mind body planet

I know that my last few articles have sort of jumped around a little bit and missed oe big thing that is sort of the key to my love of Organic foods. Organic farming is all based on the ideas of sustainability and on keeping the surrounding soil and ecosystem clean and preserved. For me my experience with it has been fun and interesting, though I prefer biodynamically raised foods, and I think everyone should know where their food comes from. 

The background about the real facts of pesticides is something that sheds a great deal of light on the importance of eating an organic diet.  Pesticides have been documented ad shown to cause some serious issues among the farmers who work with them.  Even when the techniques are done properly and precautions take, issues can arise from even a slight amount of simple exposure. Many phosphate pesticides are known to cause abdominal pains, dizziness, headaches, nausea, vomiting, as well as various skin and eye conditions. Then there are also other studies which have show much more serious problems like respiratory issues, memory loss, cancer, depression, and birth defects. I have never actually been a witness to any of these but the research doesn’t lie. 

One difficult point about pesticides in fruits and vegetables is when it comes to buying things from abroad. I have worked on Organic farms before in this country and the regulations you have to follow are pretty strict and you have to be quite rigid in every step you take ad what equipment is used every day. Each year the farms have to get checked and things have to be cleared by the certification organization so they maintain a very well ru operation. It was also my experience that these farmers were much more passionate about  their final product than just about their business. The issue for the health of the consumer arises because the organic standards in other nations is not the same as they are here. Other nations don’t place as much value on the same scientific research and thus some food enters the U.S. with levels of pesticides that are unacceptable here. 

I don’t want everyone going out now ad running for the hills because that’s not what I am saying is the solution. What I do what you to do though is read ad get yourselves informed because that is the only way anything is going to change. With your knowledge of what isn’t good for you then you can place your dollar and your power where it belongs.

Organic On a budget

Last time I talked about the joy and wonder behind where I get my foods from and I realize now that I may have gotten a bit ahead of myself on that one. When looking back on that entry I realize that I may have frightened away even myself a few years ago. I want to make my angle here very plain and simple folks. I don’t want you to change your lives because of some huge and idealistic higher cause. Though it would be nice, I don’t expect anyone who finds my little ole’ blog to do as such. What I want to do here is educate and that is exactly what I am going to do. So today I am going to talk about something that is much more accessible to those of us on the limited budget and the more mainstream diets. Everyone hears the word Organic thrown around whenever there is a discussion about food these days. I don’t think that most people quite understand what that means exactly so I want to give a little bit more information on that.

The popularity of Organic foods has grown out of what I perceive to be an awakening by people who realize that they have no idea what they are being fed. In agriculture in the country for the last century we have been obsessed with the use of pesticides and fertilizers to increase production. What has grown out of that is an obsession that spilled over in to much more research and development in genetics that simple agriculture. Today we have major corporations the produce our seeds for the most major staple crops in the country which contain pesticides all the way until they are in our stomachs. Of course these seeds have been given some kind of health clearance, but so have all of the other products that we are not informed about at the start. There are seeds for certain crops given frog and fish genes so they can resist extreme temperatures. Now I may think personally that this concept is a bit weird, but I don’t want to say that I don’t think it’s fine for businesses to do this. It is their right. For those of us who want to feel safe about our foods, the market power of our dollars has been speaking load and clear over the past few years.

Organic foods are foods produced and sold without the use of pesticides and petroleum based fertilizers. This essentially means that what you get when you buy Organic is the same foods your ancestors would have been buying. Then within the term Organic there is also another split that we have to watch out for. The term Organic does not include the use of genetic modifications. So that is why there are some labels that say non-GMO organics which means that they have not been genetically modified. In other words these products are the original strains of the products you think that you are buying. I hope that this makes a little bit of sense to you now and so you can disseminate between all of the various labeling for food out there. I will go in to more detail about Organics next time so that I can discuss how to live Organic on a limited budget.

