FORGET FRESH FRUITS AND VEGGIES

Welcome to my blog.  This is my first official posting.  The conflicting voices in the farm/food space leave the average person baffled, frustrated, and decisionally paralyzed.  My goal in this blog, which I will attempt to write daily as a short post, is to coach you to a better understanding of food and farm issues.

My vision is to create a network of folks who don't want to go to bed at night until they've had their shot of musings.  Since I come to the conversation as a real entrepreneurial taxpaying for-profit farmer, my perspective tends to be unique and, I hope, helpful.  NGOs, government agents, and farmers with off-farm wealth have their slant on things and often have big platforms.  I want to bring a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic approach to the conversation.

I don't expect you to agree with me on everything.  Sometimes I'll sound like a raving socialist; other times you'll think I'm an anarchist.  Regardless, I'm honored to be invited into your life and will do all I can to encourage sanity and truth in the farm/food space.

Yesterday I did some town errands and heard both Dr. Sanje Gupta, CNN's chief medical guru, and Clark Howard, radio talk show financial advisor, extol the virtues of frozen fruits and vegetables over fresh options.  Apparently things are abuzz over a recent research project from UC Davis comparing the nutritional content of frozen versus fresh fruits and vegetables and concluded both the same.  Since frozen are cheaper, the gurus are encouraging folks to buy frozen.

Like all Greco-Roman western reductionist systemitized compartmentalized linear disconnected parts-oriented scientific inquiry, this study failed to address many important nuances.  It compared industrial food to industrial food--neither one is worth eating.  It did not compare home-grown and home-frozen to supermarket industrial fresh or frozen.  The study assumed everyone gets their food at the industrial supermarket.

It did not measure the energy footprint of processing, bagging, and freezing.  It didn't measure the cost of throwing away the packaging.  It certainly did not look at anything like alternative compost-grown foods.  That would not be within the scope of the study.  And therein lies the pitfall.  Science is actually quite limited inasmuch as it has to study only narrow things.  But because we worship science as God, thousands of Americans ran out today and bought frozen veggies because "science says so."

I'm not disputing the findings; I'm only suggesting that lots of other things surround this issue but for most people, the takeaway is to eat supermarket frozen veggies.  That gets the thumbs up.  Not farmers' markets.  Not backyard gardens.  Not your neighbor's farmstand.  The result of this research is another plug, subtle at least and aggressive at worst, for industrial processed food.  The research is limited by the questions that get asked.  And the media doesn't ask any questions; it just dutifully parrots the myopic research. 

So what question would you like asked?