For the last few years I have been eating quite a lot of legumes and did not think that there could be any issues with the food source since the pack said produced in Italy. I recently noticed however that the pack was marked "Non-EU agriculture" and further research has shown that is very likely that the beans were grown in China. Some health food and online stores selling beans explicitly mark as produce of China whereas I have noticed that in supermarkets and other stores, it just says "Packed in UK" or "Packed in Italy" with no reference to the actual country of origin.
I have some concerns with eating food grown in China, most notably that some soil is heavily contaminated with heavy metals (lead and cadmium) and arsenic and there were also reports a few years back where banned pesticides were detected in what is supposed to be Organic food. The issue is though that in the UK it seems to be near impossible to find any legumes like black or kidney beans which are not grown in China. I certainly don't want to be eating food which has a high risk of contamination but is there anything else which will have similar nutritional content?
Even organic soy milk is grown in China so the choice here seems to be between glyphosate in soybeans grown in Europe or possible heavy metal contaminated soybeans from China, not great at all.
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