Rethinking Lifestyle

This year there are 45 registered allotment gardeners at the Steinbach Mennonite Church where I grow my vegetables – more  than 45 people who know that getting their vegetables from the supermarket is easier and and faster choose to till, plant, weed, battle insects, pick and prepare. Why?

There are many reasons. But increasingly this activity reflects a concern about the healthiness of the food we eat. So can growing your own food contribute to your health? Well maybe.

What health hazards can we avoid by growing our own food? Mostly, I believe, it has to do with  the chemicals we are now consuming everyday simply because they have become omnipresent? The key question has become: is there any link between the regular, inadvertent, consumption of  chemicals now used in food production and the increase in so many “modern” diseases, most notably autism, lymphoma and celiac disease?  Nobody knows for sure! What is uncanny is that the rapid increase in the incidence of these diseases began in the late 90s, the very time that North American farmers began routinely using two chemicals that have revolutionized agriculture: Roundup for weed control and Neonicotinoids for insect control.

It is unlikely that a single application of Roundup will have any effect beyond the intended one: the death of the vegetation growing there at the time of application. The use of Roundup in this way has been tested by Health Canada, and we can be confident that this is safe. But what if a piece of land is sprayed twice a year, not only one year, but five years consecutively? Or ten years? Or fifty years? What happens to that chemical? We know it does not disappear – nothing disappears! So how does such repeated application affect the organisms growing on and in that piece of land? Is the residual Roundup taken up by the plant? And if it is, how does this affect our health? Unfortunately the studies that have been done are not conclusive. (The story with respect to neonicotinoids, although not the same, is similar,.)

Were this an issue of toxicity, Health Canada would have banned the use of these chemicals immediately. We have moved into a grey area. Of note is that European regulators and North American regulators have access to the same scientific studies. The Europeans have said that we don’t yet know enough about the long term effects of these chemicals, so until we know more, we will ban or limit their use. Canadian and American regulators, on the other hand, have said until we know more, we will permit the use of these chemicals.

So if you share my concern about the presence of chemicals in our food, what can we do? I suggest we need to grow our own food, ensuring it is chemical free, or buy organic. Buying organic is significant for two reasons. Organic products will definitely have fewer chemicals in them, but also by buying organic we send a signal that we care about how our food is grown.