Step towards Natural and Sustainable Living – Food Intake

I started seriously questioning the food consumed by us couple of months back, pandemic situation helped to go inward. Looking at the conventional agricultural practices and the amount of pesticides used, its very alarming to know that ALL food we consume are poisoned in small or larger quantities. Looking at people experience of going through cancer and other fatal diseases, common reason we hear is lifestyle and food with pesticide/chemicals being primary contributors.

Leaving the nature part aside(though that is as well equally important), I felt we should stop eating these chemical rich foods and think that we are taking good amount of so called healthy vegetables/fruits. Hence started this journey of organic foods.

Till few months back, we were buying 50% of the vegetables from a start up delivering organic vegetables direct from farmers. The start up impressed me, especially the engineers running the company. So was buying the same for more than a year now knowing nothing about the quality of produce. The parameter I had before was the trust factor on the shop/company, nothing more the produce and how its produced. Couple of incidents like mangoes with black spots/coming in pure yellow, raised the question of real organic???. Once I started questioning, then I had to look for authenticity of the products.

Explored web, checked with few shops around but I was clueless how to differentiate organic and so called organic. Started reading more on this and found this collective initiative OFM. This gave doorway to the organic world. The validation OFM does to ensure the goods are really organic (like their very frequent farm visits, close interaction with farmers, fixed pricing and the eco-friendliness they follow) made me to make a switch to here. And they introduced me to the world of traditional rices, we never cultivated a traditional rice in my parent’s and my generation in our farm. I never questioned what rice I was consuming, where traditional/hybrid, natural/modified, short or long, natural/with pesticide residue,… Ashamed!

So with all this, now,

– buying vegetables and fruits only from verified sources (from OFM and a shop near by that buys from similar farmers)

– Consume only locally grown vegetables fruits, read some where that anything that is travelling more than 200 kms from your place will need to have all kinds of preservatives. With this avoiding fruits like Apple, Oranges and going with Sapotas, Gauva, Papaya,…

– Reducing hybrid rices and moving to traditional for both Idli/Dosa and rice consumption. Eye opener that traditional rice most nutrients and what we consume in normal white rice (and remember – white is not good) is just starch and some harmful chemical from pesticide residues

– Buying pulses as well from the same sources and stopped using white sugar completely (using Jaggery instead)

– continue growing what ever possible from the house garden and consume regularly

– Inorganic might be cheaper option and organic expensive when compared. But the fact that, what is coming cheap is with loads of pesticide and harmful preservatives, going organic would be an investment

And I don’t think this search ends here. It takes me through lot more learnings and explorations. To be continued…