Bad Parent: Organic Schmorganic
Why my family eats pesticide-sprayed, foreign-grown food.
by Jeanne Sager
April 24, 2009
I love bananas as much as the next mom. But when the grocery store is ready to charge me three times as much because those bananas are organic? You can keep them.
I don't buy organic, at least not as a rule. There are occasions — when there are no "non-organic" bananas left that aren't browned and smushed and my daughter is begging for bananas — I might be convinced to make the buy. But our mattresses are not organic. Our clothes are,
by and large, not organic. Needless to say, our milk is not organic. So a
New York Times article on a mother fretting over just how organic the mattress her baby boy is sleeping on should have made me feel bad, right?
Not really. Because for all the maternal guilt I can muster over things I have and haven't done for my daughter, I have enough other pressing things to worry about: The hole in the ozone layer. The mortgage. The reason the cat has started turning up her
tail at the litter box instead of inside of it.
When did "organic" became interchangeable with "good for us"?I'm also still grappling with the exact moment when "organic" became interchangeable with "good for us" in the United States. Arsenic, after all, is organic.
Dressing my daughter in one hundred percent cotton denim or mixing up a stir-fry of non-organic vegetables and run-of-the-mill brown rice doesn't quite cut it according to the green-baby parenting books. But whoever said organic and green were the same thing?
Researchers in the Department of Rural Economy at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada,
found the greenhouse gas emitted when organic produce is transported from great distances mitigates the environmental benefits of growing the food organically. And organically fed cows, which produce organic beef and organic milk, emit the same methane gases
as their antibiotic-treated counterparts, which in turn contribute to global warming (the EPA estimates all our livestock — organically-fed included — produce twenty percent of our nation's methane emissions). So if I can't buy organic for the environment,
surely I'd do it for my child's health, right?
About the Author
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Jeanne Sager is a freelance writer and photographer living in upstate New York with her husband and daughter, Jillian. She maintains a blog of her award-winning columns at jeannesager.blogspot.com. |
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