WHY Eat Organic, Local, Sustainable Foods? (Rookie Tip)

Foods rated most healthy to least healthy…

Note that I've recently updated this post and switched the order around between 2 & 3.  I no longer will choose local over organic, because I want to avoid dangerous chemicals on our food, especially glyphosate, and I want to avoid genetically modified foods as well.  Read more about glyphosate and GMOs below.

1. No spray/organic and local – not always easy to find, so when you see it, snatch it up!  Especially if it's from a farmer who you know and trust and who gets it about cultivating healthy soil that's full of nutrients!
2. No spray/organic, but not local – sadly, here in Michigan this is mostly what we eat from the store all winter…but just remember that organic doesn't mean it's nutrient dense.  Organic produce may not have been sprayed with dangerous chemicals, but that doesn't mean it was grown in rich, healthy soil.  Also, there are many organic junk foods at the store — think boxed mac and cheese, which, by the way, I do buy for the kids now and then when Kent and I go out to dinner.  At least they're not getting anything bad, but they're not getting especially nourished either — always add extra cheese though, and use real butter and healthy milk of course, and that helps!  Read more from Kristen about Why organic isn't enough.
3. Local, but not organic – this is what I can usually find the most of at our farmer's market in the summer. Surprisingly, there are still not as many organic growers as I'd like to see.  Nowadays I ONLY go right to my organic farmers and skip the rest, depending on what I find here:  Click here for which produce is OK to buy conventional and which is not.
4. Not local OR organic – I used to say if you can't find organic or local, still eat the produce for the nutrients.  Now I say to skip it and make something else!  (Again though, it depends on this:  Click here for which produce is OK to buy conventional and which is not.)

The idea behind such crops was to simplify weed control for farmers. The farmer could douse the entire field with glyphosate herbicide, killing all weeds without killing the crop.

But this is not the way things turned out. Weeds have quickly become resistant to glyphosate herbicide through a process called selection pressure, in which only those weeds that tolerate the herbicide survive to pass on their genes. The resulting epidemic of glyphosate-resistant “superweeds” has caused huge problems for farmers in countries where glyphosate-tolerant crops are widely planted.

As glyphosate becomes increasingly ineffective in weed control, farmers are turning to older, even more potentially toxic herbicides, like 2,4-D, an ingredient of the Vietnam War defoliant Agent Orange, and dicamba.^{5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12}

People and animals that eat GM herbicide-tolerant food crops are eating high levels of residues of glyphosate and its main metabolite, AMPA.¹³ Both chemicals are toxic.         (Find the full article including reference links here.)

And people wonder why I'm a freak about what I feed our family?!

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