Why Organic?

These days you can buy just about everything organic - produce, face creams, even dishwashing soap. What's the big deal? Eating and buying organic is important for many reasons, whether it's decreasing the number of toxins we ingest, supporting sustainable farming, or just eating food that tastes better.

So what does organic even mean? "Organic principles are based on the belief that if the natural microbial life in the soil is given an opportunity to be prolific, the plants grown in that soil will also be healthy and resistant to pest and disease, and provide high quality nutrition to those that eat those plants...Conventional agricultural and processing industry inputs such as synthetic chemical pesticides, genetically engineered seed, and artificial additives are not used." -naturespath.com

Conventional (non-organic) farmers use toxic pesticides to kill all microbial life in soil. As you can imagine, the trees, plants and crops growing in this soil will be tainted with these chemicals. Large farmers also reuse the same soil over and over to meet high demands for supply, virtually eliminating the full nutritional value of the food and diminishing it's rich taste.

Even scarier is the process by which conventional meat ends up in our fridges or restaurant hamburgers. In the most severe cases, animals such as pigs and cows are stuffed by the hundreds into barns where they are then refined to cages where they are allowed minimal to no physical exercise. They are then injected with hormones to plump them up to a large enough size to produce an unnatural amount of meat when they are slaughtered. I have even read credible reports of pigs being perpetually covered in feces and sharing their small cage space with their dead piglets. Yikes! And all this in the name of big bucks corporate America.

The Natural Myth:

Many foods are given the label "natural," and many unlearned consumers buy them thinking they are just as good as organic. For example, all-natural chicken simply means that nothing was added to the chicken after it was killed- no synthetics or additives. The problem is that there is no regulation of how the chicken was raised or what it ate - which often times means a history or hormone injections, genetically engineered seed and minimal physical exercise.

There are very strict laws that farmers and manufacturers must abide by in order to receive the organic label, so we can rest assured that we are buying healthy foods. It is even illegal for a grocery store to put an organic sign over a section of produce if less than 100% of the items are organic.

Many people are discouraged by the price of organics, since farms producing smaller quantities of better quality equals higher prices in stores. I would encourage you to reevaluate your budget and at the LEAST start buying organic for foods that conventionally are heavily sprayed such as apples, tomatoes and other foods in the dirty dozen, as well as meat and dairy so we aren't loading up on synthetic hormones and who knows what else. Familiarize yourself with foods that are safe to buy non-organic. Look for free range meat - animals that are allowed to wander around their farms. Keep researching, and take baby steps!

For more reading:
http://www.naturespath.com/organics/what_are_organics
http://www.organic.org/
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/five-easy-ways-to-go-organic/