The first thing I decided to do as I started my quest was to get more information about the food I was going to buy. I want to know more about where my food is from, how it was cultivated or raised and who is getting my money. I use the internet as a main source of information but I know the risks involved. You simply google any kind of question and you will get a multitude of answers, but it is like yelling a question and having a crowd answer to you, how many people really know what they are talking about? How many are answering you for their own agenda? How many have verified what they are saying? I usually sift through the answers and avoid personal blogs, yahoo answers, forum discussions and other personal websites unless they offer some official link in support of their posts, in which case I will go and verify the source. I also try to go directly to the companies' websites and read through what they directly have to say about their products. Most brands will offer you the story of their ingredients and it is easy to read between the lines of what they say and what they avoid saying in order to determine if the food responds to my needs. I also usually stop to read articles from important news sites like CNN or TIME magazine and I do it just because I thought that journalists are supposed to check their sources before publishing their articles and therefore there must be a basis of truth in what they say. I forgot that journalists can also pick and choose their sources if they want to, so that they can twist the truth however they want.
A Perfect Example of Misinformation by Time Magazine
Today I was doing some research on cage free and organic eggs, trying to understand the different labels and what they really meant and I ran across an article from the Time Magazine called "Organic Eggs: More Expensive, but No Healthier" by Jeffrey Kluger. Most of the people don't read past the title or the first couple of paragraphs of an article and it is easy to tell in this case what they want people to think from those first few lines. I was very shocked to see how biased and superficial the whole article was. It was based on a study ( based on a method developed in 1937 ) that took into consideration only the amount of protein in the albumen. Hey, what about vitamins, omega-3, saturated fats? Ever heard of those? But even if organic and factory eggs had the same nutritional value, do we want to talk about the impact on the environment and the fact that the chicken are treated humanely? Or that doesn't matter at all? Organic chickens are fed organic food, so at the very least we are eliminating some pesticides and toxins from the soil used to cultivate the crops that are going to be fed to these chickens, doesn't that matter too? But the journalist felt that saying that the two eggs were the same wasn't enough to boost the factory farmed eggs market, so decided to go beyond that. He underlined how in some studies it was proved that pastured eggs contained pollutants due to the environmental conditions of the soil where the chickens where raised. What about the fact that for sure the chickens that are fed non-organic feed will ingest a certain amount of pollutants? What is the incidence of those cases anyway? What about giving us some numbers and compare them to the cases of salmonella and arsenic poisoning through factory farmed eggs?
Reading through the comments under the article I was happy to notice that many people replied by posting alternative studies and informations. One that was very interesting linked to a study that compared values like Beta Carotene, Vitamin E, Saturated Fat and Omega-3 content. Now, this study was made by Mother Earth News and I am not saying that is to be taken as gold, I would have liked to see a similar study conducted by the USDA or some other governmental agency though.
What Organic is Really About
As I said in a previous post, eating organic is about much more than personal health and the media should stop using this point as an excuse to say "there is really no difference at all and you are stupid if you waste your money in that stuff". The above example is only one of many similar sounding articles that allude to the fact that organic food is just a fad for some hippies that have lots of money to waste in stupid things.
I like the definition of organic that Gary Hirshberg, CEO of Stonyfield, gave in the book "Food inc."
"Organic stands for many things - a philosophy of wholeness, the science of integration, a rallying cry for keeping nature humming as the interdependent web of life"
I decided to choose consciously what I eat and what I buy because I want to have a positive impact not only on the life of my family but also on the health, on the economy and on the environment of this country and of the world. And if that means paying a few dollars more to know that the chickens that laid my eggs lived a normal chicken life than it is ok with me. Besides I find quite interesting that most of the people that tells me that organic food is one dollar more expensive than the factory one, doesn't seem to have a problem buying 5 dollar drinks at Starbucks everyday. Sorry but I prefer to buy some organic food instead.
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