While living in Costa Rica it was a greater challenge finding organic foods than what I had been used to in California. However, over the year that I lived there, the quantity available from when I first started living there to when I left was noticable. Now that I am back in the U.S., shopping at Whole Foods makes it much easier. I have been enjoying foods like heirloom tomatoes and nectarines that I couldn't get while living in Costa Rica. The produce section is full of summer fruits and vegetables right now, that are labeled, often with information about the farms they came from. However, after viewing the video Slow Poisoning of India today, I realized that there is another issue with my diet that needs to be addressed. My boyfriend Jeet is from India, and many of the foods we eat are imported and purchased at one of the many Indian markets in the area.
It is a fact that developing countries don't have the same regulatory controls over pesticides, and their foods are often much more contaminated than even the "conventional" foods we get here in the United States. When these foods are imported in, most often we have no idea of where they have come from specifically and what chemicals were used on them.
Jeet comes from Punjab, the largest farming region in India. Several of the farmers interviewed in the film are from this region. I can only imagine what kind of chemicals Jeet may have been exposed to from the fields while he was growing up. Earlier this year, he went back to visit for the first time in seven years. He spoke to some of his family members who are still farming about the dangers of some of the chemicals that they are using in and on the foods they produce. They didn't want to listen to what he had to say. They took offense to his going to the U.S. to live, and now coming back to tell them how to run their business.
But now he and I have a challenge. We have to figure out what foods we are buying from the Indian store are really safe for us to eat. I don't even know if there are such thing as organic foods imported from India. Some of the foods are labeled with an Indian brand, but made in the US or Canada. This would mean that they have met the regulatory controls in the countries where they are produced, however that doesn't guarantee safety by any means.
The fact that we are eating all these imported foods is another whole issue. It is much better for us to eat foods that are from local farmers who are accountable to their customers.
This is a personal "environmental security" story that allows me to share some of my learnings over the past year in Costa Rica. Now that I understand much more about the human induced dangers to our global ecosystem, from pesticides and other chemicals, as well as the global food supply, it is now up to me to use the knowledge to arrive at better solutions. The first step is figuring out how to make adjustments in my own purchasing decisions.
See this related article from Reuters today.
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