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Organic Issue

Jyoti Pande Lavakare /  June 04, 2011, 0:55 IST

I am a self-confessed locavore, a wannabe-vegan and a sucker for organic produce that is pesticide-free, grown without being chemically fertilised, as close to home as possible. I’ve grown spinach, salad and herbs in my yard (successfully), potatoes and tomatoes (unsuccessfully and with growing desperation), and relate very closely to William Alexander’s $64 tomato. And yes, I am ready to pay extra for this, even when it pinches (and it does!).

Living in health-conscious California, it was impossible not to learn all about the food we eat. Product labels in the US are loaded with so much information (and complicated enough that I once took a four-hour class to learn to decode supermarket labels to access nutritional information!) that learning was just an inescapable fact of life. It stared at me from every Michael Pollan book my local library displayed in its reading area and nudged me from every aisle at grocery stores, until I finally began buying my produce from the local farmers market, held each Sunday to the eclectic sounds of different instruments. But the harp, bagpipes or cellos played by local musicians didn’t entirely soothe me into a sense of safety as I navigated luscious, red strawberries and nectarines (artificial colour? High pesticide-residue?) or brown eggs (antibiotic or hormone reinforced?) or lettuce heads (chemically fertilised?)

Despite my growing fascination for the farmer’s market, sometimes I longed to be back in India, buying my vegetables from sabziwallahs pushing their wooden thelas — produce that I naively imagined would be naturally organically grown, because, duh, impoverished farmers in India don’t have access to chemicals and pesticides that their technologically-developed, capital-rich cousins do. And because pesticides in India still aren’t heavily subsidised like our industrial fertilizers are, I assumed that even if our farmers have been lured away from homegrown manure and compost, at least they aren’t loading our produce with toxic chemicals.

Then I relocated back and found out how wrong I was. Any intelligent, alert consumer will know what I’m talking about — especially now that the the Delhi High Court has taken “suo moto cognisance” of news reports of finding high levels of banned pesticides in fruits and vegetables. Of the five internationally-banned pesticides, four were commonly found in fruits and vegetables. These include a rat poison that affects the central nervous system.

The court appointed a team of government lawyers and activists in March to randomly buy vegetables from various mandis and shops in different locations in the NCR and test them at government-accredited laboratories to let us know whether our fruits and vegetables are becoming toxic during the process of growing and preservation. The team had five weeks until May 11 to get back to the court, but there’s been no news so far.

In California, I could consult reports by the Environmental Working Group (www.ewg.org), a non-profit watchdog which uses the power of public information to protect public health and the environment. It provides useful resources like Skin Deep and and the EWG’s Shoppers Guide to Pesticides to consumers while simultaneously lobbying for health-protective and subsidy-shifting national policy changes with the government. I had its list of the “dirty dozen” — the twelve fruits and vegetables that consistently have the highest levels of pesticides — stuck to my refrigerator. Those were the ones I wouldn’t compromise on while buying organic, though for others, I continued buying the cheaper, conventionally-grown produce in order to balance my budget. Unfortunately, no such resource is available for those living in India — although if the High Court manages to take its much-needed directive forward, we could at least find a starting point. It’s about time we took this seriously — these pesticides cause cancer, infertility as well as damage to the kidneys and the liver — which means we are slowly poisoning ourselves and our children by eating the very foods that nutritionist tells us to load our plates with.