There has been questions on chickpea and if one can get clean ones if one buys organic.

Well, there are opinions, there are speculations and there are observations from a handful of samples that were tested by CFIA to allow a partial glimpse on the subject.

It is my personal belief that there is no safe way to get hold of glyphosate free chickpea, if one lives in North America, until and unless there is a serious effort at testing locally sold foods at the county or municipal level, and disclosing all those results to the local public every month. That is the reason I had tried to kick start the globally relevant petition for pushing each municipal government to start setting up a budget and start testing local food.

Unfortunately, the world has more people willing to pontificate and less people willing to do something about it – hence petitions like that get no more than 1,400 signatures.

If one does selective testing of three or four organic chickpea grown in Canada, one can find zero glyphosate. But the problem is three fold.

First – CFIA does not disclose brand names of those samples which showed no glyphosate. This is the reason I wanted municipalities to start testing and disclosing all details including brand names and origins and stores that sell them, and for people to start banging their fists on municipal council doors till they cave in (https://www.change.org/p/let-our-government-test-food-for-glyphosate?).

Second – question has been asked, if the organic certification process only ensures that a crop is grown organically, and ignores how the crop is harvested. In other words, one can grow a crop without pesticides, get organic certification and still desiccate it with glyphosate before harvest. If this is true, then that can explain how North American organic chickpea are so extremely contaminated with glyphosate, and how organic certification means absolutely nothing, with regard to glyphosate contamination in some foods grown in North America such as chickpea.

Third – there is always this issue among the CFIA records, regarding ‘unknown’ as country of origin. I suspect some, if not most, of these may have originated in Canada or nearby sources such as the US. Therefore, there is a very high probability of organic chickpea grown anywhere in Canada or the United States will have more samples with glyphosate and less samples without. This further bolsters my belief that, for North Americans, there is no safe way unless each and every kind of food is tested for glyphosate. Someone with a shipload of cash can afford to test every spoonful of food (s)he eats for glyphosate. For the rest of us mere mortals, we either get our local governments to play ball and test the food we buy, or decide to cut chickpea off our menu, or agree to play Russian Roulette with the chickpea we eat.

For people living outside of North America – that’s a different planet, a different solar system, a different galaxy and a different constellation. Rules, observations and expectations therefore would be different for them. My findings, and subsequent writing of the book, is titled Poison Foods of North America. It deals primarily with North America, with some comparisons with foods that came from elsewhere and were sampled in Canada.

Readers will be well advised to be cautious and find their path through this nightmare crop.