500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
Something weird is happening. I’m noticing that futurists are arriving from the past. Maybe I need to explain that.
There’s a young couple who have started a business empire selling heirloom seeds. The wife looks like she’d be a natural in a bonnet and the guy has Thomas Jefferson’s fashion sense. They don’t look like leading-edge people but they are responding to a leading-edge need: people want real food, and they want to grow it themselves.
Their company, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, sells 1,400 varieties of heirloom seeds and they run monthly “pioneer town” festivals with crafts, folk music and lots of bonnets – just the kind of event that has always made me want to run away. Maybe it’s the bonnets, or folk music not being sung by Bob Dylan, but old-timey stuff generally brings on in me a kind of nausea that only listening to Radiohead can cure.
But this time, it’s different. I’m willing to welcome spelling conventions like Olde Tyme into this article because of what Monsanto has done.
You know about Monsanto, the company with a long history of fouling natural resources? It got my attention in the movie Food, Inc. with its aggressive attitude about the genetically-modified seeds it produces. Monsanto has created seeds that resist its herbicide called Roundup so that farmers can spray their fields with poison that kills everything but the Monsanto seeds they’ve planted. Cool! Well, kind of cool in an evil way, because it gets convoluted. Monsanto has patented its seeds – turning a life form into a corporate asset. The patent has held up to legal challenges, allowing Monsanto to threaten farmers who try to replant its seeds from season to season. (“Drop that seed spreader and back away from the dirt, mister.”)
Ever since dirt was invented farmers have saved seeds to replant. Monsanto says you can’t do that and reaps great profits from what farmers sow. Oh, and according to the International Journal of Biological Sciences, Monsanto’s genetically-modified corn might be linked with organ failure. So the Monsanto corn on the cob I serve might cause your liver to blow up. Sorry, would you like another Chardonnay instead? You can stay away from what Monsanto is doing by buying organic. Or you can buy your own seeds and plant them.
That’s where the heirloom seed people come in. They’ll sell you purple tomatoes and white pumpkins that look a little like organs themselves but are good for you. Despite last week’s blog, I am not advocating a worldwide return to whittling and wearing gingham, but I will be seeing how many acres of tomatoes I can fit on our porch in Santa Monica.
Photo credit: Bill Ward via Creative Commons License.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
The reason they call Whole Foods “Whole Paycheck” is that while walking its hallowed aisles you can find the most expensive red peppers that ever lived, and also the most expensive salt, and even the most expensive yogurt imaginable. Some of this is justified. The peppers, for example, listen to Mozart as they grow and watch “Baby Einstein” videos. The salt comes from the tears of extremely pure Buddhist nuns living at high altitude. At least, I think so. I’m not really sure, because I’ve been a little fuzzy of late as we try to feed two people on less than $150 a week, and that means we’ve been subsisting solely on Whole Paycheck’s organic carrots, organic apple peels and organic hummus parceled out a teaspoon at a time. Can you hang on a minute? I’m having a dizzy spell again. Ok, I’ve had a sip of organic water and I feel better.
Is it worth it to eat organic? Worth the money? Worth the hunt for the store that sells organic? Worth the travel woes when there is absolutely nothing to eat in a hotel and a Cheeze Doodle is staring you down at night in a strange town?
I can back away slowly from a snack food vending machine in a hotel. But what about a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that suggests organic food has no nutritional benefits over ordinary food?
Whole Foods, can I have my money back?
Not so fast. Let’s look at the data. The researchers reviewed 162 scientific papers published over the past 50 years. They found the nutritional value of organic food wasn’t all that different from the cheap stuff.
“A small number of differences in nutrient content were found to exist between organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs, but these are unlikely to be of any public health relevance,” said Alan Dangour, one of the report’s authors.
Bummer. I might be trying to justify my purchase of organic broccoli costing, by weight, the same as a handful of diamonds, but I have to ask: Did those researchers ask the right questions? Should we only consider nutritional value? People argue that organic tastes better, and research studies show that some organic foods contain more antioxidants associated with preventing heart disease and cancer. But there’s one argument in favor of organic that I really can’t get around.
How many different kinds of pesticides would you like to eat for dinner?
A study conducted at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health and Community Medicine found that children who ate conventional food carried “significantly higher” metabolites derived from pesticides than children who ate organic. The conventional food kids were, you’ll pardon the expression, pissing pesticide derivatives.
Monsanto, the company that makes RoundUp, the stuff you spray on weeds, also made Agent Orange, the stuff sprayed on Vietnamese, and partnered in 1967 with IG Farben, the German company that made Zyklon-B, the stuff Nazis sprayed on Jews in the gas chambers of the Holocaust. Monsanto does a brisk business making the pesticides sprayed on your supermarket produce. Suddenly that non-organic supermarket carrot starts to look pretty sinister. How did it get so orange, anyway?
The good news is you don’t have to buy organic everything – conventional onions, sweet peas and avocados are ok – here’s a full cheat sheet from Dean Karnazes’ blog in Runner’s World.
In the meantime, I am prepared to make you an offer on that tiny container of organic shaved Parmesan.
