Pesticides, cadmium, PFAS: France reckons with the hidden toxins in food (1/2)

FRANCE 24 is launching a series of articles this week that examines the cocktail of contaminants increasingly found in everyday food. A few months ago, Laura* was quietly scrolling through her social media feeds when a word she’d never heard before started to pop up: “cadmium”. “I’d never heard of it before,” recalls the 41-year-old Parisian, who works as a communications director. “When I realised what it was – a heavy metal that’s harmful to our health and found in lots of the foods we eat every day – I felt an immediate wave of anxiety.” She said that literally overnight, all the packets of pasta, biscuits and rice that were in her kitchen cupboards – and that she had barely paid any attention to until then – had become “potentially harmful” to her, her husband and their three children. “I’d heard about pesticides, endocrine disruptors and so on, but I didn’t really pay much attention to them. Cadmium was a real eye-opener,” she says. “I began to take a serious interest in food contamination and realised the scale of the risk and how important it is to choose our food carefully for the sake of our health.” Read more‘Public health time bomb’: How France allowed cadmium to poison ...