On April 20 there was an article in the Chicago Tribune entitled “Parkinson’s linked to pesticides.” It immediately brought to mind the case of my neighbor on the next block who died from Parkinson’s disease a few years ago. It was an agonizing, slow death for this man, a professional artist with accomplishments in several media as well as a distinguished teaching career.

The pesticides cited in the Tribune article were maneb and paraquat. Maneb is a manganese-based fungicide used, according to one website I consulted, “in the control of early and late blights on potatoes and tomatoes and many other diseases of fruits, vegetables, field crops, and ornamentals. Maneb controls a wider range of diseases than other fungicides.”

Paraquat, according to Wikipedia, is “one of the most widely used herbicides in the world. Paraquat is quick-acting and non-selective, killing green plant tissue on contact. It is also toxic to human beings when swallowed.”

A quickie Google search told me that both pesticides have been linked anecdotally to Parkinson’s for many years, but now there’s a study that followed longtime residents of California’s Central Valley who lived near fields sprayed with paraquat or maneb during the period from 1974 to 1999. The 368 residents who lived within 500 yards of sprayed fields were 75 percent more likely to develop Parkinson’s than the 341 carefully matched controls who did not live near the fields. The study was published in the current issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology. The researchers knew when and where these chemicals were used because every application of pesticides to crops must be registered with the state.

So what’s the point?

This is what happens when agriculture becomes industrialized. Factory farms are massive monocultures, and they are extremely vulnerable to pathogens and invasive weeds. If a disease or pest attacks, the whole operation can collapse like a row of dominoes. If you’re a factory farmer in California, you have to spray all kinds of poisons on your crops to protect yourself.

But if you’re a grocery shopper in Chicago, maybe you don’t really want to eat produce that retains residues of paraquat and maneb and all the other pesticides that are commonly used in industrial agriculture.

So what’s the alternative?

Locally grown food, produced on smaller, mixed-use farms that are pesticide free. Food you can buy at farmers’ markets. Food you can grow yourself. To be sure, right now there aren’t enough local farmers to go around. We drove them out of business in favor of those factory farms in California and the dubious appeal of being able to buy a peach in January. Now we’ve got to bring them back—not for nostalgia’s sake but for our own well being.

—Carolyn Ulrich