Organic Food?  Local Food?  Sustainable Agriculture? 

What Happened to Regular Food???

 

 

 

 

             Wow, eating is getting more complicated everyday!  Actually that’s not entirely true but it can seem that way.  There is a ton of information on organic foods, local foods and sustainable agriculture so I’ve tried to sort out just a bit of it for you.

 

             Organic foods are produced according to a certain production standard.  For crops, it means they were grown without the use of conventional pesticides, artificial fertilizers, human waste, or sewage sludge, and that they were processed without ionizing radiation or food additives (www.usda.gov).  Will organic foods turn out to be superior?  The jury is still out on that topic.  In the meantime, consider looking at organic only for things that you consume on a daily basis in a significant quantity.  The “dirty dozen” list of fruits and vegetables that tend to have the highest and lowest pesticide residues can help as well.  (see chart next page)

 

             Local foods usually means  grown within a certain distance, often 50-100 miles.  A person who eats local foods is called a ‘locavore’.  This is a neat concept—it might be good to consider how you might participate in even just a little.  Eating locally grown foods has many advantages for our local economy, contributing to the ‘green movement’ in reducing ‘food miles’, supporting small scale farming, fresher and potentially more nutritious foods, and so on.  A statistic from one of the books listed below really sticks in my head:  “If every family in America ate one local meal a week, we would save 57.2 million barrels of oil”!!!

 

             Sustainable agriculture can be defined as “an integrated system of plant and animal production practices having a site-specific application that will, over the long term:

 

à satisfy human food and fiber needs;

à enhance environmental quality and the natural resource base upon which the agricultural economy  depends;

à make the most efficient use of nonrenewable resources and on-farm resources and integrate, where appropriate, natural biological cycles and controls;

à sustain the economic viability of farm operations; and

à enhance the quality of life for farmers and society as a whole.”   (www.nal.usda.gov)

(Local foods may or may not be grown organically but often are grown using these methods.)

 

That’s a lot of words that boil down to “good for everyone and everything involved” ! I encourage you to check out www.localharvest.org to see the various farms, stores and farmer’s markets in our areas.

 

 For more information and downright fascinating reading, I personally recommend 2 books:

 

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

 

Have Fun!!!       Lynne