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The Safety of Our Food
With
recalls of various foods from grocery shelves and from freezers and
cupboards, many of us are rightly concerned about the safety of the food
we consume. Even vegetables, which we are told to eat five servings of a
day for our health, have made it onto recent recall lists. This is
unsettling to say the least. Maybe even more so for those of us who
pride ourselves on knowing that chips, cookies, and processed meats are
not the healthiest food choices we can make.
We have
learned to read food labels and most of us know what the basic food
groups and the recommended daily servings are from each different group.
We have of course been led astray at times by the carefully crafted
gibberish about good carbs versus bad carbs, calorie restricting,
portion control, and other nutritional fallacies put forth by food
manufacturers and makers of weight loss products. But many of us never
thought we had to worry about the safety of fresh, packaged and canned
foods in our grocery stores.
Yet as the
recalls on various foods found at our local grocers including bagged
broccoli, salad greens, and canned vegetables, due to contaminates such
as e-coli are quite worrisome indeed. This presents a real public health
issue as e- coli, for example, can be deadly to small children, the
elderly, and those with weakened immune systems. You may know enough
about the harmful additives that processed foods often contain that you
have caused you to stop eating many of them, but now it is clear that
even healthy foods like fruits and vegetables can be contaminated in
their packaging for shipment to grocery stores and become unsafe for
consumption. Let us not forget as well that fruits and vegetables are
also contaminated by the pesticides that many farmers use to keep pests
away. Organic farmers have developed ways to grow crops without the use
of poisonous pesticides, which is why I always encourage you to eat
organic.
Grocery
stores themselves can contaminate foods like fruits and vegetables with
practices such as applying wax and other preservation materials to foods
to give them a glossy look and to preserve them for sale to buyers for
longer periods of time. Most people are not thinking about this when
buying fruits and vegetables for themselves and their families. Some
people know to wash these foods before eating them, but others eat them
without washing them first. Even rinsing off or washing these foods
first will not remove all of the preservation substances that can be on
them and that can also leech into the food itself. If you can trust the
sources, there are those that say consuming small amounts of wax and
other substances still present after washing pose no great health risk
to otherwise healthy people. Frankly though it is getting harder to know
who to trust on how safe these foods are and we need to be weighing the
risks versus the benefits of consuming these foods for ourselves.
If you,
like many other people, are finding yourself growing more wary about the
safety of the foods you are buying at your local grocery store there is
an alternative. More and more people are now buying organic foods
including meats, dairy, and other by-products of organically fed
animals. Grocery stores are starting to offer more selections of organic
foods for consumers and they are healthier for you than the non-organic
product choices. However, readying them for transport to grocery stores
opens them to the possibility of being contaminated. When transporting
food to stores you also have the environmental impact of the vehicles
carrying those burning fossils fuels.
The safer,
healthier, and environmentally responsible alternative is to buy organic
foods from a local organic farmer. Many communities have farmer's
markets from which you can buy food from local farmers. Yes, these
farmers still transport food to the farmer's market, but they typically
use smaller sized vehicles with less emissions and the distance of
travel is significantly less as well. You can also watch your newspaper
for advertisements from local organic farmers inviting consumers to come
directly to the field where these foods are grown or to the land where
animals are raised on organically. Some organic farmers that raise
chickens, cows, lamb and other animals that we humans use for food can
render the animals for you on site or have relationships with local
animal processing plants that can save you money and allow you to know
where and how this animal was processed. Buying from local organic
farmers will reduce your overall grocery costs as well by providing the
benefits of safer and healthier food choices for you and your family.
order organic meat
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