Is Cheap Food Worth Risking Your Life?

We spend far too much money on our toys and far too little money on our most valuable asset ever, the human frame. When I tout the benefits of eating organically, I like to remind my clients to take a moment to commit to putting as much thought into their food decision making as they do their electronics. Pay now or pay later with pharmaceutical drugs, paind, illness and degenerative, even terminal disease.

(OrganicJar) While relying mainly on hard work, yield variations, composts, green manures, organic pest controls, and mechanical cultivation for a productive agriculture, the Organic community has managed to produce globally accepted crops and livestock even without resorting to synthetically made soil enrichers, chemical pesticides, plant growth enhancers, genetically modified organisms and alternative feeds. The organic market nowadays still continues to grow in a precipitous pace that their forty years of extensive labor and prowess enabled them to build a $25 billion a year market that provides the consumers in the U.S. a healthier alternative to the affordable yet perilous modernized or industrialized agricultural services in terms of food products.

According to the latest sales statistics, there are more than 75 million Americans who are sentient about their health and environment that they are more willing to pay more for all-organic products, despite the present economic state. These organic consumers are aware that healthy living is to eat organic, as fresh unpreserved organic foods contain more essential nutrients that aid in boosting the immune system and help prevent cancer. Buying organic also helps in reducing the greenhouse effect and can also be the solution to the imminent falling-off of global fuel reserve and the very costly healthcare services. Organic farming provides us all with a good quality of life.

On the contrary, Industrial agriculture offers nothing but health and environmental hazards and cruelty to animals such as hypertension, obesity, food poisoning brought about by pesticides, high risk for cancer because of the use of chemical, preservatives and radiation, water contamination, and climate change. The claim that industrialized foods and food products are cheaper compared to organic is actually not true. As a matter of fact, they are more costly if the hundreds of billions of dollars that the citizens pay for the annual taxes, health care and environmental maintenance are to be taken into account. Even the pandemic AH1N1 or the Swine Flu Virus can be directly ascribed to the poorly tended farming lands.

There are also products that claim to be “natural” however they’re not. Be sure to buy products that are certified by the USDA National Organic Program (NOP). Certified food and other organic products are 95-100% purely organic. This means that the farmer or producer adhered to the strict regulation of the NOP in terms of organic agriculture and that no synthetic fertilizers, GMOs, irradiation or any forms of industrial agriculture is practiced.

The scary fact is that the organic and “natural” food industry is controlled by huge corporations and we all know what they care about: profits and market share. The UNFI and the WFM are but two of the biggest and most monopolizing wholesalers and retailers of the industry, selling mainly so-called “natural” but not organic products. Because of their vast grip of the market, the small coop and grocery owners find it hard to compete in selling their mostly organic products.
What matters most is we put the environment and our health first before anything else. Just think about it, is a cheap product worth risking your life for?