When budgets are tight, it’s important to know which fruit and veg are safe to buy non-organic, and which are the ones that you really should be shelling out the extra for.
More and more scientists agree these days that even small doses of pesticides and other chemicals can cause lasting damage to human health, and should especially be avoided by pregnant women and small children. But there is enough evidence to suggest that we should all be minimizing our consumption of pesticides.
Washing fruit can help to reduce the pesticide load, but it doesn’t completely eliminate it. Peeling is more effective at getting rid of the pesticides, but you lose so many nutrients by peeling that it negates the benefit.
The Environmental Working Group (who publishes this printable pdf list for keeping in your wallet) recommends eating a varied diet, washing all your fruit and vegetables before eating, and buying organic when possible.
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Comments:
Thank you for brining people’s attention to the importance of choosing organic.The Organic Trade Association would just caution people against the idea of limiting their organic purchases to the list of items you reference in this blog. While establishing such limits may help to reduce the size of your personal food budget, it misses an important point: buying organic is about more than keeping pesticides out of our bodies. It is about supporting a system of sustainable agricultural management that promotes soil health and fertility through the use of such methods as crop rotation and cover cropping, which nourish plants, foster species diversity, help combat climate change, prevent damage to valuable water resources, and protect farmers and farmers’ families from exposure to harmful chemicals. In this sense, buying organic is a commitment to the bigger, more complex picture of which our personal health is a part.
http://www.organicitsworthit.com
When budgets are tight, eat less.
Cheap food has led to a lot of waste, especially at supermarkets. Plus people throw a lot of food out.
Also now supermarkets are looking at large scale anaerobic digestion systems for dealing with food waste and for generating energy, this is a bad way of dealing with the core problem.
But they are not tackling the source of the problem which is cheap food.
The other issue is that cheap food drives farmers out of business.
Its all about quality of the produce not the quantity. Go out and support your local businesses.
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