With 700 million pounds of pesticide used every year, inventors are trying to create a new generation of pesticide-detectors, cheap enough for the public to afford, says Modern Farmer.
One Belgian research team has developed a machine that can “smell” pesticides. “The process uses metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), manmade microscopic sponges that can absorb the phosphonates found in pesticides. Think of it as a breathalyzer for fruits and vegetables, but instead of measuring how much alcohol a driver has consumed it measures whether phosphanates (glyphosate, the herbicide “Roundup” is an example of one) are present on a fruit or vegetable, even at minuscule levels,” says Modern Farmer.
Meanwhile, in France, a 25-year-old college student recently won a 150,000-Euro prize from the country’s Ministry of the Environment for his work on a device he calls “Scan Eat.” About the “size of a flash drive,” the gadget “is hooked up to a smartphone app” and allows the user to scan a piece of fruit or a vegetable at the grocery store and learn immediately whether it is contains pesticide residues.
And chances are good that it will, at least in the U.S., given that roughly three-fourths of the 6,953 produce samples tested by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2014 had pesticide residues.