Moving towards Organic Food

I was always interested in eating better. I've never liked oily or greasy or fried foods (very few exceptions). I don't crave for sweets. I'm lucky that my husband is also pretty good with his eating habits. We don't buy much of the processed stuff. I can do without the chemical preservatives and massive amount of salt hidden behind those labels. Anything that can't be pronounced, anything that says white flour or refined or bleached or enriched with added nutrients, stay out of our grocery list.

If wishes were horses, I'd be eating only organic stuff.

Six Reasons to go Organic:

1. Because I don't want all the chemicals, fertilizers, pesticides, harmones, antibiotics, soil fumigants that go into the conventional foods, which would eventually find their way into our bodies.
2. I don't want to eat genetically modified (GMO) food.
3. Organic fruits and vegetables contain higher levels of phytochemicals responsible for the health benefits of plants.
4. It is good for the planet; Improves the soil texture and quality and soil fertility.
5. It doesn't slow-poison the farmers as conventional farming methods do.
6. They taste real good! You got to try it to believe me.

But buying organic stuff can put me so much behind my budget. Since the demand for organic food does not meet the supply and Organic farming is more expensive than conventional methods and the money spent in organic farming is also directed towards improving the soil condition (which has been originally toxicated with all those nasty chemicals so far), the price of the organic foods is higher than conventional foods. We slowly started moving towards organic foods, by deciding to buy 'organic' how much ever is feasible. Buying everything organic is impossible at this timeperiod of our life, but we sure can buy whatever we can, Can't we?

Then I came across a website that had the most and the least concentrations of pesticides covered conventional vegetables. Here's a picture from the article from Grinning Planet. The article also has a printable wallet size picture.

My goodness! Many of my favourite foods were in the high pesticide list. And I thought I was doing great by eating those vegetables. So we started buying the vegetables and fruits mentioned in the high persticide list, from organic markets.

Since the organic stuff is so darn expensive, we limit our organic splurges to certain stuff; Stuff if grown on conventional methods have plenty of everything that we want to avoid. (See reason. no.1). We buy Organic milk, cheese, eggs, carrots, spinach, apples, potatoes, oatmeal, cereal, sugar etc. The chicken we buy is not necessarily organic, but always cage free, harmone free and always grown on natural diet.

Many of the Natural Foods stores have their own cereals. They don't come in fancy packaging and yes, I'd have to pack my own stuff. But I have more control over how much I want to buy and they are pretty cheaper than what I'd pay on cereals with fancy packaging. And I got to say that the organic cereal taste so wonderful, even with the miniscule amount of sugar in it.

And have you tasted organic milk? If not, then you might want to try it? It yummmm.... like real milk. I can go on and on about the yogurt made out of organic milk. Just divine! Somebody I know, said it must be all those happy cows, that the milk is so tasty. True!

Sure, the grocery bills are huge, sometimes a bit, scary. But we never regret taking this step. We can always save elsewhere and direct that money into what goes into our body. We've cut down our other expenses to support this need. I guess, we feel so good about it because we are helping ourselves and also the earth in a teeny weeny bit, by supporting organic farmers.