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We all want perfect fruit and vegetables, blemish free, no spots, perfect shape etc. Strangely flavour does not seem to be our primary requirement. On top of all of this, we want our produce free of any chemicals that may harm us.
Reality is, if we want perfect produce, farmers need to spray it with fungicides and pesticides. And yes, many of these products are dangerous. They have withholding periods, ie you may not harvest them within a stipulated time-frame after chemical application. These vary from 1 day to over 200 days.
And guess what, you can't wash off many of the chemicals. They're systemic, meaning they are taken up into the tissues of the plants. The plants become toxic to creatures feeding on them.
The solution proposed by some, to avoid our intoxication, is to grow your own, or buy organic. Truth is, very few human beings have this option, this luxury. Humanity is urbanising big time, with millions living in small areas, with no scope for growing their own food. The only way to feed this rapidly growing, already massive population, is intensive highly productive mono culture commercial farming. Mono cultures result in massive population explosions of creatures that favour these crops, resulting in no choice but killing these creatures. Hence we use pesticides. Same thing with fungus infections, hence fungicides.
Another possible option is genetically modifying plants, so that pests no longer like them. (Or they are perhaps toxic) I worry about this method ... these days we buy the most perfect tomatoes, they lie in the kitchen for 2 weeks, no bug touch's them, they don't rot. And they taste kind of "artificial". Are these things really safe?
Exported produce is very strictly tested for poison residues, but local markets are very lenient in this regard. I know a farmer who will not feed his family the produce he produces due to the pesticides applied and lack of adherence to withholding periods. Scary. True. Look, most of the stuff is pretty harmless in the short term, you won't suddenly get sick and die. It's long term effects, with uncertain consequences. I currently experience an epidemic of cancer amongst people I know. Young people, between 35 and 50. Is it just my perception, and if not, what is causing it?
Sure, it must be a combination of factors ... preservatives, flavour enhancers. Whatever it is, logic tells me its what we are eating causing this.
Our chemical warfare against our enemies in nature, is a complicated one. If we use the same chemicals over and over, insects develop resistance to them. (Evolution, at rapid pace.) Due to large areas under mono culture, often with no neighbouring natural vegetation, these bugs breed with one another instead of breeding with wild bugs that don't have the resistant genes. We get super bugs. Even plants develop resistance to herbicides. Nature is a powerful force to go to war with. So we constantly need to develop new chemicals.
I guess our only choice is to fight nature as carefully as possible ... the result of our war must be sustainable, it actually needs to be kind to nature in order for us to win. An obvious solution is to try to control our ever increasing population, as we can already see that we could be reaching a tipping point soon in terms of breeding ourselves into starvation. The biggest deniers of this reality are people who make more money from bigger populations, they have no interest in human wellbeing.
Organic ... well sorry, currently not practical in terms of the huge volumes of food we need to produce. Farm land needs to be utilised as productively as possible, good land is scarce, massive parts of our planet are desert, ice, and other agriculturally unfreindly problems.
Reality is, if we want perfect produce, farmers need to spray it with fungicides and pesticides. And yes, many of these products are dangerous. They have withholding periods, ie you may not harvest them within a stipulated time-frame after chemical application. These vary from 1 day to over 200 days.
And guess what, you can't wash off many of the chemicals. They're systemic, meaning they are taken up into the tissues of the plants. The plants become toxic to creatures feeding on them.
The solution proposed by some, to avoid our intoxication, is to grow your own, or buy organic. Truth is, very few human beings have this option, this luxury. Humanity is urbanising big time, with millions living in small areas, with no scope for growing their own food. The only way to feed this rapidly growing, already massive population, is intensive highly productive mono culture commercial farming. Mono cultures result in massive population explosions of creatures that favour these crops, resulting in no choice but killing these creatures. Hence we use pesticides. Same thing with fungus infections, hence fungicides.
Another possible option is genetically modifying plants, so that pests no longer like them. (Or they are perhaps toxic) I worry about this method ... these days we buy the most perfect tomatoes, they lie in the kitchen for 2 weeks, no bug touch's them, they don't rot. And they taste kind of "artificial". Are these things really safe?
Exported produce is very strictly tested for poison residues, but local markets are very lenient in this regard. I know a farmer who will not feed his family the produce he produces due to the pesticides applied and lack of adherence to withholding periods. Scary. True. Look, most of the stuff is pretty harmless in the short term, you won't suddenly get sick and die. It's long term effects, with uncertain consequences. I currently experience an epidemic of cancer amongst people I know. Young people, between 35 and 50. Is it just my perception, and if not, what is causing it?
Sure, it must be a combination of factors ... preservatives, flavour enhancers. Whatever it is, logic tells me its what we are eating causing this.
Our chemical warfare against our enemies in nature, is a complicated one. If we use the same chemicals over and over, insects develop resistance to them. (Evolution, at rapid pace.) Due to large areas under mono culture, often with no neighbouring natural vegetation, these bugs breed with one another instead of breeding with wild bugs that don't have the resistant genes. We get super bugs. Even plants develop resistance to herbicides. Nature is a powerful force to go to war with. So we constantly need to develop new chemicals.
I guess our only choice is to fight nature as carefully as possible ... the result of our war must be sustainable, it actually needs to be kind to nature in order for us to win. An obvious solution is to try to control our ever increasing population, as we can already see that we could be reaching a tipping point soon in terms of breeding ourselves into starvation. The biggest deniers of this reality are people who make more money from bigger populations, they have no interest in human wellbeing.
Organic ... well sorry, currently not practical in terms of the huge volumes of food we need to produce. Farm land needs to be utilised as productively as possible, good land is scarce, massive parts of our planet are desert, ice, and other agriculturally unfreindly problems.
