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Food Safety: Why you’re safer with Japanese rice than bread.

By on August 12, 2018

According to the USDA website, Japan’s wheat production forecast for 2018-2019 is 860,000 metric tons or about 10% of the wheat that it consumes.  This means therefore that the remaining 90% is wheat imported mostly from the United States as well as Australia and Canada.  Japan uses imported wheat to produce about 4.7 million tons of wheat flour, 40% of which is used for making bread, 34% for noodles, 11% for confectionery products, and 3% for retail sales. (source: World Grain)

Generally, it takes months for the wheat to arrive in Japan after harvest.  As a customary business practice, speculators will often store the wheat for several months until the value rises to make a tidy profit.  Doing so however exposes wheat to cancer-causing molds like aflatoxin. The toxicity level of aflotoxin by the way, is said to be 10 times that of dioxin, the most toxic chemical compound known to man. So producers will have removed it through mildew proofing agents or pesticides by the time the goods reach Japan’s port.

Aflatoxin was detected from US grains despite having been soaked in pesticide post harvest, according to one quarantine officer at Japan’s port.  Aflatoxin is often detected from American cereals too. The problem though is not just with aflatoxin. The pesticide sprayed after harvest still remaining in wheat is another concern.

No one wants to eat bread made of wheat with post harvest pesticide. However, it is difficult to completely trust the residual reference values set for wheat with large amounts of pesticides. Compared with domestic grain, the residual standard reference value of imported grain is overwhelmingly lax. For example, imported grain is set at 100 ppm and 10 ppm for domestic produce. It goes without saying that the more lax the residual standard value is, the more likely it is for wheat with large amounts of pesticide to enter the Japanese market.

Another serious thing to consider is the chemical contamination as a result of milling.  Milling as we know it,  involves breaking the shell with agricultural chemicals and dividing it into bran (outer shell of the grain) and endosperm (tissue produced inside the seeds).

So clearly, eating bread and pasta produced from imported wheat is no different from ingesting fungicide and insecticide.

 

 

 

 

About Tammy Lee