Umm…Thought twice before biting into that apple...

Some fitness Guru told me about the obscene number of calories that swim into my body through one bite of my fav snack: potato chips.

Chose a shiny new apple to replace it.

But Racheal Carson makes me want to turn to photosynthesis for provision of nutrition for my body (no wait, even the rays are ULTRA now)

There are hardly any food substances produced that do not have traces of insecticides on them. And these though present in small quantities are enough to start a chain reaction through their journey up the food chain, not sparing even mother's womb.

With the rising demand for food, came up the concept of concentrated farming — growing wheat over a huge area for a whole year instead of rotating crops. This provides an almost permanent habitat for insects related to the particular crop, which were earlier kept in check by the other uninhabitable crops around it.

Also heavy importing of exotic and essential crops/plants also brought a horde of unexpected immigrants: the native insects. These newcomers breed happily till the time they have earned the title of a "Pest" after which methods of control are conceived.

So basically stemming from our own needs, Carson goes on to explain how pesticides phased in and started slowly phasing out a lot of surrounding flora and fauna.

Detailed diagrams later, but basically the chlorinated hydrocarbons, chlorinated naphthalene, organic phosphate based pesticides have all very lethal effects on living organisms.

Some lodging in the fat deposits, other attacking the nervous system, the innocent 5 parts per million quantity suddenly magnify once inside the human body to lethal proportions.

Just made me think twice about every morsel i took today.

But on the other hand there are those who firmly believe the fact that we are alive and pig on on fast food means either the proportions are nothing to worry about or the human body is well adapting to them. But most of these silent killers have latent effects that even the scientists havnt completely discovered yet.

Plus there are the lovers of CO2 who actually believe that Carbon Credits (more on that soon) are ways of just taxing the air we breathe.

The point of this post is to just show the whirlwind my mind is currently caught in right now. For every opinion there is a counter argument. Unless you are a scientist yourself, how do you take someones word for it. And even the scientists themselves did not forsee the damage the insecticides could bring about over a period of decades.

If inspite of knowing the ill effects of pesticides, they are used freely, will my throwing my Potato chips packet in the dustbin instead of over Mahim Creek and such similar small efforts make much of a difference?

yes….

no….

yes….