I am usually thoughtful about the food purchases I make, and often buy organic items. Sometimes I buy them because they are organic, but more often I buy them because I can trust the source of the ingredients, they are usually locally grown or produced, and if packaged, usually don’t contain all kinds of low-quality fillers and ingredients that I do not want my children to consume.
My current criteria when I read the ingredients on a product is that if there are too many ingredients for me to scan and read in 3 seconds, then there are too many ingredients in the product and I won’t buy it. I prefer products that contain the minimum number of ingredients, preferably ingredients that are natural, that I can pronounce, and absolutely no partially hydrogenated or artificial anything, especially those colors with the numbers next to them, or artificial flavors.
It often gets hard to find such items, so I resort to organic, because usually organic means the ingredient list is manageable, and of higher quality, because most of those chemical things cannot be included in organic products (since they’re not, well, organic!).
But one day I was in the grocery store, and selecting a particular brand of organic macaroni and cheese, and for some reason I suddenly had a thought – what if someone confronted me about WHY I was buying the organic variety of mac and cheese…wasn’t the non-organic version OK to consume? I was glad that I didn’t have to come up with an answer to that hypothetical question on the fly, but later I thought I should, perhaps, actually think more about why I was making these choices and document them, just in case someone bothered to ask me!
I was further inspired to do this today by a visit to the www.Aveda.com website where they are having a clean water campaign, and where I learned that conventional farming is the number 1 polluter of US waterways. I support Aveda products because 1) they are produced using non-fossil fuel (their manufacturing plant is run 100% by wind power) and 2) most of the botanical ingredients in their products are organic. Plus they just have terrific products that smell wonderful!
So, I looked into the impact of conventional agricultural practices on our environment, and how that directly could affect us. And I found the following website:
http://www.organic.org/articles/showarticle/article-206
This article lists the top 10 reasons why we should support organic. Organic should not be a fad or only embraced by new-age hippies. Modern agriculture affects all of us, our entire environment inside and out. From the air we breath, clothes we wear, water we drink and food we eat. It affects our unborn children and new born babies, and their future health. It affects the entire ecosystem of our planet, and our future ability to grow food and benefit from the biodiversity on the planet. The biodiversity bestowed upon us by God’s grace and love. We owe it to ourselves, and our planet (the only planet we have), to protect it by supporting organic agriculture practices.
For even more convincing, evidence-based information, particularly regarding why organic is best for children…see an article here, by my favorite online pediatrician, Dr. Greene:
http://www.drgreene.com/21_2039.html
If you don’t go organic for yourself, do it for your children, or your grandchildren, or your neighbor’s children, or your nieces and nephews!
Thank you. I’ll step off my soapbox now 
