Organic

I used to scoff at organics. bah, who needs pesticide free food? psh. mass produced food is good enough for me!

And then when I started working here at the Farmworkers Unit, I started considering what it meant to buy organics out of concern for the workers who pick and spray the foods. There was a big case against AgMart a couple summers ago that one of our colleagues is collaborating on, where they found that a corporate giant (AgMart) was guilty of all these pesticide violations, and three women that summer gave birth to children with extreme birth defects. When they did further investigations into the case, they found more women who'd been forced to abort in the 8th month of pregnancy because their babies were horribly deformed and not viable, they found babies born in Mexico to mothers who had been working in AgMart fields in Florida who had crazy birth defects (like no rectum, no intestines, no genitalia, etc). Most of these babies died. The one that survived was Carlitos, who got away with his torso intact but no arms or legs, who is referenced in the link above.

Anyway, clearly, these women work with way more pesticides than we come into contact with on our fruits and vegetables. But still, the bigger the demand for organics, the more huge farms might try and produce pesticide-free food.

But then Fawn Pattison of Toxic Free NC came and spoke to some interns about pesticides, and I happened to sit in on the conversation. There is no such thing as "safe" pesticide use. Using the term "safe" to describe pesticide use is actually illegal. Nobody actually knows the long term effects of chronic pesticide exposure, whether its on your food or in your work environment. They do know that farmworkers dont live as long and develop cancer at higher rates than their hispanic counterparts. And they do know that massive doses experienced during pregnancy causes birth defects. Well, they sort of know that.

At any rate, they spray those pesticides, which are so dangerous that you can't touch them with your bare hands, you aren't even supposed to wash clothing that has been exposed to pesticides with other clothing, they spray these pesticides all over our fruits and vegetables from the time they are little baby fruits to the time they grow to be ripe. That means the pesticides aren't just chillin on the outside of the fruit. They're all up in it. That means you're eating cancer. When you eat inorganic fruits, and some are worse than others (like celery, peaches, strawberries are all more cancer-retaining than, say, oranges or apples), you are actually eating cancer. And Alzheimers and other neural diseases. All those pesticides are going straight to my brain and binding to some hormonal developing tracts up in there and confusing signals and laying the foundation for alzheimers and parkinsons disease. Before, I had a one pronged approach for fighting alzheimers, and that was doing crosswords every day when I turned sixty. Now I have a two pronged approach, and its called doing crosswords every day when I turn sixty and only eating organic foods for the rest of my life.

The moral of the story is that I couldn't enjoy the most delicious peach of my life today. I kept thinking about how I was eating cancer, and how those stupid pesticides are tasteless, and how I wished that we had made more educated decisions about buying organic fruits at the beginning of the year.


The alternative moral of the story is cotton. At least with fruits and vegetables you can pretend you're washing off the pesticides. With cotton, they spray these intense leaf defoliants all over the entire cotton crop, which destroys the leaves in a matter of seconds. These are intense pesticides. Anyway, then they just go straight to the magical cotton processing place, where they get turned into cotton products -- like tampons. We just put those little cancer sticks up our hoohaws like they're vagina candy and don't even think twice about it. thats cancer-loaded cotton! right next to my future babies! Never again. Organic cotton tampons forever for me.

perhaps i'm being paranoid. but better safe than sorry, i say.