History trip

[MinorityView]

Originally posted in the polio section, but MT asked if it could be added to the book review area. This one isn't about better health exactly, more in the way of an awful warning.

Just read The Cider House Rules by John Irving. Much of the book takes place in an apple orchard and these sections of the book are based on his own early experiences working in apple orchards in Maine.

So, here we are in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and the orchard is sprayed from spring to fall, constantly. They do use rudimentary safety measures, but the spray spreads far and wide and everyone is living in a mist of the crap.

The man who owns the orchard develops Alzheimer's. He dies after a while. Then his wife who has actually run the orchard for many years suddenly develops a fast cancer and is dead in a few months.

No mentions of polio in the book, but I can see why it was more common in the summer. Insane!

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

I was talking to some of the old orchardists who were up in Auckland at that time, and they used to come in from spraying, covered head to foot in "green". The spraying schedule in this country was similarly horrific. Even now, old orchard ground in Auckland is a toxic cesspit which sometimes has to be evacuated...

Yet people at that stuff, right up to 1970, which was around the time when most of those sprays were banned in this country.

[MinorityView]

Another bit from the book:
Near the orchard is one of the first "drive-in" movie theaters in Maine. Maine is not well-suited to outdoor events due to the vigor of the insect life. So the son of the orchard owners brings along insecticide and douses his car in it. The stink is unpopular, but then the other movie goers realize that he isn't getting eaten by the insects, so they ask him to douse them, too.

Also, the cider is made from apples that have been sprayed 10 or 15 times during the growing season. And of course they don't wash them before they crush them.

Yeuck!

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

And given that parkinson's is linked with sprays, you wonder just how many of these chronic diseases have a link.

[MinorityView]

Yes, but it hasn't really been researched, has it?

My daughter used to work for the U.S. Geological Survey. They spent many years doing water quality testing and analysis across the country. She worked on a project in Pennsylvania, collecting hundreds of water samples, testing some in the field and some in the lab and then helping to organize and analyze the date.

One thing she observed, was that they didn't collect any samples of water that had "dangerous" levels of any insecticides. However, a single sample might have low levels of 10 or 12 or even 25 different insecticides. And there was no research to show that this mix of a little of this and a little of that was actually harmless. Which is how we've gotten to the point that every human being on the planet is now stuffed to the gills with a soup of various toxins.