Organic Shmorganic

Seems like everyone is selling organic produce these days from the prestigious Whole Foods to the savvy shopper’s paradise, Costco.   Heck when Walmart gets into the business of organic produce, you know the day of reckoning has come.  Lets back up and figure out what ‘organic’ means in the first place.

Organic foods are those that are produced using environmentally sound methods that do not involve modern synthetic inputs such as pesticides and chemical fertilizers, do not contain genetically modified organisms, and are not processed using irradiation, industrial solvents, or chemical food additives.1

And what about Organic certification?

Certified organic food in the United States is grown according to standards set by the National Organic Program of the USDA (US Department of Agriculture).  According to those standards, Organic food is produced without using most conventional pesticides; fertilizers made with synthetic ingredients or sewage sludge; bioengineering; or ionizing radiation. Before a product can be labeled "organic," a USDA accredited certifier inspects the farm where the food is grown to make sure the farmer is following all the rules necessary to meet USDA organic standards.

However the entire ‘organic’ discussion is fraught with contradictions.  There are numerous organic certifications but also seemingly equal number of tainted organic produce scandals.  On one hand we have Michael Pollan urging that we shop locally for our produce and then my friend in NJ promptly reminds me that their Farmers’ Markets operate only April through October.  They are at the mercy of the supermarkets for the rest of the year.  And what about the cost of buying organic which can be so prohibitive?  Amidst all this confusion how should one approach the basic task of buying healthy produce which is really all we want?

Tatsoi anyone?
Tatsoi (Brassica narinosa or Brassica rapa var. rosularis), also called spinach mustard, spoon mustard, or rosette bok choy, is an Asian variety of Brassica rapa grown for greens. [from Wikipedia]

My  local farmers’ market is devoid of the gazzillion salad greens you might find at the San Franscisco Ferry Building Market.  However I do come across  interesting finds such as tatsoi, broccolini, mango plums as well as some of the more ‘ethnic’ produce such as fenugreek leaves, okra, amaranth leaves.  Of the 15 odd produce stalls in the market, there are only 4 that sell certified organic produce and most of these guys don’t sell the ‘interesting’ ones mentioned above.  The farmer who sells Tatsoi does not have any certification but always claims that his produce is grown organically and is pesticide free.  Indeed I have on occasion found a caterpillar or some other pest feasting amongst the leaves so it must be pesticide free, right?  The first time that happened, my knee jerk reaction was to pronounce the produce as ‘spoilt’ but then I remembered the times when I have pulled out Swiss Chard from my little veggie patch and found it to be a haven for a few different bugs which had to be rinsed off pretty vigorously.  My produce was far from being ‘spoilt’.  Since my tatsoi guy does not use any fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, irradiation, etc., I asked him why he did not get organic certification.  He responded quite matter of factly, “because we don’t want to keep giving the agency $700-$800 every year for doing nothing.”  Therein lies the problem with acquiring organic certification.  It is simply too much of a financial and labor burden for the smaller farmers since in additional to the steep fees, there is a lot of paperwork and record-keeping involved.

Trust Thy Farmer!

How then is the average consumer supposed to be assured whether what they are buying is really healthy or not?  It is a tough call to make but my tactic has been to talk to the people who are growing the produce as much as possible.  Once you start frequenting the market, you start recognizing the faces, you see entire families of farmers working the stalls.  You notice that they are practising sound farming techniques like crop rotation, etc.  You would never find them just selling one vegetable.  In fact their stalls look like a scaled up version of what a backyard vegetable patch would yield - smaller quantities of many different vegetables.  These are the people who know exactly where and how the fruit or vegetable grows.  They are happy to tell you how to pick a good one from a pile.  They will tell you the truth if you will but ask them.  They don't make false claims and their goal is to make a honest living.  For example, at my local market, there is a fruit seller from Visalia, CA who has an amazing variety of fruits throughout the seasons - plums, peaches, grapes, pomegranates, oranges, pears, you name it.  When I spoke to him, he vehemently claimed that he did not spray anything and that his produce was pesticide free but admitted using fertilizer to amend the soil.  That precludes him from getting any organic certification.   Do I buy his produce?  Yes I do.  At some level, I have equated pesticide free to be healthy.  

