Originally Posted by
Jughed
I've worked on the bulk chemical production side for fungicides, pesticides, herbicides, weed killers...
You don't want to know what is sprayed on your fresh produce in the USA. Chemicals no other country allows in any dose.
Full on chemical plants make these products, many worse than the industrial chemical plants I visit (ones that we hear about all the time), nasty nasty places. Stuff is made in bulk - at the point where zero human exposure is considered safe - then watered down and sprayed on our crops.
Why? Money.
I live in farm country - crop dusters flying over the farms for the entire growing season - and I know what kind of crap they are spraying. Nasty nasty nasty nasty stuff.
Plants = healthy, yes - I agree 10000%. Genetically modified plants sprayed with some of the most toxic chemicals on the planet? Not so much!!
How do any of us know if what we are consuming is free from all of these chemicals? Unless we grow it ourselves...
We are founding members of a local food coop, not part of a chain or larger organization. The coop (Sno-Isle) was founded 30 years ago. It has great variety of certified organic produce, canned goods, bulk grains, etc. You don't have a coop? Start one. There's an organization that'll help you with that.
Our diet is probably 90%+ organic foods. We're lucky in that there are many local small farms, but the larger market has a lot of organic content available. One just needs a small group of people capable of figuring out how it all works, and of course, a local market, consumers. Our town has about a 125K population. Membership is about 10K families, and we have many shoppers who are not members. We started small and grew.