The Muffin-Mix Scare

A dangerous pesticide is banned by the EPA

"Another bowl of grits won't kill anyone," said Ron White, assistant commissioner of the Texas department of agriculture. Maybe so, but how about another slice of birthday cake? Unsure, state health officials in Florida swept grocery-store shelves of some shipments of Betty Crocker cake mixes, Gold Medal flour, Dixie Lily corn grits and Martha White's hush puppies, among other goodies.

In California, the state asked Procter & Gamble to take Duncan Hines muffin mixes off the shelves, and in Massachusetts, the public health commissioner recommended that consumers return 46 different cake mixes and grain products to the store. The cause of the panicked shelf cleaning was a chemical called ethylene dibromide, or EDB. A highly effective pesticide similar to DDT, it is also a dangerous carcinogen. Farmers have used EDB to keep bugs off grain and citrus fruit for more than 30 years, and scientists have known the cancer risk for the past ten years. But the Federal Government has been slow to act, prompting nervous state authorities to begin testing and in some cases banning food products shown to contain traces of the chemical. Last week the Environmental Protection Agency responded to the furor by outlawing the use of EDB as a pesticide for grain and by recommending national standards for grain products already tainted by the chemical. EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus, who during a previous reign at EPA banned DDT in 1972, announced ceilings of 30 parts per billion of EDB for ready-to-eat food, like cold cereal or bread; 150 p.p.b. for flours and baking mixes; and 900 p.p.b. for raw grain in storage.

Because of a loophole in the law that exempted EDB from federal tolerance standards in 1956, these levels are voluntary, but the states are all expected to comply.

At the same time, Ruckelshaus moved to ease fears.

"We must calm down," he said to a packed news conference in Washington, D.C. EDB is generally no longer used to treat grain, and the stored harvest that has been fumigated can be made safe simply by airing it or storing it longer. Most of the cake mix falls below the federally acceptable levels, and cooking will eliminate about 91% of EDB. Ruckelshaus put off any decision on the use of EDB on citrus fruits. Only about 2% of citrus fruits consumed in the U.S. are treated with the chemical. While there are safe alternative pesticides for grain, no entirely safe substitute has been found yet for citrus. Aldicarb, a granular pesticide, is used in Florida but was temporarily banned last year when traces of it were found in water supplies. Still, some experts argue that the hazards of EDB are exaggerated. "Compared with smoking, the danger of eating a few muffins is incredibly low," says Bruce Ames, chairman of the biochemistry department at the University of California at Berkeley. "It doesn't deserve the headlines it's been getting. A peanut-butter sandwich is more of a risk." For state and federal regulators, the real question is what level of risk is acceptable. "Any amount is a risk," says Olaf Leifson, environmental monitoring chief for the California department of food and agriculture. "It's how much society wants to tolerate." Though federal law technically bans any carcinogen in food, in practice the Government allows small levels if the cost of eliminating the cancer-causing substance is too high. The difficulty is weighing possible future lives lost against immediate economic cost. Consumers who fear any EDB at all can return to an old but forsaken faithful: plain white bread.

It has virtually none.