Organic at Costco
What about the certified organic produce at the supermarkets or at Costco, what is known in the food circles as ‘industrial organic’?  It is a little bit of a complicated issue.  On one hand, I do place an implicit trust in the organic certification labels because at the minimum it assures me that there are no health damaging pesticides or herbicides involved.  However the large scale operations tend to be mono-culture, ie. specializing in one or two select crops, require organic soil amendments and drain local water resources. Added to that is the fact that there is almost always some kind of processing involved with the big organic operations, ex. triple-washing, bagging as well as transportation over long distances.  The success of industrial organic then is largely achieved by ignoring the sustainability and environmental issues.  All that said and done, how can you argue the affordability of buying a big box of certified organic spinach or organic apples at Costco prices?  I can’t.

Healthy?  Organic?  Is there is a difference?
I suppose we all have to make our choices somewhere or the other.  For me it has boiled down to a multi-step decision making for buying my healthy produce.  

1. Buy local certified organic
2. Buy local ‘assured’ organic or ‘assured’ pesticide free  (yes, it is a huge leap of faith but I choose to believe the farmers I have spoken to)
3. Buy supermarket organic from so-called small farms (believe it or not, there is organic produce in supermarkets that comes from local or relatively local farms.  Read the labels and skip the stuff from Chile for the time being)
4. Buy industrial organic
5. Buy conventional if it is not listed on the Dirty Dozen of produce

Somewhere here there should be the option of buying a share in a CSA (Community Shared Agriculture) where you get a box of certified organic produce from a local farm on a regular basis.  I have no opinions on CSAs just yet since I have not tried them but have plans of doing so in the near future.  

And last but not the least, there is the exemption which I call ‘buy no matter what’, ie. something I have to buy whether it is organic or local or whatever only because I am spoilt and won’t give it up no matter what (for me this includes mangoes and bananas amongst a couple of other items).  The trick is to keep this list at a minimum.  

The bottom line is that we want produce that is healthy without breaking the bank.  In an ideal world we would want it without having hurt the planet or infringed upon someone’s human rights but for the time being lets just worry about getting healthy produce, OK?




1 Allen, Gary J. & Albala, Ken, ed (2007). The business of food: encyclopedia of the food and drink industries. ABC-CLIO. p. 288. ISBN 9780313337253.

Consumer Beware!

How often do you pick up a box of cereal or some other food in the grocery store and try to make sense of the endless list of ingredients?  Even if you manage to pronounce all of them correctly, how much of it do you get?  I mean really get it?  Is it harmless?  Is it responsible for this health issue or the other?  When do the alarms go off in your head?  

For all you iPhone users out there, here are a couple of apps which might make that trip to the grocery store a little bit easier.  

Choose Healthier Foods
The application from Fooducate Blog appears to give information on ingredients, serving sizes and a grade.  I think it also provides some alternative products.  The blog is pretty impressive too (started by a dad who seems to have similar qualms as me about what to put in our kids’ mouths).
http://www.fooducate.com/blog/category/fooducate-mobile-app/

Avoid GMO foods (Genetically Modified Organisms)
This application from the ShopNoGMO Project is free and lists the brands and products which have been verified to be GMO free.  It also lists common GMO crops and ingredients which use them.    
http://www.nongmoproject.org/consumers/search-participating-products/iphone-app-shopping-guide/

They have a pdf version as well over here
http://www.nongmoshoppingguide.com/download.html

As a non iPhone user, I guess I still have to rely on Google and memory to decipher the ingredients.  However here is a helpful tip - a product that says ‘made with organic ingredients only’ is required to have a minimum of 70% organic ingredients but it also has to have 100% non-GMO ingredients.  I guess one should just stick to products made with 'organic ingredients only' to avoid GM.  Hmmmn, wouldn’t it be much simpler to have products with GMOs in them labeled as such?  Apparently 9 out of 10 Americans would like that but the FDA is probably paying more attention to the Monsanto lobbyists with much deeper pockets.  I wonder if it has something to do with those 53% of Americans who say they would not buy GMO foods if the products were labeled as such.  That is a gripe for another posting as is the whole argument against GMO in the first place.  

In the meantime, here are a couple of action related links if you want to voice your opinions about GMOs.

http://organicconsumers.org/monsanto/

Not to get all political and stuff but really it should be consumer demand that controls the fortunes of the big food corporations.  Then why is it the other way around right now?  We ought to take action to change that.  After all it is a matter of our health and future.  

