December 15, 2017
Organics – Are We Missing Something?
We are surrounded today with articles about eating organic food. We are told that it is more nutritious and better for the planet. These are quite obvious facts and I agree, but I wonder if that is enough to convince us to pay the extra cost of buying organic?
For me when it comes to food, I not only want it to be nutritious but also smell and taste good. This is not always so when it comes to the organic produce that I buy. I wonder if our organic farmers are concentrating more on the marketability of their produce than taking the extra care of the soil in order to produce sweeter, tastier fruits and vegetables? Or maybe the seed variety hasn’t been produced for taste but more for how well it can be shipped.
I grew up on a small hobby farm in Nova Scotia. We grew/raised most of our food. Even as a child I had no problem eating the wide variety of produce we grew because they were sweet and tasty to me. I remember going to the garden and pulling out a turnip, washing it, and eating it raw by scraping it with a spoon. It was sweet and tasted really good. I tried that one day and it was gross! Bitter and sour.
When I say to my children that food taste different today than when I grew up, they laugh at me and tell me that my memory is wrong. But I know this to be true because last year I convinced my daughter to plant a heritage tomato plant. Right beside that plant there was a yellow tomato and a Roma tomato. Well, when they started to ripen the mice decided that the heritage tomato was better than the others, and we hardly got to enjoy any ourselves. But when we did, everyone had to agree it smelled and tasted sweeter and had more of a tomato taste than the other two. Now I think they believe me.
I am beginning to think that not only should we measure our organic produce by the fact that herbicides/pesticides were not used but also what variety of tomato, broccoli, etc. is grown because flavour is also a big factor in whether a person will choose to eat a certain food or not. We are also more willing to pay the price if our taste buds tell us it’s worth it.
