The American food supply is teeming with deadly pesticides. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), headed by former Monsanto lawyer Tom Vilsack, says people shouldn't worry because pesticides are completely safe to eat!

The latest pesticide data released by the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) claims that most pesticide contamination on fresh fruit, vegetables, butter, and other food commodities is below the legal tolerance limits established by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Only 23 of the 9,990 food samples tested, says the USDA, showed pesticide residues exceeding the established tolerance levels. Based on this, the agency is now claiming that the food supply doesn't pose a safety concern, and that consumers can eat up without worry.

But what the agency isn't divulging is that tolerance levels continually change as a result of corporate lobbying. As more pesticides are needed to grow genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) and other unnatural factory foods, more residues remain, thus the need for new limits.

Not only does the EPA continue to evaluate the safety of pesticides in isolation, ignoring the effects of synergistic, real-life exposures to many different pesticides, but the agency has also repeatedly succumbed to corporate lobbying pressures to up the safety limits for known hazardous pesticides.

Back in September, for example, GMO giant Syngenta Crop Protection LLC petitioned the EPA to increase the legal tolerance for neonicotinoid pesticides on crops. Neonicotinoids, as you may recall, are now widely regarded as the bee-killing class of pesticides, which are now banned in most of Europe.

And Monsanto, purveyor of the deadly Roundup herbicide, has petitioned the EPA to up the allowable limit of glyphosate on crops as well. According to Truthstream Media, the new limit would double the amount of glyphosate residue allowed on oilseed crops like soy and canola, raising it from 20 parts per million (ppm) to 40 ppm.