Impressionable minds, Captive Audiences?

After the initial burst of inspiration that resulted in the creation of this blog came the intense pressure of writing a substantial and worthwhile second post.  I had a nice lofty topic figured out sure to be informative and intellectually satisfying.  That was till I took a trip to Lucky, the local grocery store, along with two somewhat hungry 7 year old boys (my son and my nephew) and saw the experience from the perspective of a 7 year old.  We were in the deli meats and cheese aisle looking for Ricotta cheese and sure enough the boys started wondering why they could not have this thing called  ‘Lunchables’.  I dismissed them saying that it was not healthy and they could not figure out why that was the case considering that it was food that they sometimes get as part of their ‘healthy snacks’ - turkey, cheese and crackers.  I mean it was not cake, brownies or cookies so why was this not healthy especially when it said so on the box?  Crazy lady that I am, I got down on my knees, turned over the package and tried to teach them how to read a food label.  Here is how the conversation went:

Not just one kind or one brand!

Me: OK, so let me teach you guys why it is not healthy.  See this list over here which says ‘Ingredients’?
Boys: Yes?
Me: Lets try to read it.  (I start rattling off the initial seemingly harmless ingredients such as Enriched flour, etc. and then we get to the interesting stuff)
Me: Can you guys read this? Do you know what it means? (Pointing to the larger words like the Sodium Diacetate, Partially Hydrogenated Cottonseed oils, Sodium Nitrite, etc.)
Boys: No we don’t, but this is just turkey and cheese.  Look at the picture.

Defeated, I invoked the privilege of the all-knowing adult and insisted that they trust me.  I reminded them of an earlier conversation when my son had innocently asked me why McDonalds sold junk food if it was not healthy.  After a couple of facts had been shared with him, he had concluded that they must be ‘bad’ people if they were only interested in money and not making kids healthy.  I told them that these are the same kind of people who made the ‘lunchables’ look so nice and healthy.   

Strawberry, Chocolate, Vanilla.....c'mon how can this be bad?

We moved on to the dairy section looking for plain old milk and they got excited because how can one go wrong with milk.  “Can we have this chocolate milk?  Milk is good for our bones right?”  Using their new found label reading skills, they informed me “This has 28g of sugar.”  I nearly burst out laughing since this means that in 1 cup of milk, they had to have added 16g of sugar which works out to be roughly 4 tsps of sugar!  Dismissed again.  I tried telling them about the evils of sugar, ie. it makes you sick, does not help your body grow strong and turns your brain into mush (OK so I don’t have a scientific backup for the last claim but it is the most powerful one that works in my family).  My nephew who is more believing and accepting of his crazy aunt’s idiosyncrasies had now caught on and claimed that he was not interested in getting any unhealthy food.  My son on the other hand has had more experience trying to wear his mother down.  He started to get combative picking up items left and right asking why they were unacceptable.  Extremely frustrated at not having been allowed to get
1) Turkey & Cheese Lunchables
2) Chocolate milk
3) Fruit rollups
4) Cheetos
5) Vanilla flavored yogurt

6) Oreo cookies
7) Some transparent pink colored juice that looked plain bad without even glancing at labels,
he exclaimed, “there is nothing here in this store that is good for us.  You are not letting us buy anything!”

Overwhelming choices

This is only one small section of the flavored yogurt shelves

And indeed that was the crux of the matter.  The choices of foods in that store which were categorically nutritious were very limited.  We had to mosey along to the Produce section before I could set them free and ultimately they were allowed to pick up a bottle of Odwalla fruit juice which seemed like the least I could do given the torture I had just put them through.  

Long story short, it got me thinking about the irony of the state of our food choices in the United States.  This is after all the land of the plenty but isn’t it also supposed to be the land of the free?  Free to make choices?  However even an adult can get frustrated by the overabundance of unacceptable foods that either have added sugars, chemicals and/or preservatives to the point of overshadowing the nutritious foods that we actually need and want.   So what hope is there for a 7 year old to find an acceptable choice?  And how many times am I just going to have to say NO to almost anything and everything that catches his fancy?


Captive to the dictates of the big bad wolf?


