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Is there weed killer in wine and beer? That question was posed by multiple headlines this week after testing conducted by a consumer advocacy group revealed traces of glyphosate in almost twenty brands of booze, including one that was labeled organic. The idea of drinking weed killer is, of course, alarming but what did these tests actually show?
The U.S. Public Interest Research Group tested twenty different wine and beer brands and found detectable levels of glyphosate in all but one. Twenty is not a large sample size, as U.S. PIRG acknowledges, but the fact that traces of glyphosate show up in food isn’t exactly disputed either. It’s also been found in cereal and ice cream.
What is glyphosate, why is it in everything and should consumers actually be concerned? Glyphosate is the primary active ingredient in the most ubiquitous herbicide or “weed killer” on the planet, sold by Monsanto (now Bayer) under the brand name Roundup. It’s true, to a certain extent, as the U.S. PIRG report states, that “Roundup is everywhere.”
But Roundup became ubiquitous for a reason—it’s a highly effective agricultural tool. Farmers simply have to get rid of weeds or else face the consequences. As scientist Andrew Kniss wrote in a blog post entitled Everything in Agriculture is a Trade-Off, ignoring weeds could mean the decline of “world food production...by 20 to 40 percent.”
Over the years since it’s come on the market, use of glyphosate has indeed increased dramatically, but that increase has brought about plenty of positives too: higher yields, economic gains for farmers and a decrease in other more toxic herbicides.
In the U.S., pesticides are regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency. If and when a pesticide is approved, agency scientists review the body of evidence and safety studies to determine what’s called the “tolerance” level for that product—that is, the amount of the ingredient that can be present without posing a risk to human health.
The highest level of glyphosate detected by U.S. PIRG in those twenty wine and beer samples was 51 ppb, or parts per billion, which is a very small amount and well below the EPA tolerance levels which are set at 200 to 400,000 ppb.
It’s such a small amount that an adult would have to drink more than 140 glasses of wine or beer daily before causing a real problem, as a spokesperson for the Beer Institute told USA Today. U.S. PIRG also reports finding glyphosate in the organic beer brand, but the amount there was even tinier: 5 ppb. To be clear: that’s a trace of a trace.
So why the consumer panic? In 2018, a California jury awarded a hefty sum to a plaintiff who alleged his cancer was caused by occupational exposure to Roundup. But the herbicide first rose to significant controversy three years earlier.
That year, the International Agency for Research on Cancer or IARC, an organization that’s part of the World Health Organization, classified glyphosate as a “probable carcinogen.” The decision set off a whole new level of public panic about glyphosate, because it seemed at odds with safety reviews by other scientific and regulatory bodies, most notably, the EPA and the European Food Safety Authority.
IARC has a system for assessing and rating the cancer-causing evidence for just about everything you can imagine—from manufacturing chemicals to processed meats to coffee—but it’s been widely criticized as more confusing than helpful, or “confusogenic,” as the science writer Ed Yong put it.
The differences between the different IARC classes—not classifiable, possibly carcinogenic, probably carcinogenic and carcinogenic—aren’t particularly clear, especially to consumers. Even if glyphosate is a “probable carcinogen,” for example, alcohol is a definite one—it’s associated with far more evidence of cancer risk—but it turns out no one is banning alcohol. As Yong writes, the “classifications are based on strength of evidence not degree of risk.” These ratings don’t convey cancer risk in a meaningful way.
Risk is a notoriously challenging concept. As Guy-André Pelouze writes for Slate, “determining the carcinogenicity of any foreign bodies that ends up in our ecosystems involves assessing degrees of uncertainty.” Humans aren’t so good with uncertainty. Alcohol is familiar, enjoyable and culturally significant. What is an herbicide to most consumers (especially if they don’t farm)?
Two years after the IARC review, Reuters reported that the head of the committee looking at glyphosate had omitted several studies showing the chemical to be non-carcinogenic from the body of evidence the committee had to review. To date, however, glyphosate has not been reclassified.
