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What does it take to be organic food ?"
First, food is NATURAL when
it is not overly processed. Home cooking is the solution to healthy
nutrition, good tasting food, and a lower cost of food. We spend so
much time working out of the home, for someone else on a stressful
job, only to use our salary to pay someone else to cook for us in the
form of convenience restaurants, canned and frozen foods, packaged
foods. Processing destroys several nutritional qualities of food;
hence our processed food has been fortified in many ways to replace
lost minerals and vitamins. Secondly, natural food is also whole food
for the same reason that whole wheat bread is preferable over white
bread. Finally, the notion of natural food comes back to the main
technical requirement of organics: chemical-free production and
processing.
The concepts of organic agriculture deserves years of study and practical experience.
Organic Agriculture follows a basic rule: the land must be chemical free for
the last three years and continue likewise during the production of
organic crops.
Such a summary does not properly serve the objectives of organic
food and organic agriculture. Even the standards for organic
production tend to limit themselves to chemical free farming and the
inherent requirements to succeed without synthetic inputs: crop
rotations, soil life, environmental protection, and the absence of
chemicals in food processing. But organic means much more. To keep a
long story short, organic food is NEAR,
NAKED AND NATURAL!
Food is NAKED when it is not
over packaged. When a significant portion of the sale price of a food
item goes to packaging, handling, advertising (besides the
transportation and distribution mentioned above), then the farmer
ends up with a survival income and the consumer complains about the
cost of food. Over-packaging also increases garbage disposal costs
and space. Recently, studies have shown that some plastic bags and
plastic lined cans are releasing dangerous toxins into our food.
These notions of organic food are strangers to no one. We view
advertising every day where some multinational food corporation is
proposing so-called wholesome, natural, home-cooked food that has
travelling thousands of miles, was processed many times, was packaged
in tins and repackaged in cartons and over packaged in bulk lots and
sold through several intermediaries.
While the organic standards focus on production and processing
methods to protect the environment and avoid toxic inputs, they pay
little attention to marketing and distribution methods,
transportation distances, and nutritional content. It is up to the
organic enthusiast to minimize the distance between the consumer and
the producer, to maintain the nutritional integrity of the food, and
to reduce the amount of resources consumed in the production of food.
Food is NEAR when local people
eat local food. I think all farmers would like to see their produce
eaten locally, but organically minded people would make a special
effort. The average food molecule in North America allegedly travels
about 1500 miles. Imagine the cost and resources spent on moving food
from the farm to a distant processor, then to an even more distant
wholesaler and distributor, and back to your home town on the
retailer's shelf. It requires significant fossil fuels, pollution,
subsidized transportation, and spoilage to cover the distance. The
economic imperative of long-distance food is economy of scale; the
economic imperative of organic food is a direct producer-consumer
relationship. The direct contact maximizes freshness and quality,
improves mutual understanding, gives power to consumers and producers
instead of the large food processors and provides a better price to
both parties.
In Enriching the Earth, Examines the situation from England.
In the United Kingdom more than half of all nitrogen fertilizer has been applied to grasslands. A Royal Society study found that in the late 1970s average applications on pastures surpassed the inputs to arable land (172 vs. 135 kg N/ha), and that synthetic compounds accounted for 57-63% of all inputs. The overall use of fertilizer nitrogen in the United Kingdom rose by almost 50% between the late 1970s and the mid 1980s, but it declined afterwards, and its average during the late 1990s has been only about 20% higher than a generation earlier, which means that the synthetic fertilizers supply between 65 and 70% of all nitrogen inputs. But high-yielding winter wheat -- the 1998 mean was 7.97 t/ha -- still receives more than 180 kg N/ha, double the amount applied in 1970 when the yield was around 4 t/ha, and the secular correlation between the rising applications of inorganic nitrogen and rising harvests is obvious
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