Made in the USA Stickers For Food: Keeping You and the Environment Healthy

So my mom has been attending nutrition classes with this lady that specializes in ancient Chinese healing/medicine. She has been going to the lady for acupuncture throughout chemo and radiation. I've been asking my mom to pass on her new pearls of wisdom, and one thing that she said that the nutritionist emphasizes is the importance of eating foods that are "in season." Basically, this means not eating strawberries from Mexico, Chile, etc, in the dead of winter in the U.S... I don't know about you guys, but when I am at Whole Foods, Safeway, etc, I head straight for the conventional tomatoes from Mexico instead of the more expensive, more local produce. I didn't really know what to think about this new piece of advice until I read this interesting article from the New York Times. According to the article,

... a plump red tomato from Florida is often not the same as one grown in Mexico. The imported fruits and vegetables found in our shopping carts in winter and early spring are grown with types and amounts of pesticides that would often be illegal in the United States.

These pesticides are not only bad for us (some of them do not wash off with water) but they are terrible for the animals that live around the crops. This article focuses on how the pesticides effect birds specifically.

So what should you do to help? It is hard enough worrying about how to keep yourself healthy, let alone birds and animals in Latin America. Here are a few things to watch out for:

What should you put on your bird-friendly grocery list? Organic coffee, for one thing. Most mass-produced coffee is grown in open fields heavily treated with fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides...

Organic bananas should also be on your list. Bananas are typically grown with one of the highest pesticide loads of any tropical crop. Although bananas present little risk of pesticide ingestion to the consumer, the environment where they are grown is heavily contaminated.

When it comes to nontraditional Latin American crops like melons, green beans, tomatoes, bell peppers and strawberries, it can be difficult to find any that are organically grown. We should buy these foods only if they are not imported from Latin America

Maybe we should bring back the Made in the USA stickers for food?