One of the great ways that you can improve your daily diet and enjoy your meals in a more flavourful and accessible way is to switch over to organic food, especially when it comes to fruits and vegetables!
What Is Organic Food
Organic food, simply defined as any produce grown without the use of synthetic chemicals, boasts a whole wealth of benefits for consumption. Be it for easier digestion, more flavourful greens, consuming cleaner water through your vegetables, or even contributing to a more sustainable farming style for the betterment of our global agriculture.
In the case of most non-organic foods – which can be foods that were grown using human-made pesticides and fertilisers, or a variety of produce that is genetically modified – the lower quality of product is only marginally cheaper, and can, in some cases, have much less flavour and be harder on your GI tract.
To better understand when and how organic produce is best to purchase, let’s first go over the difference between wide-scale and small-scale organic produce.
How To Find Organic Food
Because the organic label does not demand a particularly robust set of parameters, it can be common for big name brands and industrial farms to slap the label “organic” on otherwise non-organic produce, upping the cost without actually improving the quality of the product.
For the best results, consider searching not only for organic produce, but local organic produce, or small-scale organic produce, which is more often farmed in more sustainable forms. In small-scale organic production of fruits and vegetables, less carbon is wasted on delivery, making it more sustainable to shop for it at your local store, guilt-free!
However, if farmers’ markets and local venders are not easily available at your location, another thing to look for in particular is the special certification that approved organic foods have. A little research into the regulatory bodies and the seals awarded to organic products in your local region can go a long way to making sure that the products you buy that are labelled as organic are, in fact, as organic as they claim to be.
Other Benefits
Another benefit to switching over to organic foods is the effect on the ecosystem. Synthetic fertilisers, made up of chemicals rather than compost or animal waste, can be made up of chemicals that, while improve the rapid production of fruits and vegetables in farms, contribute to lasting damage done to soil and waterways. For example, some fertilisers, applied in excess, are carried off into local bodies of waters, such as rivers and lakes, where the chemicals negatively impact fish and crustacean populations through oxygen depletion.
Over a longer scale of time, high levels of nitrogen in synthetic fertilisers speeds up soil acidification, which makes the earth in which the produce are grown in gradually become less and less tenable to life, a process which is difficult and time-consuming to reverse.
Over an even longer period of time, this excess in nitrogen even contributes to the build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. With all of these downsides in mind, there’s all the more reason to shop for organic produce, where the only fertilisers used should be entirely natural, made up from anything from compost to mushroom manure to kelp meal. With these small changes, we made the culture of farming more sustainable, by supporting the agricultural practices that take greater responsibility with the long-term health of our planet.
When it comes to flavour, there’s simply no doubt – organic fruits and vegetables have more flavour than inorganic ones. This is especially the case when you buy local produce, such as the ones from independent farmers or nearby markets, because the vegetables you buy aren’t treated with as much preservatives, and are allowed to ripen naturally rather than being picked prematurely and ripened artificially with chemicals.
Similarly, the water quality of vegetables grown organically is often higher, which matters hugely when it comes to leafy greens, like lettuce, cabbage, and fresh baby spinach. Dirty water, or water treated chemically, leads to more bitter greens, and sometimes even more upset and gassy stomachs, due to the lower regulations in water parameters.
With local, organic farms, you can be certain that the water used to grow your watermelons is clean, sustainably sourced, and not treated with harsh chemicals, and since most vegetables are almost entirely water, you can imagine that this has a huge effect on how your veggies taste and how your body digests them. Much of your hydration every day comes from the food you eat, so if you care about drinking clean water, you should consider thinking about eating clean water, too!
Lastly, switching over to organic products encourages a greater societal shift to a culture of sustainability and care. When you shop local, certified organic, and small-scale produce, you establish more of a connection with the agriculture of your community. GMOs, while not actively harmful in and of themselves, are often branded by the companies that produce them, making them exploitative of farmers, who need to pay to grow them.
By comparison, heritage fruits and vegetables have been grown by independent farmers over generations, with natural selection and purposeful caretaking to make produce that is bountiful without being excessive. With this in mind, you can also look into the labour practices of small farms more easily, and buy products from small, independent, and organic farmers who treat their employees with humane labour conditions, and pay them the adequate wages they deserve.
While the main reasons for buying organic foods are simple at first – they taste good and they’re better for you – the lasting effect reaches wider than our own plates and shopping carts.
By choosing more sustainable, reliable, and trustworthy options at the grocery store, we can encourage more responsible practices when it comes to agriculture, and nurture a future that better cares for our planet as well as our farmers.