Another source of lead pollution that I wasn't aware about until buying a house on former orchard land is that lead arsenate was used as an insecticide against the coddling moth for several decades. It is a large issue in Eastern Washington State where a lot of former orchard land has become schools, housing and parks.
I’ve been trying tonfigure our if fruit and vegetables grown in lead polluted soil pick up lead or not. I haven’t been able to track down a good answer
From the research I've done it seems that most plants pick up very little. In fact it's almost a problem because you can't "leach" it out through planting. On the other hand, fruits and such aren't affected. The problem is that it's in the soil, so you have to be really careful about washing produce if it's dusty. I would be very hesitant to eat any beets, carrots, potatoes, etc... unless the soil had been amended. That usually means several feet get manually removed and dumped somewhere else and you bring in fresh topsoil. This is what WA state has had to do with a lot of the parks and public schools where they've tested and found high Pb levels.
That's what I've read as well. Generally in soils lead gets sequestered as lead sulfate and phosphate. I think unless acidic conditions exist it just stays there indefinitely.
And plants tend not to absorb it. So your tomatoes are okay.
Short answer, yes, it can remain in soil attached to root vegetables and be taken up into the tubers themselves, less so with leaf material, and further less so with fruits. It depends on the concentration of lead in the soil, the type of soil, and so on. The primary worry is soil-dust contaminated with lead, which can go airborne.
"
Do not grow leafy vegetables or root or tuber
crops (carrots, potatoes, beets, turnips) in
lead-contaminated soils. Grow them in raised
beds filled with clean soil, where the clean
soil cannot become contaminated with paint
flakes, chips, or dust.
Fruits that are marketed as vegetables, such
as tomatoes, peppers, beans, cucumbers, and
squash, may be grown in lead-contaminated
soils will not accumulate significant
concentrations of lead.
The primary risk of lead consumption from
eating a plant grown in a lead-contaminated
soil is from ingesting lead-rich soil that
adheres to the surface of the plant. Therefore,
washing and peeling greatly reduces the risk
of ingesting lead deposited on surfaces of
vegetables and fruits
"[0]
> Enriching the soil with compost also helps increase fertility. As a result, the overall size of vegetables increases, diluting the amount of lead they contain. The effects of using compost can be striking. In the study, addition of compost cut the available concentration of lead by as much as one-half.
This is a statement that's technically true, and at the same time practically wrong. If the context is that I'm going to be eating tomatoes from my garden, what's likely to happen is that if my yield doubles, my consumption doubles (unless I have a massive garden and can't eat everything I grow). So now I'm eating the same amount of lead, just in a bigger package!
It's actually quite common for people to have a high enough yield from their garden to be unable to consume it all themselves. They end up canning some of it, giving it away to friends and neighbors and even posting questions to forums asking for creative ways to dispose of the remaining surplus without just trashing it.
Store bought food isn't actually "perfect." I limit my rice consumption in part because it contains arsenic.[1]
Antibiotic resistant infections are a serious and growing threat. The CDC indicates that one in five such infections are "caused by germs from food and animals." This is from info they put out about antibiotic resistant infections and food safety. [2]
There are lots and lots of articles out there about unsafe cookware. The ones that pop to the top are mostly from disreputable sources. I've tried to find one that doesn't sound too nutty. [3]
I began avoiding aluminum cookware long before it was some kind of hot trend. I strongly favor glass bakeware and enamel cookware. It gets dismissed as nutty on forums like HN to talk about things like the dangers of teflon cookware, but if you are really seriously concerned about food safety (and metal poisoning in specific), you need to stop and think about the chemical impact on your food of the kind of cookware you use.
We actively recommend that people cook with iron pots and pans to treat anemia.[4] So it's not like we are unaware that the materials your cookware are made of can imbue your food with metals. But we typically downplay the seriousness of using things like aluminum cookware and anyone who adheres too strictly to such a guideline or too loudly advocates such a guideline is dismissed as a nutter.
I have a genetic disorder, a form of Cystic Fibrosis. I exchanged emails with a PhD biologist met through HN who kindly answered some of my questions. My belief is that my genetic disorder predisposes me to retain metals at a higher rate than normal. This guy said that given the function of the CFTR (the defective cell channel responsible for CF symptoms), that did not sound like crazy talk to him.
So I am pretty careful about exposure to metals in food and other details of food chemistry while also trying to not just make myself absolutely nuts.
My "professional opinion" -- as a former homemaker and person who never completed my BS in Environmental Resource Management :) -- is that if you have contaminated soil in your yard and you want to garden, then you should pursue a "square foot" gardening style approach and create fresh elevated beds from imported clean soils and compost for whatever small plants you desire to grow.
A desire to grow fruit trees is not conducive to that approach and most homeowners will not have the means to remove all contaminated soils on their property and replace them for purposes of planting trees. At that point, you can try to remediate the soil to some degree or give up on having food producing trees or have soil testing and make a judgement call.
There are no 100% safe foods on the planet. Over the years I've read a lot of things about what is in our food that really turned my stomach and made me lose my appetite. Then I developed some best practices to try to limit the damage, and I put my blinders on and I try to not think about those details too much while actually eating.
My understanding is that it doesn't make its way into fruit, but it probably does into the green and woody tissues of the plant. So vegetables grown in it are a concern.
