That ants on a log snack you fed your preschooler for lunch?  It may have been served up with a side of up to 67 kinds of pesticide residues, says a new report by the Environmental Working Group.  Same goes for those sweet strawberries that are currently in season.

In an effort to raise awareness about pesticide use, the group  reviewed 100,000 produce pesticide reports from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and put together a list of the “dirty dozen” fruits and vegetables, or those that contain the highest amount of pesticide residues even after being washed with a high-pressure washing system.

If reducing pesticide exposure is your goal, you don’t have to go 100 percent organic, says the Environmental Working Group’s Amy Rosenthal.   “You can reduce your exposure to pesticides by up to 80 percent by buying the organic version of the Dirty Dozen,” she said.

Here’s the list:

Continue reading »

Tweet

0

Pin It

Think twice before you let your kid play with your cell phone. Feed your children organic food whenever possible and don’t heat baby bottles or other plastics in the microwave. And don’t forget to test radon levels in your home.

These are just a few suggestions from the President’s Cancer Panel, which released its annual report yesterday.

There are thousands of cancer-causing agents in the air, food, and water which are posing “grievous harm” to Americans every day, the report concluded. Not nearly enough is being done to research and regulate these chemicals.

Although large studies have found no links between cell phone use and cancer, the report said that people would be wise to play it safe by wearing headsets and to make calls quickly, according to Reuters. Continue reading »

Tweet

0

Pin It

So this whole farm share thing is working out better than I expected it to. I actually managed to use almost everything this week. It also looks cool, at least the last box did. Very colorful.

Here’s how it went down: Continue reading »

Tweet

5

Pin It

I have long felt that the organic/conventional food “debate” among moms is nothing but a smokescreen of corporate power to divide and conquer us–all at our children’s expense.

Last night, for our (sixth!) anniversary date, my partner and I went to see Food Inc. and it gave me that much more evidence for my theory.  It also gave my partner a more concrete sense of why I will argue to cut the cable television, cut the dining out, cut the new clothes purchases, cut the parking space rental…you getting the idea?…cut anything in our budget before we cut into my grocery allotment.

Mind you, I don’t think it’s impossible to eat well on a tight budget, a belief recently bolstered by this article in Salon about a couple who ate sustainable, organic, local and ethical (SOLE) for a month on a food stamp budget, in greater New York City.

But even if eating well costs more, it’s the kind of thing I consider non-negotiable, the way I consider regular well-child doctor visits non-negotiable.  And if our family budget is tighter these days, we do have health insurance, and we aren’t reduced to food stamps, so it’s not something we have to negotiate anyway.

And yet, I am well aware that for some people, good food does have to take a backseat to things like rent or medicine.  So the children of the poor are the ones at highest risk for health complications that result from a bad diet–things like Type 2 Diabetes, food-born pathogens, and the increased cancer rates that are documented in children who rarely eat produce that has not been treated with pesticides.

This is not a matter of morals.  The poor have been accused of moral inferiority from time immemorial, but again, this is a smoke screen.  If someone can’t afford to eat safe, nutritious food free of poison, that person is basically starving.  Just because the United States has plentiful calories at low, low prices, doesn’t mean it has plentiful FOOD at same.  And the children eating empty–or even dangerous–calories are not doing so because they have “Bad Mommies” (that distinct middle-class invention where we confess our love of Twinkies), they are doing so because our society doesn’t value the health and well being of children.

Because when you take the government grocery budget to that big kitchen table on Capitol Hill, you find loads of money being poured into subsidizing farmers who grow the corn and soybeans that are the basis of the “food” engineered in labs for huge corporations that sell cheap, empty calories to the world.  A fraction of that money used to subsidize small, organic family farms could A) increase the number of those farms and thus the availability of better food and B) decrease the price of that food the way current subsidies make fast-food “dollar menus” possible today.

I’m not a better mother because I feed my kids as SOLE a diet as possible.  I’m a wealthier one.  But that doesn’t mean the health of children like my daughter’s biological siblings being raised in the direst of poverty by her birth mother across town, is not my problem.  Quite to the contrary, I think good, safe, healthy food (that–bonus!–happens to be better for the environment too) is very much my business and when children can’t get it, it is my responsibility to change that.

I am weary of the “Whole Foods Mom” versus “Walmart Mom” false debates.  It is time the Whole Foods shoppers and Walmart shoppers linked arms to demand the best possible food for the most possible children.  Stop letting them divide us.  It’s our kids who are the big losers in that war.

See Also: The Floundering Promise of Organic Milk

Tweet

31

Pin It

The words “Manhattan” and “Farm” don’t go together in my mind. So when I heard that there was a FarmShare that offered deliver to The Big Apple, I was skeptical.

After some soul searching (more like gut-searching, as in examining my ever-expanding waistline), I decided that I was willing to give it a try. We went whole hog — which is just an expression, because there’s no bacon involved — and got vegetables, farm fresh eggs, and fruit. Continue reading »

Tweet

9

Pin It

They say that if your budget can’t handle All Organic All the Time, the one most important thing to buy organic for your kids is milk.  And yet, at $6 per gallon, it’s a tough one, even if the rest of the cart is full of bargains.  I know I’m grateful for the not-organic-but-not-quite-conventional option of No Hormones/No Antibiotics milk myself, and that–at roughly half the price of organic–is what my family drinks.

And yet, I can’t help but feel for the family dairies that are suddenly seeing red after making the difficult and expensive switch to organic milk production.

For example, Continue reading »

Tweet

8

Pin It