Progressive Wednesday

The Grandeur of Earth Day: Plants

April 11th, 2007 by Progressive Wednesday

Plants:

We’ll be direct and to the point here: try to buy one piece of organic produce every time you go grocery shopping.

Why, pray tell? We’ll rely on our handy and, yes, dandy bullet points:

• Buying fresh organic produce can shift the power from behemoth agribusinesses to small farms. If you can buy locally grown, all the better (this reduces the use of fossil fuels for transport). The biggest businesses have, over time, run the private farmer out of the proverbial Dodge. We don’t dig that. I grew up surrounded by small farms. I went to church with those struggling farmers. My heart can’t help but want to work for them and not against them.
• Organic produce is grown without the use of pesticides or artificial fertilizers, and new research clearly demonstrates that organic food — despite what the American mainstream media outlets suggest — is better for you. If you need proof, just click here, or here, or here. And the chemicals used to grow “regular” produce have been shown to be dangerous for fetuses. And one other thing is for certain: those chemicals used on regular farms pollute our drinkable water and our soil.
• Growing organic food creates “less stress on farmland.” This protection of our soil is essential to the long-term quality of our food.
• Often, you can find organic foods at similar or just slightly higher prices than their genetically modified counterparts. Hunt down those if you’d like. Organic baby carrots at my grocery store are, more often than not, cheaper than “regular” baby carrots. It doesn’t take much work and most major grocery stores carry a small but substantial enough variety. You might even buy organic baby food. Or organic milk. Or organic eggs. If you’re having trouble finding organic foodstuffs near you, check out Local Harvest, enter your zip code, and be lead to the food.

Organic food demonstrates the importance of protecting biodiversity. Chemicals unnecessarily used on plants get in the water, which pollutes animals (including, of course, us). This polluted water also runs into other soil. That polluted soil then struggles to grow native trees and plants. Without those, animals that rely on them for food and shelter… well, they kick ye ole bucket. You get the picture.

If nothing else, in our opinion organic food tastes better. So to quote Grandma Zambito: Mangia! Mangia!

It’s really very simple: a small purchase can help the whole of the land. And this land, my sisters and brothers, is your land, and this land is our land. And it’s the only land we’ve got.

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Editor’s note, if you’re interested, you can find a trailer for a film called Good Food, Good Business below. You can buy the video by clicking this sentence.