This is a letter I picked up years ago from a man who is a small food shop owner. I’ve since forgotten his name, but his message is very valid. If anyone knows who wrote this, please email me, so I can give him credit:
Food, Clothing, housing, transportation costs and health costs. These five necessities account for the overwhelming percentage of the average American’s income. According to our own government’s statistics, food is the only category that has gone DOWN in proportion to one’s income in EVERY single decade of the 20th century. Only one category has gone up in every single decade – medical costs. If you think these facts are unrelated. you may as well stop reading now.
Al1 four of my grandparents happened to be born in the first decade of this century, and except for my paternal grandfather who was accidentally killed in a bridge accident at the age of 39, they all lived healthily into their 90’s. Farming and marketing produce has been our family’s stock and trade for over a century. I have learned much from my grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles about this wonderful vocation of ours and I would like to share some of it with you.
By the time my grandparents were all married (the early 1920’s) none of them had ever had an icebox or refrigerator. None had ever eaten a green pepper, never eaten (or heard of) iceberg lettuce, never eaten “enriched” flour, or pasteurized milk or any meat treated with hormones or antibiotics, or an ear of corn over 48 hours old, or any fruit or vegetable with ANY pesticide on it. Only one of them ever visited a doctor before they were married. They didn’t spend much of their income on medical costs, but they spent a great deal more of their take home pay on food than we do today. They DID (as 90% of Americans of that time did) know where every mouthful of food that entered their bodies came from. lf they didn’t grow it themselves, then they knew Mrs. Miller raised the hens that laid the egg , or Mr. Billings grew the cabbages, or Mr. McMullen milled their flour.
By way of very sharp contrast, you may remember the horrible debacle in Washington State a few years ago when so many young lives were lost after the youngsters consumed hamburgers contaminated with e-coli. The pursuant investigation uncovered the fact that the “specially blended” batch of meat that was used in those particular patties had come from at least 7 different countries – not 7 different animals, or even 7 different farms, but 7 different countries! In contrast, 90% of Americans today haven’t any idea where even ONE mouthful of their food comes from. If this is the price of progress, then I say “THE PRICE IS TOO HIGH – DON’T BUY IT”.
Contrast #2. A current running TV ad promoting plastics depicts a young woman and her child walking through the open marketplace of some bygone era, with sausages hanging from the rafters, chickens live in cages, cheeses, eggs, bread and produce spread out on tables in the open air. Suddenly, she and the child are in a modern-day supermarket – bright and antiseptically clean. She picks a neatly, tight, saran wrapped pack of grapes. Then she finds a dozen eggs in a pretty Styrofoam container then plastic jugs of milk and juices. Everything is so pleasing to the eye – it sure looks good – but what about the stuff she went to the store for in the first place – the food! Being a conventional supermarket, the grapes are so covered with pesticides that the first touch of the grapes to the tongue produces a burning sensation. The eggs, full of hormones and antibiotics are on average about 40 days old at our new supermarkets, often even older. The milk and juices are cooked until no enzymes are left, not to mention the contaminants inside the liquids. I guess it’s just the price we pay for progress – I say “THE PRICE IS TOO HIGH – DON’T BUY IT”.
Contrast #3. In January of 1977, I was operating a market on Rt. 31 in North Ft. Myers. At that time it was a very new and rare thing to have watermelons this time of the year. They were from Costa Rica – very sweet and very expensive. While putting them on the displays, this memorable encounter took place: A lady of apparently meager means asked me, and I quote, “How much your watermelons is?” Not having had time to even get a sign on the rack I rather embarrassingly (and possibly a bit condescendingly) answered, “Ma’am, they are awfully expensive.” She rebutted “I didn’t ask you that. I SAID how much they IS?” “Ma’am, they’re $10 each” “Is dey sweet?” “Yes Ma’am, very” She reached in front of me, tapped a few selected one, and put it in her cart. As she walked away, she glared into my eyes and said “I wears whats I can gets. I EATS what I wants.” I felt as if someone had hit me in the knees with a ball bat.
I had been properly humiliated. but more importantly – enlightened. Jump ahead almost exactly 20 years to the store at Davis Blvd. in Naples where a very well dressed lady of obvious means asked where the ladies room was. While inside, an energy saving timing switch turned out the lights. Being startled, she nonetheless managed to grope her way around the restroom and return to her shopping. In moments, she let out a shriek and ran back to the ladies room. Back to the store again, she cried that in the darkness she had left her very expensive gold belt and now it was gone! Accusations flew as I did my best to console her, but she was very upset and stormed away. A week or so later I recognized her as she entered the store with another lady. I approached her to offer my apologies and to inform her that we had changed the restroom light switches to conventional ones. She said she was happy about that and as far as the apology, none was needed. It so happened she had not worn the belt that day after all, and it was safe at home. As we both meandered around the store attending to our own tasks, I happened to be near as they approached the banana rack and overheard her say to her friend .43 cents a pound for bananas! I refuse to purchase them when they are over 39 cents!
