The word they made up so you would not ask

There is a word riding on the food in your kitchen tonight, and most people in this country have never once said it out loud.

The word is biosolids. It sounds like a science class. Something measured. Something handled by people in coats who have already thought about you.

That is the job it was hired to do. Biosolids is not an old word and it did not grow up on its own. It was chosen to stand in front of a plainer one, and the plainer one is sewage sludge.

Here is what it is. At the wastewater plant, everything a city sends down a drain gets run through the machines. Not just what leaves a house through the bathroom. Everything. What rinses off a hospital floor. What a plant sends out the back. What comes off the pavement when it rains hard enough to overwhelm the line. What is left when the water is pulled back out is a solid, and that solid has to go somewhere.

It gets dried. It gets treated. It gets tested for a short list of things. And then about sixty percent of this country's supply gets spread on land as fertilizer.2 Pasture where beef grows. Fields where feed grows. Ground sitting uphill from water somebody drinks.

Now, I want to slow down, because this subject draws a crowd of people who stretch the truth, and every time somebody stretches it, the industry gets to wave the whole thing off as hysteria. So I am going to stay on the record. Every fact below is linked at the bottom of this page to the government document it came from. You do not have to take my word for a single line here. I would rather you did not.

The paragraph that changed how I garden

In January of 2025 the EPA released its own draft risk assessment on two forever chemicals, PFOA and PFOS, in sewage sludge. Their agency. Their scientists. Their document.

It found that those chemicals in sewage sludge may contaminate soil, livestock, food crops, fish and drinking water in certain higher-risk situations.1

Sit with that a second. Food crops. Drinking water. That is not a man on the internet with a camera. That is the agency whose entire job is to tell you the water is fine, writing down in its own draft that under some conditions it may not be.

They are called forever chemicals for a reason that is not complicated. They do not break down. Not this season, not this decade, not in your lifetime or your grandchildren's. Whatever goes into that ground stays in that ground. And a plant does not know to be careful. A plant is a straw. It pulls up what is around its roots and builds itself out of it, and then you slice it and put it on a plate.

One state stopped arguing and acted

In 2022 Maine became the first state in the country to ban spreading this material on land. Not restrict. Ban.3

They did not do that over a rumor. They did it because farms got tested and families found out what was under their fields after the fact. After the barn was paid off. After twenty years of doing every single thing the right way.

Think about what that morning is like. You bought that ground. You built it up. You raised animals on it, you sold off of it, you fed your own children out of it. And a man with a clipboard tells you the dirt is carrying something that will outlive your grandchildren, and no, there is nobody coming to make you whole.

Those farmers did everything we tell people to do. It did not save them, because the one thing they could not do was see it.

Now here is the Florida part

I grow food in West Central Florida, and I check what I say against the University of Florida extension service, because down here the national advice is usually written for somebody else's dirt.

In this state it is governed by Chapter 62-640 of the Florida Administrative Code. The material gets sorted into classes. Class B still carries pathogens, so a pasture it went on has to sit thirty days before livestock graze it.4 Good. That is a rule doing its job.

Then there is Class AA. Class AA is the top grade, and it comes with no grazing restriction, no harvesting restriction, and no public access restriction at all. And here is the sentence, from our own extension service, that stopped me cold: certain Class AA biosolids are labeled as fertilizers and marketed to the public.4

I am not going to tell you the bag on that shelf will hurt your family. I do not know that. Nobody has run that study on a backyard bed, and I am not going to make one up to win an argument I can win honestly.

What I am telling you is that nobody has run it. That the testing that does happen looks for a short list and forever chemicals have not been on it. That the label does not have to say. And that a man is allowed to carry that bag out to a bed his kid is going to eat out of, and never once be given the chance to decide for himself.

The not knowing is not a side issue. The not knowing is the whole thing.

Who this lands on first

Let us be honest about who absorbs this. The families who can afford to buy every bite organic will mostly step around it. They always do. The people who cannot are buying the cheapest produce in the store and the cheapest soil at the box store, and cheap inputs go exactly where you would expect them to go.

So this is not really a gardening argument. It is an old argument wearing gardening clothes. It is about who gets told, who gets protected, and who gets handed the bill twenty years later and told there is no one left to sue.

I spent twelve years as a certified personal trainer before I ever grew anything on purpose. Twelve years of watching people spend money they did not have trying to buy back a body that food took from them. Then I spent eleven years learning to grow in Florida sand, which humbles you fast, and wrote three books about what that taught me. Those two halves of my life keep landing on the same conclusion, and I am tired of being polite about it.

There is a window open right now, and it closes in September

On July 6, 2026 the EPA published draft guidance on these chemicals in biosolids. Read the fine print on it. It is voluntary. It carries no legal force. It is a recommendation.2

A recommendation, for a material that goes on the ground that feeds a country.

The public comment window on it closes September 4, 2026. That means right now, today, an ordinary person can put their name in the federal record on this. It takes about ten minutes and it costs nothing. Say who you are. Say you grow food. Say you want to know what is in the bag and you want the label to say so.

People think public comment is decoration. It is not. It is the record. And a record with ten thousand growers in it reads differently than a record with none.

What we traded, and what it is going to take to get it back

Go back far enough, and not even that far, and this was not a specialty. A yard had food in it. There were greens out back and something fruiting along the fence and a few herbs by the kitchen door that somebody's mother reached for before she reached for a store. People were not doing that because it was charming. They were doing it because it was how you ate, and how you got through a bad year.

Then in about one generation we handed the whole thing off. We stopped growing it, we stopped saving seed from it, we stopped teaching it, and the skill went quiet. Not lost. Quiet. It is still sitting there waiting for somebody to pick it back up.

And look at what the handoff bought us. A supply chain nobody voted for. Ground being treated in ways almost no one is told about. Families who have to trust a label written by a stranger because they have no other way to know. When times get hard, and times get hard, that is a thin place to be standing.

I am not telling anybody to go off grid. I am not growing every bite I eat and neither are you. But there is an enormous difference between a household that grows nothing and a household that grows something. The second one has a floor under it. It has a skill in it. It has a kid who watched a seed do the thing a seed does, and that kid is not going to forget it.

A five gallon bucket on a porch counts. One bed counts. A pot of herbs by the back door counts. Compost you made out of your own kitchen scraps counts double, because you know every single thing that went into it, which is a sentence almost nobody in America can say about their food anymore.