Ill even look one up for you.
"Chemicals that have been banned for food crops are still being used on cotton," says Will Allen, founder of the California-based Sustainable Cotton Project. Nearly one-quarter of all pesticides used in the United States are applied to cotton, and the overall amount and intensity per acre is increasing every year. Worldwide, more pesticides, some of them extremely toxic, are sprayed on cotton than on any other crop.
How much of them end up in your diet? Every year in the United States, half a million tons of cottonseed oil goes into processed salad dressings, baked goods, and snacks like Fritos and Goldfish. Another 3 million tons of cottonseed is fed to beef and dairy cattle, which also eat vast amounts of the cotton by-products known as "gin trash."
The industry view is that pesticide residues are removed from cottonseeds during their chemically intensive processing: the seeds are washed with caustic lye or sodium hydroxide and the oil is extracted with hexane, a highly volatile solvent, and is then filtered through sulfuric-acid-laden clay. (Foreign-produced cottonseed oil is sometimes extracted with a mixture of hexane and benzene, a known carcinogen that is very difficult to remove.) But residues from pesticides such as the defoliant DEF have frequently appeared on California Department of Food and Agriculture scans of cottonseed and other cotton by-products over the past decade. Cottonseed oil, however, is rarely tested for pesticides, according to Young Lee, staff scientist at the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the Food and Drug Administration. In 1997, no cottonseed oil at all was tested.
REF: Daniel Imhoff "King Cotton - pesticide residue is common in cotton byproducts used in agriculture - Brief Article". Sierra. FindArticles.com. 06 Mar, 2011.
King Cotton - pesticide residue is common in cotton byproducts used in agriculture - Brief Article | Sierra | Find Articles at BNET
