ruralruss,
Same here. It is a challenge though.
It is a little scary that we eat food that has poison on it strong enough to kill things. Sure we rinse the veggies we get from the store. If rinsing them with water is enough, then the first rain that occurs in the crop field would remove all the poison and the bugs would have a feast. So it seems to me that a potent amount of poison must stay on the food after rinsing it.
People are living longer now than they used to so maybe the poision on the food isn't killing us earlier. However, I wonder if we are just living longer but are sicker in our old age - more cancer, etc.
I would rather die quickly in my sleep than have a slow death by poison. I could just be paranoid...
However, I doubt anyone would argue that eating food that at one time had poison on it is healthier than eating food that never had poison on it. Of course, that's assuming you had enough to eat after the bugs got their share.
Obed
Obed,
There are some things you can do, first search on the internet for foods that you should buy organic because of pesticides and then look for ones that are low in pesticides. For example, apples and strawberries are among the the worst. Vegetables like onions, garlic, cauliflower, cabbage, basically things you peel are usually pretty low in pesticides.
I always eat seasonal fruit for breakfast. For the last couple of weeks I have been eating a quart of strawberries. We have around 500 plants. I love them but so do the slugs. We covered our raised beds with black weed block fabric and cut X's just big enough to get the strawberry plugs in. The slugs won't get on the fabric. Of course the squirrels have taken a like to them. The blueberries will be next and they are easy to grow organically, just plant them. Before the strawberries were apples. We buy these by the bushels. We take them home and sort them so the ones in the worst shape are eaten first. Then we put them into plastic bags, getting as much air out as we can and put them on the bottom of our second frig. We don't open them until they run out in the the first frig. These will keep amazingly long time, especially Pink Ladies. Now I sad apples are on the bad list, we have 2 orchards within a reasonable distance that practice IPM, Integrated Pest Management. It is not organic but they do spray less and they use natural means of pest control like introducing beneficial predator insects. However we still vigorously wash the apples in soapy water. Not just any soap and especially not anti bacterial soap.
Learn what the eggs of squash beetles look like and squash them. They look a lot like lady beetle eggs so be careful because they are good bugs. There are many other thing you can do planting a garden is a wonderful thing. When you start getting more that you can eat it is time time to try canning, drying and freezing food.
We grow most of the food we eat, I would estimate around 70%. We have lettuce almost every day, 10 months of the year it is from our garden or large hoop house. We plant 70 to 80 tomatoes every year and there is just 2 of us. We have pizza sauce, pasta sauce, tomato sauce, tomato juice, salsa, dried tomatoes, frozen roasted tomatoes, V8 juice, whole canned tomatoes and probably some more I am forgetting.
Grains are one thing we buy because we don't have enough usable land or the equipment. We get our wheat from Wyoming. It is not certified organic but none the less it is. We grind our flower from it to make bread. Tonight I will be having pizza with a crust I made last evening, I will put our pizza sauce on it along with our onions and our garlic and our crushed pepper flakes, sadly the whole, spicy, green olives come from Greece and the cheese from Whole Foods.
My wife of 32 years and I both grew up on small farms. We now live our lives much like we did growing up, and I like it.