I am lucky enough that the college I have chosen is right in the middle of a nice farm belt.  There aren’t too many of them that are interested in local foods movements and Organic growing.  Most of the farmers are much more traditional in their loyalties and in their own corporate sponsorships.  Around here though there are a nice selection of farms that specialize in such progressive and sustainable farming.  Because of these farms there is also an almost daily selection of farmer’s markets around if you have a way to get their and mouths to feed. I usually go to a farmer’s market five days out of the week with the exception of wednesdays and sundays which are apparently rest days for the farmers to maintain work back at the farm and rest a little bit.  These farmer’s markets are not only relics of a past economic structure that we had in this country and others still have today, but they are a sign of growing acceptance of the fact that we need to be stewards and not only consumers.

Many farms around here also participate in programs known as CSA’s for short.  These programs are called community supported Agriculture and within the last decade or so they have been blowing up in popularity and sheer numbers.  Basically what a CSA is is a way for the farmer to get community support for their farm while the people paying get seasonal food that was picked that day fresh.  Every January these farms start taking money and make up a big list that they limit to make sure everyone is going to get what they pay for. Then they take that money and invest it in the basics of the farm and the whole things cycles back around. I don’t know personally, but I would imagine that in a system like this the farmer’s are not making that much money, but really they are doing something that is so much more important than that. By setting up a system like this they are essentially bringing all of the economic growth and support that would have gone to already prolific farmers in areas like California or Florida and bringing it back to our town.  This also helps us to minimize how much energy is being expended to get us our food.  Instead of flying strawberries from across the country, I get about ten pounds of them in the early summer. 

Today is Tuesday and in this context this is like the perfect storm of a day for my style of food.  On this day I have a farmer’s market a block from my apartment and I pick up my CSA about three blocks past that.  Today I came home with corn, blueberries, lettuces, potatoes, and onions.  All of the food is so fresh and delicious that it makes dishes taste totally different that if I were to make them with even Organic grocery store foods. This is the aesthetic payoff of the local foods movement, but the implication are much larger than that. These are just two of the more practical support structures that most people can access on a daily basis for making change in the world around them. Go out and find one or both of these today and make your difference. 

I would like to start of my blogging career by just giving an overview of the kinds of things I will discuss on here as well as a little bit of a background on myself. This will be my first blog ever and I will surely hit some snags along the way and run out of things to say eventually, but right now I have plenty of things to spout about. I hope that in all of my ramblings, that I can educate those who are seeking, discuss with those who are learning, and learn from those who are willing. This is my goal, and this is my blog.

My life has always been sort of steeped in the world of the natural way of living you could say. I have only recently had to begin calling my way of life “natural” because people like labels and we can’t deny ourselves that. Since I was a young child in our home, the primary methods of medicine were yoga, and herbs. I have only begun using supplements on my own periodically when I feel that my body could really use something that plants cannot provide in a quick enough time frame. I grew up in a home where there was little to no exposure to television and much of my free time was spent gardening in the summer and reading in the colder months.

Now that I have reached collage age and I am being forced to live in the way that everyone else here must, I have had to make some adjustments to the way in which I live to cope with a reduced amount of natural surroundings to use at my disposal. This has forced me in to the world of local foods and ,at times when I can’t get things at farmer’s markets, organics foods at the grocery store. I look at the way I am living my life right now as sort of a model with which a person can function on a sustainable and natural way of life, even while caught in the grips of faster paced living conditions. I have been walking the path of eco friendly living forever, but now I am out there in the big world with everyone else, just trying to do my part to help with the mess around us.

At this point in my life I have been a yoga teacher, a professional musician, an amateur music therapist, and a farmer. My mother and father were both practitioners of qigong and Reiki. The background that I bring to the table should provide readers and discussers with something interesting at times, and something that they may disagree with at other times. That is the wonderful part of this path. There are so many routes to take and every one is just as valid if they work for you.

I hope that I have given everyone a good taste of what is to come and what may be discussed on here. If anyone has anything that they would like me to bring up, please don’t hesitate to stop me and just ask how I feel or tell me how you feel on something that interests you. Here’s to a wonderful time from here on out. Salute!