides, insecticides and herbicides used on blueberries, and their environmental persistence.
Here is a list from 2008, of agricultural chemicals actually found on harvested commercial blueberries.
Many pesticides are potent neurotoxins that can definitely affect humans at high enough levels. One major class are the acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (which also happen to be very useful drugs for researching neurobiology, where my knowledge comes from). At very high doses, these compounds cause paralysis. In humans, lower doses disrupt the autonomic nervous system, which would certainly cause some nasty indigestion at the very least. Wiki’s description of the effects include “bradycardia, hypotension, hypersecretion, bronchoconstriction, GI tract hypermotility, and decrease intraocular pressure.”
The MSDS on Diazinon (one of the pesticides that’s listed in spark240’s references) specifically states that “Ingestion may cause irritation of the digestive tract which may include nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.”
It’s foolish to dismiss the potential risks of pesticide exposure. There are many documented cases among agricultural workers.
That is sad.
Do other things haunt you?
I know the feeling, and I know you have to get over it to ever truly relax. Hope you can work on it yourself, or get some help if you can’t beat it alone.
spark240, lazybratsche - I am not dismissing or denying the effects of pesticides on the human body - the key point here is that it was a a small handful of berries
Is there any pesticide in common use that is applied at anything like the kind of concentration that would result in a small handful of berries carrying a sufficient dose to make someone ill immediately after consuming them?
Also important here is that the berries were presumably ripe.
You’re a farmer with a field of blueberries that are ripe and ready to go to market, do you apply pesticide right before picking them? Why?
Just thought I ought to come back and clarify further…
spark240 - I don’t want you or anyone else to think I’m saying you’re lying. I do think you might be mistaken - but if you’re right, and the illness you experienced was caused by the pesticides, I think we’ve got to treat that as something quite abnormal, because:
-You consumed a very small amount of fruit. Under normal circumstances, this would have been only a very small dose of pesticide, even immediately after spraying. But you say you were ill immediately, which implies a significant dose. In the case of many pesticides, I’d expect that you would have tasted something odd with the contamination at this level.
-You picked ripe fruit - for these to have been recently sprayed seems abnormal.
Linking cause and effect in cases of food-related illness is not always easy, because the symptoms may kick in hours or days after the item is consumed - whilst it’s still possible that you were made ill by a concentrated dose of pesticide on a handful of berries, I think you’ve got to consider the possibility that it could have been caused by something else you ate earlier, with the symptoms merely coinciding with you eating the berries.
If the berries were that contaminated, that close to market, I don’t think they’d be safe even after washing.
So the myth is true! Obviously he was talking about the green & blue ones.
:eek:
I used to work in a supermarket. One day this bloke couldn’t be stuffed walking to the bathroom to he took a piss in a bucket in the fruit/vege coldroom and poured it down the sink where fruit and veges were washed. Another time a couple of guys were kicking around a soccer ball, and it hit one of those ultraviolet fly zappers, spilling hundreds of dead flys over the boxes of tomatoes underneath it. Guys would come in with filthy hands which had been who knows where and pick through fruit for a quick snack. I don’t think that supermarket had much of a problem with rats, but it didn’t take any measures to stop vermin from accessing produce. Nor did any supermarket I visited (although maybe rats weren’t a big problem in those ones).
I always wash my fruit and veges.
Produce is rarely harvested when ripe. Most produce is harvested unripe and shipped all over the country/world, spending up to two weeks in transit. It is coated during packaging with a variety of fungicides and pesticides (usually in wax form, which is why I use dish soap to get it all off) to keep them safe from pests and spoilage while traveling.
I think I learned this from Mr. Rogers.
I just don’t like the gritty texture of dirt in my food. Spinach, as but one example - if it’s been grown in some sandy soil, there’s dirt on it. Getting that gritty bit of sandy dirt in my creamed spinach is not conducive to gastronomy.
