What am I eating ?????

Here's something which gave me a slight fright: a report about cleaning fruit & veg. Apparently it doesn't help to wash it - eColi & some other things you don't want to ingest get into the leaves (spinach for example) & fruit... So: big project to test efficacy of chemical baths & irradiation. Irradiation works best - provided it's strong enough to kill the stuff, and even then it's not 100%.

Now I wonder what the irradiation does to the life in the fruit I'm eating ? I don't care that my worry is not scientific - I'd much rather they try to figure out how to prevent the eColi's etc from getting into the food in the first place.

I'm sure we've all seen the fresh produce fields bordering some of our most congested highways. Which is why I like to see WHERE MY FOOD COMES FROM. When I make vegetable juice for The Man, I'd rather the ingredients didn't originate right next to the N1. When I eat grapes, I'd prefer it if they didn't come from the area where the irrigation water was so polluted that the EU cancelled import deals with those farmers.

Let me just make this clear: I absolutely do not blame those farmers - they're caught between a rock and a very hard place. They're partly dependent on water from a river - polluted before it gets to them. They do what they can with purification, but it brings me back to my first point - get rid of the problem at source. And I'm afraid this gets us into even more polluted waters: politics.

So I'll leave that there. Point is - I want to know Point of Origin. And that's not always easy. Especially when your punnet of fruit comes from that mysterious farm called Specially-grown/packed-for...

There's always been a particular pleasure in knowing, for example, that your avo's came from Louis Triegaardt (as it used to be called), especially if the box also told you the name of the farm. One gets to know & trust some of these points of origin. But nowadays it's not just out of interest - I wonder how often it is a health risk for us not to know where our fruit grew & how it got to us.

Bottom-line: we're going to have to get to a point where we can grow more of our own. If you eat off your own tree, you know what you're getting.