Your Organic Garden is getting a big boost

I just read this in the New York Times: The President's Cancer Panel is the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream, so it is astonishing to learn that it is poised to join ranks with the organic food movement and declare: chemicals threaten our bodies.

It's about time someone made the connection official, I think. I've been saying that for years and worrying and fretting about my grandchildren's highly exposed life in Boston. The lawns there have little flags warning it is not safe for pets or children to play on them. How insane is that? When I work at the local school, the lunch served there makes me understand how you can be fat and undernurished at the same time.

I have friends who don't eat organically because it is more expensive and they haven't room to grow their own vegetables. Growing organically is more labor intensive. The wine grapes grown in our valley where organic until an industry person come in for a consultation and told the owners how much cheaper it was to spray Roundup rather than covercrop and till. "Why you can't even start up the tractor for that price!" Our county had an ordinance against spraying herbicides. The Forest Service was planning on using Agent Orange on their tree plantations, sprayed from helicopters until the local people concerned about their water supplies, objected. The Forest Service and PGE honored this ordinance, but not private companies. The ordinance was unenforceable and was down graded to a resolution under Reagan. Courts ruled that counties could not have stricter regulations than the state and the farm lobby in the valley fought for spraying.

So it has been a very disheartening time for the organic movement with constant assaults on labeling. The Bush administration wanted GMOs to be labeled organic. So to see a government commission ready to say that chemicals and environmental pollution are main causes of cancer is a very encouraging change.

May 18, 2010

Your Organic Garden is getting a big boost