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Which Foods Are Most Important To Buy Organic?

Which Foods Are Most Important To Buy Organic?

Most people know it’s a good idea to buy and eat organic foods whenever possible. Even those who aren’t particularly health-conscious are aware of this. However, it’s all-too-common for consumers to stare blankly at their kitchen’s subway tile backsplash, trying to make a shopping list filled with organic options that don’t empty their wallet. Healthy organic foods are almost always more expensive than nonorganic items — often dramatically more expensive. This can leave many people wondering if it’s even possible to be health-conscious and budget-conscious at the same time.

Fortunately, it’s absolutely possible, as long as you know which foods to buy organic and which you’re safe buying from the regular aisles.

Some foods aren’t much different, whether they’re organic or not. However, the foods on this list should always be purchased organic to avoid accidentally ingesting nasty chemicals. Knowing which foods are most important to buy organic will help you stretch your dollars as far as possible, helping you stay healthy and save money.

Coffee

Coffee is the third most sprayed crop in the world, just behind tobacco and cotton. And while neither cotton nor tobacco ever makes its way into our diets, 30% of the entire population drink coffee occasionally. For many people, two or even three cups of coffee is a part of their daily routine. So if you’re only going to buy one organic food regularly, you should make it this one.

Pesticides used on coffee plantations are supposed to be partially neutralized during the roasting process, but even worse than the effects they have on your body may be the effects they have on nature. These herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides can have negative long-term effects on farmers and the environment. If more people choose organic coffee, however, this won’t have to be a problem forever.

Dairy Products

The right dairy products are an essential part of a balanced diet. They are also important in having strong teeth and a healthy smile, which 99.7 percent of adults believe is socially important. Don’t settle for the cheapest butter, cheese, or jug of milk on the shelf, though. Nonorganic dairy products usually come from cows that received antibiotics, growth hormones, and a grain-only diet. What goes into the cow eventually makes its way into the milk and unhealthy animals can only produce poor-quality products.

And as if that wasn’t enough, animals in conventional industrial farms typically aren’t treated well and don’t enjoy lives that are healthy or pleasant. Not only does this ultimately mean poorer health for those who consume the animals or their milk, but it also means the animals themselves suffer needlessly while alive. Buying high-quality organic dairy products is a better option for you and our animal neighbors.

Grapes (and Wine, Too)

There are a lot of reasons to buy organic, but when it comes to grapes and products made with grapes, the reasons become even more convincing.

Many people enjoy a glass of wine now and then, especially at celebratory events like weddings and anniversaries. Even if you don’t drink wine, you probably eat grapes at least once in a while. Unfortunately, grapes have been found to contain multiple different types of pesticide residues. To make sure that your healthy treat or relaxing drink doesn’t carry any adverse effects with it, always buy organic grapes and wines and try to wash your grapes well before eating them.

Apples

As we all know, you should visit your doctor at least once per year and you should eat an apple a day so you don’t have to see them more often. One reason apples are so famous for being healthy is that they’re a good source of fiber, which helps keep your digestive tract in shape. But if your apples aren’t organic, you may want to reconsider: most apples contain residue from at least one pesticide.

Besides washing your apples before eating (which is something you should do with just about any fresh food you buy), try to find apples that are organic. This also applies to products like apple sauce and apple juice, which can be even worse than nonorganic apples because they’re so highly concentrated.

Tomatoes

If you love topping hamburgers with tomato slices or adding grape tomatoes to salads, you’ll want to make sure the tomatoes you’re buying are organic. The USDA Pesticide Program showed that tomatoes can carry 69 different pesticides. And since you always eat them with the skin left on, you’re even more likely to get those pesky chemicals in your system. When you’re looking for tomatoes for your next barbecue, go organic.

Peppers

Peppers are fascinating fruits. Not only do they possess an unusual flavor spectrum, from mildly sweet to intensely spicy, but they’re also known for a variety of health benefits. That’s because peppers contain a chemical known as capsaicin, which may help relieve nasal congestion and even fight off cancer.

Unfortunately, nonorganic peppers are likely to contain other chemicals that aren’t so helpful. Conventional grocery store peppers can carry up to 75 different pesticide residues, including recognized carcinogens and neurotoxins. No matter what kind of budget you’re on, when you buy peppers, they should always and only be organic.

Sadly, organic hot peppers aren’t as easy to find as other organic options, especially in smaller grocery stores. If you can’t find or can’t afford hot peppers, try using onions instead. They offer a similarly spicy flavor and they’ve been shown to be fairly clean, even when they’re not organic.

Leafy Greens

Dietary experts recommend that you eat five servings of vegetables every day and for many people, those servings come from tasty salads. From spinach to kale, leafy greens are worth splurging on to get organic. This is because the leaves offer a wider area for chemicals to stick. Considering that you can’t peel leafy greens and you need a lot of them to make a satisfying salad, the result is a concentration of pesticide residue on your plate. To avoid this problem altogether, go organic and be diligent when you’re rinsing or soaking greens as you prepare them.

And there you have it: these are some of the most important foods to buy organic. Even if you’re on a budget, to enjoy the best health possible, try to always buy these foods in the organic section.

Those Rising Vegetable Prices? Blame California’s Warm Winters

By Russ Parsons, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

SANTA MONICA, California — The display at the Weiser Family Farms’ stand at a recent Santa Monica farmers market was sparse, even by early spring standards — potatoes, some green shallots and garlic, a little sprouting broccoli. The lilacs that signal the start of spring for many Southern Californians came and went weeks ago.

