When All Food Was Organic
I found an interesting blurb in the Parade insert in Sunday’s paper this week about organic food. As we all know, organic foods have become one of the hot topics in the grocery stores lately. Rather than question whether it’s healthier to eat organic-labeled foods instead the regular produce in the grocery store, someone wrote in to basically ask when it was that all foods used to be organic before. In other words, at some point in the past, all food did used to be organic, before mankind started messing with it, and the person wanted to know how many years it’s been that such has not been true. “AskMarilyn” replied:
Millennia! Humans have been attempting to improve their crop yields for as long as they’ve been hungry. About 2800 B.C. Sumerians used sulfur to control pests. Around A.D. 900,Chinese farmers saw that arsenic worked better. In the 1700s, kerosene was added to the arsenal. And 50 years ago, DDT was the leading pesticide.
tags: organic food, farming, gardening, pesticides
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on January 2, 2007 at 9:22 am
Thud said:
She makes a pretty good point. Some folks insist all-organic raw, uncooked diets are the best because that’s what we ate in our “natural” state. But in our natural state, we also tended only lived to be 30 or so.
No doubt pesticides, chemicals, and additives can be dangerous and destructive — both to the human and the environment — but there’s got to be a balance somewhere.
on January 2, 2007 at 11:22 am
Gardening » Blog Archive » When All Food Was Organic said:
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on January 3, 2007 at 4:20 pm
buttercup said:
Sulphur? Ewh! So I guess this organic thing really is a new craze, even relatively speaking.