The lady with the $10 watermelon LEAPT into my mind. Whose priorities were in order? What’s more important, our clothes or our food? Surely most understand paying a little more for higher octane at the gas pump, but few are prepared to pay a little more for higher nutrition in organic food. The watermelon lady was on the right track. The 4 extra pennies for the bananas made the “belt lady” exclaim, ‘THE PRICE IS TOO HIGH – DON’T BUY IT.”
Contrast #4. As a teenager in the early 60’s, I spent almost every day each summer picking corn in the morning and selling it all day long at one of the families markets. Late in the summer, just as school was getting ready to resume, you would find in almost every ear of corn I picked a worm (or 2) at the tip. Everyone’s was the same that time of year, you simply cut the end off and boiled your fresh picked corn. Leap ahead about 35 years to the same store on Davis Blvd. A 30’s something female shopped with a half- filled shopping cart approached the corn table. Opening an ear or two, she shrieked and dropped to the floor an ear that had a worm on the end of it. She bolted out the front door, leaving her basket behind and loudly exclaimed she would never shop here again. We hardly see any worms in corn nowadays – we humans would sooner poison our own food the share a small portion with another organism. We have become terrified by little bugs, caterpillars and insects (most of them are beneficial) anywhere in our house or yard, and certainly on our food. You can see the bug – you can’t see the poison. The conventional farmers spend billions of dollars each year on poisons to keep bugs off our food. To the conventional farmer some chemical pesticides cost as much as $500 a gallon. I say ‘THE PRICE IS TOO HIGH – DON’T BUY IT!
How our food LOOKS is increasingly more important than how our food IS. ALL of the fruits and vegetables are graded by the USDA on only one criterion – APPEARANCE! Nutrition has no bearing in the matter. Almost all the food a farmer grows nowadays end up at the supermarket – this is who pays him for his yields. What they require is shelf life and of course, a good appearance. Thus the farmer’s marching orders are – make it pretty and make it last a long time after it has been picked. Making it pretty is, as we have said, accomplished by spraying billions of dollars of toxins on our food to keep a few organisms (often beneficial) off. Extended shelf life has been accomplished primarily in 2 ways:
1.)By picking the stuff green
2.) Genetic engineering. This subject would require an article or two of its own in order to barely scratch the surface. Basically we’re playing with some heavy stuff here already having introduced anima l genes in some popular fruits and veggies
Supermarket chains began around the same time as my grandparents lives did and their primary impediment to profitability in those days was the perishability of their fresh food . In just 2 generations they changed profoundly the way America eats. They were losing flour and grains to rancidity and bugs. Solution – remove absolutely everything of nutritional value, and it will never go rancid, no insect could be found stupid enough to eat the stuff and then we’ll give it a nice moniker, like “enriched” after we spray a few chemical vitamins on it. Presto – flour to last longer than people. The same thing was done with sugar beet and sugar cane growers, so that now you are able to leave to your great grand children flour, sugar and salt that in 100 years can still be used to bake a perfect cake! The supermarkets also noticed how short the shelf life was on red tomatoes and red peppers. The tomato solution was, pick ‘em green, gas ‘em until they turn some funny chartreuse color and they’ll last months! They found the peppers wouldn’t change colors with gas, so they had to find a way to make us eat them green, and they’ve succeeded even though green peppers contain less than 10% of the sweetness and nutritional value nd are harder to digest. The chain stores solved their waste problem. Over 2/3 of Americans today don’t even know that a green pepper is simply an unripe red pepper (or yellow, etc) and 2/3 of Americans don’t know what a true vine-ripened tomato tastes like.
And then the lettuce, the chain stores were throwing away leaf lettuce after 6 or 7 days, Romaine after 12 or 14. Solution – invent a new vegetable – we’ll call ill Iceberg Lettuce. Actually, it’s mere closely related to the poppy than to other lettuces. It is also not only nearly devoid of nutrition but recent studies infer that it may even cause digestive problems. But the supermarkets can keep a head around for up to 2 months! Most remarkable is the fact that at that beginning of his century, absolutely no one ever ate the stuff, and by 1970, 85% of all lettuce consumed was Iceberg.
Conventional farmers have unfortunately become comfortable with the supermarket’s way of doing things. A tomato or pepper plant you see will produce many more green fruits than red (because, of course they are assimilating less nutrition from the plant). In the same way genetically altered seeds not only increase shelf life but increase yields by using the same approach – get the plant to produce more pieces of fruit per plant by reducing the fruit’s nutritional requirements. All good for the supermarkets, all good for the farmer, all bad for the consumer. The conventional farmer AND the conventional retailer are quick to point out the progress they have made in cutting food prices this entire century. If this is progress, then I say, ‘THE PRICE IS TOO CHEAP – DON’T BUY IT!”
I haven’t even touched on the many benefits of a living soil or university studies on the nutritional value of organic foods. In fact, one could produce an article this Size every day for 5 years and not get to all the reasons we SHOULD eat organically grown foods. The ‘other’ side has only one argument for why we should not eat organically grown foods – they say, ‘THE PRICE IS TOO HIGH – DON’T BUY IT”.