Last May, a big scare story hit the British media when it was con.
I firmed that fried, baked and roasted bread, potatoes and other starchy foods contained a chemical, acrylamide, that causes cancer and inheritable genetic changes in rats and mice. It is assumed to have similar effects in humans.
Can we eat our morning cornflakes and toast, or go to a takeaway for some fries, without getting poisoned?
The situation was deemed serious enough (for the multinational food conglomerates, in particular) for the World Health Organisation (WHO) to convene a committee on the matter.
This reported one month later that acrylamide was present, especially in crisps, chips, biscuits and breakfast cereals. recommended further research and that people shouldn't cook their food too much.
Environmentalists picked up the fact that polyacrylamide (made by joining lots of acrylamide molecules together) is used in .. Monsanto's herbicide, Roundup, to help it spread more evenly over crops.
Small amounts of acrylamide will be left in the polyacrylamide and more could be formed when it is heated. According to Zak Goldsmith, in November's Ecologist, the WHO is deliberately diverting attention They away from this source of acrylamide, and onto the cooking process - a "problem without a solution". This was a classic case of "putting corporations first".
The chemicals industry plays fast and loose with our safety, and agribusiness is particularly bad. We only have to look at the Bhopal disaster to see that. There
chemicals. often within a single company. So the argument about putting corporations first is simplistic. The second point is that the science refutes Goldsmith's claim that cooking starchy foods is not an issue. from Nestle) have shown that heating together purified (i.e. polyacrylamide-free) sugars and amino acids from potatoes produces large amounts of acrylamide. their emotions get in the way of the facts, which is harmful to the environmental are. should be more controls on the use of
But there are two problems with
Goldsmith's argument. Firstly, big corporations' interests are involved in both sides - food cultivation and processing, Two separate studies (one, ironically, Sometimes, fundamentalist ecologists let Environmental ROUND-UP PHIL WARD updates us on the latest hazards served up to us by capitalism Crops threatened by fungus