Laurie Benenson: June 2007 Archives
Making sure the food I prepare for my family is healthy and safe is a bigger job than it used to be. It seems that every week there is a new area of concern regarding the food supply.
A few years ago, I felt I was doing a good job if I declared fast food joints off limits (with the possible exception of road-trip refueling) and tried to make sure we had fruits and vegetables every day. Then I added "organic" to my list of prerequisites, especially for those fruits and veggies that seem to retain the most chemical pesticide residues after harvest (for instance, berries). Then other concerns kept popping up: avoiding trans fats, which up until recently were present in most breakfast cereals, crackers, and snack foods; only using hormone and antibiotic-free meat and chicken; and limiting consumption of the types of fish that contain the most mercury (tuna and swordfish).
But with the recent e-coli outbreaks in such healthy foods as spinach, lettuce, and scallions, even buying produce marked "organic" no longer insures that the food is safe. Not when it's grown on gargantuan factory farms and sent out to all parts of the country, with minimal oversight (the use of tainted water was blamed for last year's e-coli episodes, but the spinach itself was supposedly grown using organic guidelines).
So now my new resolution is to try and buy as much of our fruits and vegetables as possible at the weekly farmer's market, which features locally grown produce raised on relatively small farms. (We are lucky enough to live in Santa Monica, California, which has one of the world's greatest open-air markets.)
The people selling their produce at the farmer's market are personally responsible for the safety of their food, and that makes me feel much more confident. Besides, buying local reduces the amount of fuel needed to transport the food -- so it benefits not only our health, but goes easier on the environment as well. It's a win/win situation -- and besides, shopping at the farmers market is community-minded, convivial and fun.
