Getting in the groove

The benefits of going organic

By Belinda Hulin | Illustrator Alan Phillips

It’s a fond college-years memory for many baby boomers. Standing in line at the health food store deli counter and ordering a veggie sandwich with a name like Bilbo Baggins or Sprout-About. The organic food cost a little more than a burger, and the whole-grain bread often tasted like pressed sawdust. But you could sip honey-laced rose hips tea, choke it all down and feel so healthy.

So in harmony with nature. So groovy.

Most tie-dyed health food dabblers went back to pizzas and burgers the next day. Those truly committed to the organic-foods lifestyle usually graduated to shopping at a food co-op that substituted zeal for selection. Later, they might turn to pricey produce at natural-foods markets, supplementing the menu with mail-order canned goods and peanut butter from Walnut Acres. It was a lot of work and expense to avoid eating the synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that American agribusiness was built on.

Fortunately for modern-day college students – and their aspiring-to-green parents – organic foods are much easier to come by these days.

Best bets
Want to dip a toe into the organic field but don’t know where to start?

• Try replacing foods with the highest levels of residual pesticides. Using U.S.D.A. statistics on pesticide residues in produce, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group compiled a list of the foods with the highest and lowest amount of pesticide residue.

• The worst offenders were conventionally grown fresh peaches, apples, sweet bell peppers, celery, nectarines, strawberries, cherries, lettuce, imported grapes, pears and spinach.

• Conventionally grown onions had the lowest residual pesticides, along with avocado, sweet corn, pineapples, mangoes, sweet peas, asparagus, kiwis, bananas and cabbage.

What happened over the last 25 years to make organic a mainstream option? Read the rest of Belinda Hulin’s story as well as tips on how to get started and a guide to what is organic, in the September issue of Water’s Edge, on newsstands now.