Then there was the time we had fresh cauliflower when my brother’s girlfriend was over for dinner. Guess whose piece had the caterpillar in it…
I don’t believe this. Many fruits have food grade wax applied, but I’ll need a reliable cite for the claim that it contains pesticide or fungicide.
I know this is done for some crops/produce, but this is hardly relevant when we’re talking about a field of blueberries that are fully ripe.
I’ve heard of apples and citrus fruits being waxed, but I don’t believe it’s widely done for blueberries - unless you know better.
You wash blueberries with dish soap?
Every time I go Buy a tomato for a salad I have to feel em, for one ready to eat…then go home and completely forget to wash the damn thing, realizing only after I sliced it up.
Every other fresh veggie gets a bath, done subconsciously.
Wonder if it was picking and eating in the fields/woods/gardens/trees as a kid made me not think much of tomato washing.
Wild onions out of the ground (peel the first layer,good as new)and blackberries n strawberries just blow the bugs off em, and dont eat the apples with the holes in em. Peaches, Oranges, Kumquats ect…there was no washing back then.
But, I sure rinse/wipe the hell out of the tops of cans before opening, even if its just my shirt doing the cleaning. 
More on the blueberry-field experience…
It seems likely that the concentration varied over the area of the field. Tests for pesticide residue on harvested berries (as linked earlier) suggest that dramatic variation is not uncommon.
The berries I ate were indeed ripe. But in the “wild” blueberry barrens in Maine, not all berries ripen at the same time. The same tracts will be “raked” a couple times in the season. So there were small unripe berries throughout the same areas where we were harvesting the ripe ones. Presumably the pesticide was intended to protect those; perhaps there were also pests that would be expected to get into the harvested ripe berries. (This is a blueberry rake. This is a field with both ripe and unripe berries.)
I didn’t mean to say that I felt sick instantly upon swallowing a few berries.
I was working in the field, it was hot, and here I was surrounded by all this good-looking fresh fruit, apparently free for the taking. I ate a few berries, kept working, ate a few more. Over the course of perhaps an hour, I ate a handful in total, a couple at a time. Then I began feeling sick. Not too bad at first; I tried to keep working a bit longer. But it got worse; my head started to spin a little, and then I started to feel seriously nauseated.
It wasn’t like taking a poison pill and being struck down a moment later.
All I can say is that after a few hours working in the sun, those berries looked and tasted pretty good. Maybe I would have noticed something otherwise. But, look, it appears that a couple dozen chemicals might have been used in that field. Some of them might be more or less tasteless. I don’t know what pesticide is “supposed” to taste like.
Maybe. But I can tell you, nobody else was eating the berries in the field (everybody picked the ones closer to where we were staying, washed them well, and had blueberry pancakes every morning), nobody else got sick, and nobody was surprised by the notion that it was the berries that made me sick. In fact, I don’t recall anyone there–people who’d been working with these blueberries annually for years–even suggesting an alternative explanation, or a need for one. Of course, my memory of that stage is little mixed up.
After I started feeling really bad, somebody called the woman who was managing our group for the lease-holder, and she gave me a ride out of there, made me drink water, kept an eye on me until I started to feel better in a couple hours. In retrospect, she was probably concerned that it would come back to the company somehow, perhaps that she was negligent in not warning the new kid against eating berries straight from the field.
In any event, I learned the lesson. I never ate any more berries in the field and I was fine from then on.
Diluted bleach/iodine solution rinse just before eating is the safest route. Other than that, cold water rinse them to remove visible contaminants. The dirt is the habitat for most dangerous microbes. Once it is washed off, the threat is greatly reduced. Many fruits and vegetables have evolved a symbiosis with certain harmless microbes that prevent more dangerous ones from colonizing on it. The natural yeast found on grapes comes to mind.
A healthy person should have a minimal risk of infection under normal circumstances. Small children, the elderly, and immune compromised individuals should take special care to sanitize what they eat. People who take medications to prevent stomach acid should also take extra care since their first line of gut antiseptic defense is compromised.