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Growing Your Own!

© Bob Ewing

Do you wash your fruit and vegetables before you eat them? This practice has become so common place that you can buy special fruit and vegetable washes. Now I'm always suspicion when I encounter a new product. Is the product a response to a real or a perceived need? In other words, has the need been manufactured just to sell a product, or do you really need the product. The answer with fruit and vegetables is that you do need to wash them before eating them. I don't feel you need to buy fruit and vegetable washes that are on the market but they must be washed. There are far too many pesticides in use today for anyone to feel safe eating any fruit or vegetable unless it is certified organic. Unfortunately, even then you are not necessarily safe from e.coli.

The more you know about the food that you eat, the better are your chance that what you eat is actually safe, and healthy. The best way to know what is in or on your food is to grow it yourself. The next best way is to purchase it locally from someone you know from previous dealings, someone who grows the food not just resells it.

If the food is grown organically and locally you can feel fairly secure that it is nutritious and safe. If you and all other food handlers wash their hands and keep a clean food preparation area you significantly improve you chances that your dinner will not harm you and your family. Food is your most intimate experience. You need to be aware of what you are actually doing when you pop that apple or pork chop.

Now recent news about mad cow disease and hoof and mouth disease, makes my decision, made at least ten years ago, to be a vegetarian seems wiser all the time. I haven't eaten pork or beef in all that time and feel very happy about that. This does not mean that I cannot get sick because beef, chicken and pork by-products are in so many foods and food items that there is no guarantee that I am safe from mad cow disease.

It all comes back to the importance of either growing your own food or buying from a local organic grower. It is a simple as that.

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