There are several books, discussions and agitations about the evil genius of the food industry - marketing to kids, monopoly, processing, politics, blah, blah, blah.  But the more pertinent question for me turned out to be "How in the world am I going to teach/encourage my children to recognize, choose and enjoy nutritious foods?  How will they learn to make the same choices that I make when they are no longer subject to my seemingly arbitrary decrees?”  Don’t get me wrong - it is not as if my family does not enjoy our share of the so-called junk food and my kids get their share of dubious snacks and treats (moreso than not).  My sweet tooth that has me stocking up chocolate periodically and there are enough birthday celebrations around to keep us eating cake with amazing regularity.  However the treats and food choices are regulated by this sane obsessive parent for the most part.  I wonder what will happen when my son finally flees the coop in 10 odd years.  Will he just binge and make up for all the lost time or will I have done my job and scared him off all processed foods for life?  (Sheesh I can just visualize it - he will be the only freshman in college who will turn up his nose at pizza!).  But seriously there has to be a middle ground.  I wonder if along with geography, science and math, my son should be learning how to decipher food and nutrition labels?

In the interest of unscrambling and defying the marketing genius, I am going to try to figure out some basic rules to teach my kids understand the difference between healthy and not.  I mean it is not exactly rocket science.  In my simplistic world, the rules might go something like,

1. If it grows on a tree or is a plant then it is good for you.  If it looks like something that comes from a factory then it can’t be good.
2. If it is something that has a long list of ingredients with things that you cannot pronounce then chances are it is not really good for you.
3. Just because it says ‘Its healthy’ on the package, it does not mean it is true.  Remember that there are people in the world who care about money more than they care about your health.  (talk about stealing away their trust and innocence)
4. If something is very sweet and and it is not a fruit, then it means it has too much sugar which is not good for you.  
5. You should not have too many treats.  In fact you should definitely not have more than one treat in a day.  A treat is one cookie or a piece of any other sweet.
6. Ultimately I suppose one has to keep reminding them that healthy eating is the only way they are going to grow to be strong and smart.  I have found that my kids respond very well to the idea of being strong and smart enough to pursue their sports and other activities.  I might have well use that to my advantage.  

This seems like commonsense but it is amazing how we don't normally talk about this with our kids. I wonder if these kinds of rules and conversations will make my children into precocious little brats and anxious eaters or simply more informed kids who can freely make sensible food choices?  Luckily for me my kids already like fruits and vegetables and other nutritious choices so the imposition of these rules should not completely traumatize them (or so I hope). Time will tell all.

"We might as well stop eating altogether!" Not quite.

Buy organic, no wait buy local. 
Eat only cage free eggs but hey, are they really allowed to go outside. 
GMO will kill the planet. GMO will feed the planet. 
Salmon is good for Omega-3 fatty acids. But don't experts also say that one should limit the amount of seafood due to fear of mercury contamination? 
City water shows high levels of chromium but apparently that is necessary. 
Eat more green, leafy vegetables. Oh no, tainted spinach found in CA. 
Campesinos in Mexico are uniting against corporate greed.
Ruined farmers in Asia are committing suicide
Those Girl Scout cookies are killing the rainforests in Indonesia........blah, blah blah! 


Sound familiar?

A friend exclaimed in frustration that if we have to do the right thing by our bodies and by the planet, we might as well stop eating altogether.  There is so much information on the subject of food and diets and much of it is contradictory. So how is a lay person to make sense of all this? It is tough work as I am finding out.  But it is not impossible.  We just have to be way more educated and vigilant than ever before.  We have taken food for granted for much too long especially here in the United States.  So much so that we don't even realize that we now have fewer food choices than we did a few decades ago.

Food has become a very complex issue where it is no longer enough to just buy tasty and/or healthy food and be done with it.  One has to wonder about safety and real nutrition value.  The next logical concern is sustainability over the long term.  There are environmental and economic impacts.  Thanks to the nature of the global food system, choices made in the US can impact farmers in Asia.  There is the matter of corruption and control in the food system by a select few corporations who also seem to control political and regulatory entities.  The list is endless and complicated enough to tangle a few neurons up there in the brain.

This blog is my journey as I try to unscramble and make sense of this complex issue and figure out the "right" answers - those that will be right both for my family's health and the health of the planet and its people.  My hope is that I can encourage you to also look at food with an added perspective and make the choices that are right for you.