2nd week of CSA
on Jun 07 in CSA News, Farm News by JosieWow! we are wet on the farm. I bet you are ready for sunshine like we are. This rain has produced some monster Bok choy. Here are some great ideas for Bok choy
Bok choy with ginger and garlic click here for recipe
Spicy Bok Choy, click here for recipe
Bok choy salad click here for recipe
In the pick up this week is, Baby spinach, Boc choy, red mustard, arugula, radishes, turnips and Walla walla onions.
Our favorite way to do turnips is to cut them in bit size pieces and saute in a pan with a little olive oil or butter and a lot of chopped garlic, a Tablespoon of cummin and some salt and pepper until they are soft, then quickly add the chopped greens for just a second till they wilt. Yum!!! A few red chili flakes spicy it up.
Why we should eat organic
America’s farmers were delivered a post WWII mandate to increase production and lower costs, ushering in the “cheap food policy” era that persists unto the present day. Survival instinct drove many cultivators to expand, embrace toxic chemistry, hyper-mechanize and deepen debt, but most simply drifted from the land, abandoning agrarianism for a burgeoning urban economy. In many ways, we have all been “guinea pigs” in a grand experiment to industrialize and cheapen the production of food.
Last week, some notable results from that venture were published in Pediatrics, official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Researchers from Harvard University’s Schools of Public Health and Medicine, among others, examined the association between urinary concentrations of organophosphate pesticide metabolites and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children 8 to 15 years of age, coming up with some startling indications. Their data, gleaned from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2000-2004), which assessed thousands of children representative of the general U.S. population, demonstrates those carrying pesticide levels higher than the median concentration were twice as likely to suffer from ADHD than subjects whose urine contained none.
This common class of nerve agent insecticides, including Malathion and Chlorpyrophos, long employed in agriculture and urban pest control, accumulates in the more sensitive juvenile population largely as a result of dietary intake. A more encouraging 2006 study, conducted by Emory University’s Chensheng Lu and collaborators at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), confirms that children switched to organic diets clear organophosphate residues from their urine almost immediately and maintain undetectable levels of these pesticide metabolites until reintroduced to conventional eating habits. The USDA’s Pesticide Data Program (PDP) has analyzed hundreds of thousands of food samples for residues over two decades and regularly finds contamination in conventional products four times more frequently than in those certified organic.
We inhabit a contaminated world, where many of our chemical tools persist in the environment over time. Organic foods sometimes contain residues from such “background” contamination but when detected, measure on average at dramatically lower levels than those in conventional foods. Entrepreneurial American farmers will grow food, given appropriate technological support, non-toxically if you demand it and compensate them fairly. These emerging facts lend credence to a friend’s assertion: “Cheap food is not good, and good food is not cheap”.
-–Tom Willey
