Food Pollution

Lately I have been busy with the problems that face humans, more than those that affect me directly. Perhaps in my 8th year [ thats 50 something for you two legged people!] I am getting.... wiser? One such hot topic is the quality of food we eat.

Mom was recalling how till 10 years ago, she had to wash, soak in salt water, peer into and extract worms and other crawlies from many vegetables like cauliflower, lady finger, spinach, and now- thanks to the unrestricted use of pesticides, she has an easy job in the kitchen. No worms, easy to cut and chop veggies, and better utilization. One would think that’s a good thing, isn’t it?

But I hear otherwise. How the cauliflower is transported in buckets of pesticide infused water in order to reach the vendors worm-free and pristine. How every single vegetable is sprayed, dusted with poisonous chemicals just to improve their productivity, shelf life and better returns for the farmers, and how some farmers actually grow their own vegetables and grains separately without these additives because they are well aware of the harmful effects of using toxic, often banned chemicals in farming.

And the profit mongers don’t stop at anything. Almost every food, drink that we consume is today treated with chemicals, just sometimes in order to make it look bigger, better, fresher, pest free, and allows them to maximize their investments, many times at the cost of the consumers' health. Cows and buffaloes are fed on a diet of antibiotics and hormones in order to increase milk production, which leads to resistance to those antibiotics in the humans, and irregular growth due to the imbalance of hormones. Poultry is fed with unnatural foods in order to increase their body weight .

There are a few farming professionals who try to take a different approach by using safer pesticides and keeping their farmlands organic, but their efforts are often fraught with losses and disappointment because in fact by avoiding harmful chemicals, their farms become escape routes for pests from neighbouring farms who have warded off pests with liberal spraying. So unless all the farmers collectively decide to stop using harmful chemicals, the project will not bear fruit, pun intended! That nice lady with the 4 dogs [ how about sending them off to a zoo-eh?, so that I get to have a run of her lovely garden?] is one such farming professional who is constantly trying to reinvent her own crop strategy without totally compromising her values in terms of harmful substances used in her fields.

You may wonder how I am concerned about all this, but hey! Am I not part of this family, and therefore the larger community? And should I not have an opinion about matters that matter to my dear ones? 

I think we should all just go back to the basics of olden days, grow what you can eat, and stay away from those healthy looking poisons on the supermarket shelves.