Saturday 22 September 2012

ORGANIC, YOU SAY?

As I trawled the aisles of the food store, tossing in super healthy (ha!) goodies (read instant noodles, microwave popcorn, chocolate and such; you get the drift), I stopped short in front of a shiny new display that screamed the words 'organic' in large white letters. Anything new and shiny and fun (and oh, the packaging was fun!) strikes my eye (of course!) and the trolley develops a mind of its own and automatically grinds to a halt. It's not me, please note, it's the trolley to blame, as stuff I may not have planned to purchase gets rung up at the till. But I digress. But yeah, happens to you as well, right? Right? *hopeful look*

So the organic stuff. When the excitement of 'new!' wore off for a few seconds, I looked closely at the displays. Gorgeous packaging for everything, with uber cool designs and in a couple of cases, kitschy names too. Impressive. And yes - the product range included the gamut of lentils, spices and fresh veggies too. But while 'regular' red onions cost Rs 16/- (about 25 cents) a kilo, the smooth, plump organic ones were four times the cost. As for the spices, loved the packaging - corrugated cardboard (gasp!) and papier mache boxes (ooooh!) - but again, not so much the pricing. With a loud, thumping heart, making sure to check that no one was looking, I surreptitiously compared prices on both. And wound up with the organic cumin and pepper in my shopping cart. Also the onions.

Getting home, almost reverently dicing the onions for soup, decided that they smelt and tasted the same as any others, and thought that maybe the soup would taste different, if nothing else, to accommodate for the organic goodness. And oh, ditto the pepper.

As the soup was getting done, quickly whipped out the Berry to google up info on organic products. As expected, sifting through pages of wisdom, found that organic foods are healthier (duh!), have lesser chemicals and pesticides infused through them, are not genetically modified, contain more minerals, vitamins and other goodness as compared to conventionally grown produce. Or so they said.

Recently, my wallet was relieved to come across more research that said otherwise. Turns out that overall, there was not much of a differnce between the nutritional content, although the organic food was 30% less likely to contain pesticides. There is also no concrete evidence yet that there is a discernible difference in the amount of bacteria from eating organically produced foods compared to conventionally produced foods.

And oh, my onion soup didn't taste different, either. I think I'll use up that saved dough to buy myself a new ebook reader.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Excellent information however I’d like to let you know that I think there is problem with your RSS feeds as they seem to not be working for me. May be just me but I thought overall I would cite it.

Anonymous said...

Love what you are doing with the blog man!

Vaijayanti Albal Sharma said...

On the RSS feeds - am challenged and therefore clueless (as usual). Hint as to what I should check/ do, please?

Vaijayanti Albal Sharma said...

And for the comment from earlier today - hurrah! Thank you, just made my (otherwise dull) day. *claps hands in glee*