Are Organic Foods Worth the Price?

Don’t tell my husband, (don’t worry, he never reads this, and if he does I’ll post an apology) but our grocery bill has gone up TONS since I’ve started eating primarily organic! I used to pride myself on walking out of the grocery store with 3 full shopping bags and only $20 dollars lighter. Now I have register shock every time I fill just one or two grocery bags!

So, is it worth it? Many of you may have heard of the “Dirty Dozen”. It’s from the US Department of Agriculture and it’s the twelve pieces of produce they say you should ALWAYS buy organic. It seems that no matter how much you wash these fruits and veges, a lot of pesticides remain. So for those of you that don’t even wash your produce, you might be extra concerned!

So just what does our government recommend we always buy organic?

Apples

Cherries

Grapes, imported (Chili)(personal note-don’t buy Natures Partner either)

Nectarines

Peaches

Pears

Raspberries

Bell peppers

Celery

Potatoes

Spinach

Potatoes

Strawberries

Okay, that’s thirteen but who’s counting?

Strawberries. Who doesn’t love a fresh strawberry?

Strawberry Shortcake, Yum. Chocolate dipped strawberries – Yum Yum! I haven’t been able to eat a non-organic strawberry since I saw the movie “The Future of Food”. One of the final scenes is in a strawberry field, you see a man dressed in a gas mask, full suit of protective gear, carrying a small machine with a long nozzle, lifting up each strawberry leaf to get better access to the strawberry fruit that he douses with a steady stream of his chemicals – then cut to young boy popping a plump, fresh strawberry into his mouth! UGH! I don’t want to eat those chemicals, don’t want my kids to eat them, and as cheap as I am, discovered I didn’t want the guests at my last party to eat them either.

And potatoes. Wow, somehow I thought the ground would protect them, but of course that was before I knew about how the treated the dirt with synthetic nitrogen before planting, among other icky things I’m sure. Now new research is finding that the synthetic nitrogen actually destroys soil carbon instead of enriching it. An ultimate end result is more nitrates in ground water that then enters the atmosphere as nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas with some 300 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide (read more here http://www.grist.org/article/2010-02-23-new-research-synthetic-nitrogen-destroys-soil-carbon-undermines-/ ). BTW, nitrogen is used for nearly all conventional crops, its just that potatoes really remind me of it.

So, is it all worth paying more for organics? I know this is just a small, small argument for a very large topic, but yes, it is. Not only for me, but for all the current and future residents of the earth. All these pesticides are terrible for our health, it’s no wonder we have “grown” so many more diseases since the 1970’s when pesticides, herbicides etc started becoming so widespread. Innocent residents near fields of sprayed crops are adversely affected from drift, so much that the EPA is considering increasing buffer zones around fields (more info http://action.ufw.org/page/s/epadrifts or see below).

Bottom line, we’re all worth the few more dollars it’s costing to fill my grocery bag. Aren’t you worth it?

Not-So Pure-Cane Sugar

I’ve always wanted a reason to not eat sugar. I mean a really good reason, not because it’s not good for me, because that reason just hasn’t worked very well, I’ll gladly harm my own body for a moment of heaven. No, I needed a good animal- or earth-friendly reason

So this falls under my commitment to “let no animal suffer” in my name, which by the way, is getting more and more difficult as I read more and more.
But back to sugar –

The white refined sugar Americans love so much is white because it is run through a bone char filter during the processing. What is a bone char filter? Well, it’s created from the most dense bones of a cow. Of the 82 pounds of bone from a cow, only about 20 pounds are load-bearing bones, mostly the pelvis, which are used for the bone char.
The bones, almost exclusively from non-USA sources, are baked for 12 hours at temperatures over 700 degrees to remove bacteria etc and thus create a char. You then have 9 pounds of char from one cow source.

An average sugar processing plant runs a filter processing 30 gallons of sugar per minute for 120 hours, each requiring 70,000 pounds of bone char. So doing the math, that’s almost 7800 cow bones being used for just one filter. Of course some plants run multiple filters at a time. That’s a lot of dead cow. Mind you hey only have to change the char every 5 years or so, but it’s still a lot of dead cow.

Cane sugar is the only kind of sugar run through these filters. Beet sugar is not, however it is common for cane and beet sugar to share the same post-filter vats, so you really can’t say for sure that it’s char-free. There is one plant in New York that is using an ion filter, but until now it’s been more expensive than bone char. But even the sugar from that plant is indistinguishable to you and I at the grocery store because it’s not packaged any different than the other plants as they’re all sold under the same names.

Organic sugar, however, is always char free. I’ve been eating almost exclusively organic and vegan for the last few weeks anyway but there have been occasional bits of candy and cake finding their way to my mouth. Again wondering to myself, why do I need a reason other than personal good health to not eat sugar?? Now I have the cow gross-out reason.

Enough of that, now a quick tip about genetically modified and organic produce. If your produce item code starts with a “9”, it’s organic. If your produce item code starts with an “8”, it’s genetically modified. Now, just run out to your supermarket and try and find an “8”, chances are you won’t. You see, they thought we’d PREFER genetically modified food, but the opposite proved true, we avoided it. So shortly after this was instituted the “authorities” decided we really didn’t need to know if it was genetically modified, so they took the “8” off. That’s how much they care for us, the big corporations and government, they care enough to mislead us into buying what we otherwise wouldn’t. .Baaa

Now where'd I put those organic cookies?