theblogbitme

The organic trend in America is growing stronger. This became vastly apparent to many consumers when Wal-Mart announced that it would see more organic products on its shelves due to growing demand. The press release sparked a debate to define the term “organic” and the sustainable food movement in general.

As a vegetarian, I look for ripe, tasty fruits and vegetables. However, I did not put much thought into where my fruits and vegetables came from or how they were grown until I met my husband. His family is very educated about organic produce and have been teaching me about the benefits of purchasing organic food that has been grown in a sustainable environment.

Recently, we went to a fantastic vegetarian restaurant in Mendocino called The Ravens. I was so inspired by my entree that I purchased their cookbook. Chapter 8 of the cookbook begins with a vegetable stock recipe. It reads:

We begin this section with our vegetable stock, which is used as a base in many of the following soups. Be sure to use organic ingredients; any of the vegetables can hold traces of pesticides and herbicides, especially carrots and celery.

Yikes! That is a scary thought. Here you are in the kitchen with an array of succulent vegetables, making soup, completely ignorant to the fact that you are adding pesticides and herbicides as additional ingredients.

Since I recently found out that Pepsi and Coke products in India contained too many pesticides, I have been wondering how many other products I consume that contain harmful silent, deadly ingredients.

Of course, buying all organic ingredients also comes with a price, so I was wondering which items give you more bang for the buck, so to speak, when it comes to buying organic. I read in my current issue of Cooking Light, that there is a pesticides report card online at FoodNews.org (they have since taken down the web page, so it is a good thing that I saved the lists last week!). See below.

These lists are a good thing to keep in mind when you are choosing items in the produce section. I also was wondering if washing fruits and vegetables made a difference in the organic produce debate. FoodNews anticipated my question. According to FoodNews:

What about washing?

Washing will not change the rank of the fruits and vegetables in the Guide. That’s because nearly all of the data used to create these lists comes from the USDA Pesticide Data Program (PDP) where the foods are washed and prepared for normal consumption prior to testing for pesticides (apples are washed and cored, bananas are peeled, etc.).

While washing fresh produce may help reduce pesticide residues, it clearly does not eliminate them. Nonetheless, produce should be washed before it is eaten because washing does reduce levels of some pesticides. However, other pesticides are taken up internally into the plant, are in the fruit, and cannot be washed off. Others are formulated to bind to the surface of the crop and do not easily wash off. Peeling reduces exposures, but valuable nutrients often go down the drain with the peel.

Hmmmm….food for thought. We will see how successful I will be at buying more organic fruit and vegetables and how that ultimately affects the bottom line. So far, so good. Today I went to Trader Joes and was looking for sweet potatoes. They did not have organic sweet potatoes, so I compromised and purchased organic yams instead. It will take a little ingenuity, but I think this will work.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 1st, 2006 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Cooking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.