Word: alar
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...offering elegant, sophisticated -- and often pricey -- dishes. Some chefs have gone organic for health reasons, others because they believe natural produce is tastier and fresher. Not least of all, the trend reflects consumers' increasing concern with food safety and health, especially in the wake of persistent scares over Alar, pesticides and animal hormones...
...produced a regulatory tangle at EPA and a superfluous Superfund to clean dump sites. Government restrictions on man-made chemicals are absurdly stringent in proportion to ; their risk, says Ames. He notes that while the public panicked last spring because of trace amounts of the synthetic growth regulator Alar found on apples, many fruits contain natural carcinogens in concentrations 1,000 times as great. Observes Ames: "Eating vegetables and lowering fat intake will do more to reduce cancer than eliminating pollutants...
...speed without wearing seat belts, go hang gliding and expose themselves to the cancer-causing rays of the sun. On the other side, they suffer a bad case of the jitters about the smallest threat to personal well-being. They flee from apples that might bear a trace of Alar and fret about radon, nuclear power...
...most serious case people usually make against grapefruit is that it's a bit too tart. But last week consumer groups in South Korea launched a boycott of U.S. grapefruit because they believe the produce is contaminated with Alar, a chemical preservative and suspected carcinogen that has been used by apple processors...
...South Korean protest was triggered when a test requested by consumer groups showed the Alar content of U.S. grapefruit to be 0.5 parts per million or less. But since the lab equipment was not accurate enough to measure below that level, this was "equivalent to a finding of no Alar," says Dan Gunter, executive director of Florida's department of citrus. Says he: "Alar is not used on grapefruit." The Korean government declared U.S. grapefruit safe, but American growers fear the sour taste may linger...