"As Trump’s EPA Takes Shape, Here’s Your Pesticide Cheat Sheet"

"How EPA regulates these 5 major pesticides has serious implications for the environmental and public health."

"In the final weeks and months of the Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Pesticide Programs issued a flurry of reports on some of the country’s most widely used pesticides. Decisions made on the basis of these environmental and health assessments will likely determine the level of pesticide residue allowed on the food we eat. They will affect children’s neurological health and development, particularly in agricultural communities. They will determine how farmworkers are protected from pesticide exposures. And they will affect the fate of threatened and endangered species across the country.

So, the stakes are high.

While scores of different pesticides—herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides—are used on U.S. food crops, the five the EPA is now reviewing are the ones to watch: atrazine, chlorpyrifos, glyphosate, malathion, and the insecticides known as neonicotinoids.

Between them, these pesticides are used throughout the United States. All but malathion and two of the five neonicotinoids now under review are used in every one of the lower 48 states. All have environmental and health effects that raise serious concerns—enough so that some are banned or severely restricted in the European Union. These pesticides are also all used on some of the most commonly eaten and popular produce, including apples, cucumbers, grapes, kale, spinach, strawberries, and tomatoes, all of which appear on the Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) 2016 “Dirty Dozen” list."

Elizabeth Grossman reports for Civil Eats February 2, 2017.