Thursday, May 29, 2014

Some questions about food

I'm starting to get in the swing of things with this new job. It only took a month. :) But I'm watching a two month old baby in my home every morning, so for now I have 2 small people in my home for half of the day. In a month, I'll have him full time.

 It's really different having them both. I forgot how demanding newborns are on my time, and Madeleine wants my attention still, so juggling them both has been a learning curve. Over the last week though I started getting into a routine. :) He comes usually asleep. Madeleine plays with me. At 10, he wakes up and plays with us. 11, Madeleine goes down for nap, then I feed him and he goes to sleep until his mom picks him up. 

Anyway, one of the big perks of having a little one in the house is more time to read and watch movies. I read two new books this month, Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson and We are all completely beside ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler this month. They were both excellent reads, and I highly recommend them both.

As far as movies...I've watched plenty, but this last week I've been going through all of Amazon's food documentaries. Documentaries is a weird genre to begin with, since they are usually extremely biased. Ex. Matt and I watched one at the beginning of the month about the history of Britain's aerospace engineering...and we were chuckling about which planes they selected to make England look the best.

But back to the food documentaries, these are kind of disturbing and I can't get enough of them. For starters, I find any footage of animals being killed horrifying, but add the evil corporation stuff too and I am pretty upset by the end of the movie. The weird thing is I watch these documentaries already knowing a lot of what they are presenting. I know how bad animals are treated, and yet I consciously still eat meat. I know a lot of the organic food research. I've seen people struggle with feeding their families. Yet, I keep watching them, and for some reason...now it's actually changing a bit how I buy food.


For example, I'm making more of an effort to buy locally grown. We already eat vegetarian every other day. I'm passionately working on my garden. (We have small tomatoes and strawberries growing!) And just
yesterday I was making buttermilk pancakes, and on my buttermilk it said, "Go to upstatefarms.com for more information." So I did! And I found out about some farmers. I just want to add that it wasn't organic buttermilk, yet it was from grass fed cows that were treated humanely. Just saying.


The thing is I still have a lot of questions that these documentaries are missing. So if you know any of the answers...let me know. :) If not, I'm going to be researching a lot.

My list of questions
 I'm still not sure about all the farming companies being evil. Are there some good big guys right? They mentioned them during in this organic film. There are organic food being grown by very large corporate farms. Why does no one really talk about them?

GMOs aren't all evil right? That seems like a very broad term.

How is non-organic broccoli grown? All of the documentaries talk about soy, wheat and corn being evil, yet there is little mentioned about non-organic vegetable farms. This is a huge gap for me.
 
Are all other non-organic food being flown from other countries?

Should I be concerned that it comes from other countries? t sounds like many other countries have stricter rules on pesticides and GMOs than our country.

Organic doesn't equal humane animal treatment right? That seems to be a quiet secret.

Anyway, this is something that I'm looking into a lot. I've already decided that we aren't eating organic in our family. I think with our limited budget that it's better that we are eating more fruits and vegetables right now, than only one or two organic fruits or vegetables. I'll let you know what I find though as I research. You can be it will be done during nap times.

4 comments:

  1. The problem with GMO is that everything is genetically modified. Even we are. Everything is modified even if people didn't do anything to it. I'm not sure if humans changing the vegetables changes the nutrition value. Maybe it does. But I've always wondered about it.

    NPR had a story awhile ago about a study that showed that organic isn't really that much better for you. Yes, there are fewer chemicals, but the rules to call something organic are kind of bendable. That's what I got out of the story anyway.

    Also, I think you are right. Organic meat might not mean humanely treated. Because organic just means no pesticides, etc. That is an interesting part of this whole thing.

    I would love to buy organic and from Whole Foods or Sprouts. But right now, having vegetables and fruits in my diet is what I can do. They aren't organic, but I think it is still better than eating the alternative (hamburgers, etc., all the time). And we do vegetarian several times a week. I think you are doing a great job of being health and eco-conscious.

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  2. Here is the NPR story: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/09/04/160395259/why-organic-food-may-not-be-healthier-for-you

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    1. Thanks so much! I'll have to read it. By the way, you might find the blog zero waste interesting. I just read her book and it was amazing!

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