Date:   2/13/2007 12:38:07 PM ( 17 y ago)
Popularity:   message viewed 615 times
URL:   http://www.curezone.org/blogs/c/fm.asp?i=1002588

One doesn't need to go through the super expensive process of 'certified organic'. Anything grown without pesticides and other poisonous methods like human sewage fertiliser is organic. When I hear people talking about 'food economic justice' and 'pricey, unavailable to the inner city' my alarm bells go off. It sounds like typical excuses that limosuine liberals make up in order to explain why the innercity inhabitants don't buy vegetables. First of all, I grew up in a working class/working poor black and hispanic neighborhood filled with bodegas and chinese food restaurants. Poor people of all backgrounds have a certain pattern of eating habits. Here where I live, white working class poor no one buys fruits and vegetables either. There's a GNC and I'm not sure how they stay open. Anyway, I digress...I worked in a healthfood store in my old neighborhood and whenever we tried to sell fresh organic vegetables and juices, maybe about 1% of the people that lived around the store ever came in. It was the same people all the time, mainly folks from the Caribbean who grew up with taking a spoon of castor oil on Saturdays,etc. There's a perception that organics are expensive when in fact they aren't. Health food isn't more expensive when you consider what you are getting in return. However, poor people are in a survival mentality and quantity not quality is paramount. There are a lot of issues at work here. A Whole Foods isn't going to open up in a poor innercity neighborhood because they won't make money. People have to live. The WFM that I used to work at was in a upperclass white area and the business was pretty slow. I think it's a food mentality. My mother and I and my sister shopped at WFM even though we were poor. A lot of nurse aides I knew in New York, all black and not the richest people on Earth, shopped there. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink. Thank you for bringing this up Leslie. It's something I thought about a lot since moving to a very different nabe. Americans are very deluded about food :(
 

<< Return to the standard message view