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Let’s begin with the good news: Healthy soil is still the source of environmental and human health. This week we welcome good-food activist and writer Melinda Hemmelgarn to our cadre of contributors. Her topic, organic pioneer, couldn’t be timelier in the wake of yet another food scare that’s left us scratching our collective head, sticking it back in the sand and preparing to swear off tomatoes for the summer.
Oh dear, what can the matter be? It’s time we started to seriously ask that question, instead of standing by while government/industry puts another Band-Aid on the problem—usually to the detriment of the environment and human health—in place of getting to the root cause. Take the spinach E. Coli outbreak of 2006. Rather than assessing the wisdom of cutting and commingling fragile produce and sending it all over the country in little hermetically sealed incubators for pathogens, we’ve begun regulating wildlife off of farms.
Those of us who, like Sir Albert Howard, understand the connection between healthy soil, healthy food and healthy people, know that the answer does not lie in irradiating our vegetables or turning our farms into sterile laboratories. But as author Loren Muldowney illustrates with her second column highlighting a raw-milk lecture series that took place recently at Rutgers University, odd things happen when fear replaces facts about food. That’s why we hold seriously our charge to nurture a food-literate public, and why we’re so grateful to contributors like Loren and Melinda for helping us meet that mission.
A local farmer who grows heirloom tomatoes nearby and sells them at New York City’s Greenmarket laments that he doesn’t know what the latest food scare will do for business. “I feel bad for those farmers and workers in Mexico and Florida,” farmer/writer Tim Stark told us from his own tomato field in Lenhartsville, PA. “All those people have nowhere to go with their tomatoes. It’s just awful.”
Regardless of the disease vector, says Stark—who farms without chemicals and suspects it may be someone’s wash station, as the pesticide-laden produce is typically sprayed vigorously before shipping—what really bewilders him is that it’s taken so long to trace the problem back to it’s source (at press time this had yet to happen). “Isn’t there a trail leading back to the farm? It’s so blurred. If you buy a tomato from me you know where it came from and you can ask me all the questions you want.”
Does that mean your business won’t be hurt as your own tomatoes begin to ripen over the next few weeks, we asked Tim. “You would think that, but that may not be true because people freak out and all of a sudden all tomatoes are bad. I know when we had that spinach scare, farmers at the Greenmarket couldn’t give their spinach away.
So, please don’t freak out. Stay informed. Eat your vegetables. And support your local farmer. He or she is your surest ticket to health.
Dan Sullivan and the
Rodale Institute editorial team
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