When I was little I would sometimes ride with my parents out to farmland my family owned in the Iowa countryside. I remember the thrill of weaving through rows of corn that stood way taller than me.
What my mother remembers most is pulling up weeds. And when I asked her recently if she thought that anything in particular had caused her breast cancer, she said, “I always wondered if there was something on the weeds.”
In fact, the ongoing Agricultural Health Study has found that pesticide exposure may have contributed to unusually high rates of lung cancer among farmers in Iowa.
I first read about the study a couple of years ago while visiting my mom shortly after her diagnosis. On that trip I also visited one of the farmers who harvests our land. He showed me bright pink and turquoise corn seeds coated in pesticides and walked me through his barn past a row of enormous herbicide bins.
That evening a tornado ripped through town and my dad refused to budge from our porch. “Man defying nature,” I thought to myself, before running for cover in the basement.
In truth, my dad is a naturalist. He has always encouraged my mom to try nutritional therapies for her cancer instead of the hard-hitting chemicals the doctors pour into her body.
But he’s also a shrewd businessman whose livelihood depends, in part, on crops with productive yields. For my father, and for me and my mom, the jury’s still out on how much blame to place on the brightly colored stuff in our lives and our diets.
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