The Organic Choice

It has always made sense to me, this organic thing. Looking at the pale imitations of tomato like foods found behind the counter at Subway, your local salad bar, the local Wal-Mart produce isle, it is an easy comparison to what you can pull out of the ground, and what Sysco/Food Service Of America supply us with. The appearance, the taste, the mouth feel are just so sublimely different.

We pay a price for convenience. The convenience of not having to plant, cultivate, water, harvest, and clean from one's own plot, or the plot of a neighbor is found in the quality of fruits and vegetables described above. The cost of transporting them 100's, if not thousands of miles. The lack of choices in what is available. The price we pay in the need for increasing chemicals as pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, just to maintain the same yield. Not to mention the negative impact of these chemicals on our environment, the watershed, the air quality, and the developed weaknesses of growing produce in this fashion.

The business of producing, and distributing food has simply become an industrial process, and I don't mean that in a good way. What becomes important in industrial food is not it's inherent quality, it's goodness, but rather the cheapness of it's production, and the shelf life, that will make it profitable for the business. One example of this might be the increasing number of recalls of food products that are making people sick, and in some cases, killing them. This is what happens when profit wins out over quality.

So as our nation continues down the road of simple preparation, or no preparation we all pay a high price for this convenience in the descending quality of health of our lives. At least this is the way I see it. Now I'm not proposing that everyone go back to farming all their own food, or never eating out, or preparing industrial food,but I do think it will be helpful if we all take a step back, look at what we're doing, and how well it is working.

My interest here is in sharing my ideas, recipes, tools that work, and procedures in the hope that others can have fun, eat better tasting, more nutritious food, save money, and did I mention have fun?