As part of this Healthy Eating challenge I’ve decided to increase the amount of organic foods we’re bringing into the house. There are conflicting reports whether organic produce contains more vitamins and minerals and is healthier for you. And we’ve all read the articles that instruct us to buy organic apples and strawberries and forget about organic bananas, but I don’t believe that we should ignore the organic bananas just because there’s less of a chance some of the pesticides they use on them penetrated the skin. The way I see it, organic farming is better for the environment overall so we should be buying it anyway. We should all support organic farmers and manufacturers of organic foods as much as we can… even if it means just buying ONE organic product while we’re at the grocery store.
But what about fruits and vegetables? It’s still pretty much winter here in Ottawa and all of our produce is imported from somewhere. What then?
I was faced with the purchase of tomatoes the other day. I have to say, I’m not crazy about the produce at the Superstore. I’ve had better results shopping at Farm Boy on Merivale and Produce Depot on Carling, but since I have little time to go to multiple stores the Superstore will usually have to do.
All of the tomatoes I was looking at the other day – regardless of where they were from – were the kind that don’t really even smell like a proper tomato. They were failing the sniff test, badly. So I wandered to the organic produce aisle to see what was there. Before me lay a bag (yes, they were prepackaged) of five “on the vine” tomatoes. They were ripe (good!), and organic (yay!), nestled in their own thick plastic bag (bad) and flown from Israel (ugh). So which is better? Buying organic from halfway across the world, or non-organic from somewhere else on the continent?
I thought about those tomatoes long and hard. I decided to buy them despite the fact I didn’t know how much they cost. But really, I thought, how much could they want for a few tomatoes?
Ha. I watched the cashier ring them in, they were $7.00.
You know what, they taste pretty good. I’m not sure if I’ll buy them again, but I might. Michael Pollan in his book In Defense of Food writes about how little Americans (and probably by extension, Canadians) spend on food. Other countries (France springs to mind) spend a higher percentage of their income on groceries and eating. Shouldn’t we?
But seeing as my tomatoes arrived from the other side of the world… I’m torn.
Isn’t good food worth spending your money on?
What do you think? What’s your experience? And should big stores like Loblaws work harder to promote local produce when it’s in season? And what about when it’s not?
What do you do?
p.s. the photo at the top of this post shows the produce bags I made. I took Kristina’s advice and used colourful shoelaces. They turned out pretty well if I do say so myself!