But a couple of stalls down, a shopper could find cherries, apricots, and even peaches and nectarines that tasted like midsummer.

That, in a nutshell, is the state of California’s nearly $30 billion produce industry, which accounts for more than half of the fresh fruits and vegetables grown in America.

Fruit has been ripening and ready to pick at almost shockingly early dates. At the same time, some vegetables have been in extremely short supply, resulting in much higher than normal prices.

Lettuces are selling at wholesale for twice what they were at this time last year. Cauliflower has doubled just since February.

Although the last four years of little rain have played a role in this agricultural quandary, farmers also point to the immediate effects of two successive exceedingly warm winters, which have gone largely unnoticed in the ongoing conversation about the California drought. For shoppers, it means less salad and more dessert.

Warm weather pushes plants to grow faster and fruit to ripen earlier. And this year has been far warmer than normal. High temperatures in the vegetable-producing Salinas Valley, typically in the low 60s in January and February, spiked to near 80 several times. In Fresno, the center of California’s stone fruit industry, winter temperatures hit 15 to 20 degrees higher than normal.

The higher temperatures have interrupted the tightly orchestrated schedule of planting and harvesting that farmers rely on to ensure a smooth supply of produce throughout the year. Farmers plan their calendars with an almost military precision so that the harvest will move smoothly from one field to the next, one crop becoming ready to pick just as the last is finishing up. Warm weather pushes some fields to be ready to harvest much earlier, leaving a gap until the next set of fields is ready.

For the Weiser family, which farms about 400 acres, spring’s lilacs were blooming in March and were done by mid-April — when they usually are just getting started. Much the same was true of their other spring crops, such as carrots and parsnips.

“We’re usually a little light this time of year, but this spring the timing is just different,” said Alex Weiser, whose vegetables are regularly cited by name on menus at Southern California’s finest restaurants. The Weisers’ farmers market season for some vegetables was cut short by three weeks, and they’ve stopped going to some of their regular farmers markets entirely.

Summer, on the other hand, will be coming early. The Weisers took advantage of the warm weather to plant their highly sought Ogen and Sugar Cube melons three weeks earlier. They should ripen in a couple of weeks rather than in mid-June.

After two successive warm winters, Alex Weiser vows he’ll be ready to avoid the spring gap next time around — though, of course, there’s no guarantee that the streak of warm winters will continue.

“Next year we’ll have more to sell because we can plan for it,” he said. “We can’t take things for granted and just do what we normally would do. Things just aren’t the same as they used to be.”

The effects of the warm weather certainly aren’t limited to small farmers, as Brian Antle can attest. The third-generation grower at Salinas-based produce giant Tanimura & Antle, which farms 38,000 acres, says it became obvious early this winter that the warm weather would mess with his plans when crops such as lettuce, celery, broccoli, and cauliflower were maturing two to three weeks ahead of schedule.

Making matters worse, a spell of more seasonably cool temperatures in April slowed the growth in other fields with the same crops, which were still maturing, widening the gap further.

“Usually you might see a gap in one commodity,” Antle said, “but when I look at our sales sheet today, everything across board is much higher (in price) than it usually is.”

The shortages are reflected in the wholesale prices reported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Red leaf lettuce has doubled in price from a year ago. Romaine is up 50 percent. Prices for iceberg lettuce are on the rise too.

Every increase in the wholesale price does not create a corresponding bump at retail because supermarkets prefer to keep prices as steady as possible, even if it means taking a loss sometimes. But the average retail price of a pound of broccoli was recently up more than 50 cents over 2014, and for most lettuces, the price per head was as much as 20 cents more over last year.

“As soon as we put our best-laid plans on paper, Mother Nature comes along,” said Mark McBride of Coastline Family Farms, a major vegetable grower based in the Salinas Valley. “All winter we’ve been 10 to 21 days ahead of schedule, and for the next few weeks we’re going to have to pay the piper for that” — with much less to sell, until other crops come in.

The situation is noticeably brighter for fruit lovers. Just as the warm winter weather has pushed Southern California’s glorious purple jacaranda bloom to an earlier start, so it has with tree fruit such as cherries, apricots, even peaches and nectarines.

The cherry harvest, for example, started three weeks ahead of schedule, in mid- to late April, rather than May — an eternity in the fruit industry. Partly as a result of that, retail prices were a dollar a pound cheaper last week than a year before.

Warm winter weather can cause problems for tree fruits, which need a certain amount of cold weather in order to go dormant and get enough rest to produce a healthy crop. So far this year that doesn’t seem to be a major problem. Although most farmers are predicting harvests that will be slightly smaller than average, they certainly won’t be catastrophic, as the cherry harvest was last year when it was less than one-third the typical size.

At the Saturday Santa Monica farmers market, chef Walter Manzke from highly praised Republique restaurant was pulling a trolley laden with vegetables and fruits, including nectarines, from veteran stone fruit grower Truman Kennedy.

“Buying nectarines this early is usually a little questionable,” Manzke said. “I don’t like getting fruit so early that you get sick of it before it really gets ripe and good.

“But at the same time, when it’s good, it’s good. I don’t know how (Kennedy) does it, but these have real flavor. You can’t always count on the calendar to tell you when you’re supposed to be eating something.”

Photo: Mark Boster via Los Angeles Times/TNS