Eating is an agricultural act - Wendell Berry

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

3 things to avoid

following the diet tips and edible oil warning, here is another warning - vegetable/fruit warning...

please avoid:
1. cauliflower
2. cabbage
3. grapes
all the 3 are highly overdosed with pesticides.
the first 2 are heavily attacked by the diamondback moth - which has the potential to wipe out the entire crop withing the first 3 weeks. hence farmers spray the pesticide every day to kill the DBM.
i heard that while loading into the trucks, cauliflower is dipped in a solution of pesticide which prevents the black mould formation.

so kiss goodbye to the gobi manchurian, aloo gobi, all chinese fried rice and noodles.

11 comments:

Preeti Aghalayam aka kbpm said...

People have been saying this for several years now but i sort of dont buy into this. in my (childhood) home, these three things always got washed in warm water, sometimes with some salt. extra attention was paid to the washing at any rate, but we ate them all the same. which is what i do now as well. if you make a list of things to avoid (not talking about you guys who grow food but the rest of us that buy) i think it will be a real lengthy one. Most veggies & fruits, milk, rice, dhals, pretty much everything you can imagine. I dont think isolating these three (which is something people have been doing for years, citing the same reason as you do, higher pesticide amounts), is of much benefit, overall. Although, I do admit to strong dislike of Gobi Manchurian.....

csm said...

i heard it from the fellow who did these things. he never buys these items.
he swore that you feed cabbage (in some form) to a dog and in a year, it will be dead.

you can wash all you want. even with detergent, it will not wash well with ones digestion.

it is of course a question of degrees of contamination and it is obviously true that most of our food items are contaminated. but these 3 are the most contaminated. it is simple common sense to be sensible.

Preeti Aghalayam aka kbpm said...

i dont know what quantitative basis you have to declare these three as 'most contaminated'!! i think its common sense to question the source where we get this stuff from, and to be aware of potential contamination in them, for sure, but not necessarily to just drop two vegetables and one fruit from ones already pathetic diet overnight. again, i am not talking about you, but about other people who read your blog and ditch the cabbage curry and finish up their non-cabbage meal with a glass of pepsi or coke....

csm said...

i do not (and i think many others) live/make key decisions in life by quantitative data.
when the farmer who has grown cabbage told me that he does not eat cabbage (for the known reasons), it is iron-clad quantitative data for me.
if cabbage is the only vegetable someone is eating and they stop (be reading this blog - highly unlikely as it may be), i think it is a good development.

out here, along with what to avoid, there are enough what to eat as well :-)

Raja Panda said...

Interesting discussion. So, i thought i'll put my 2 cents too :)
I too have heard the same points as csm mentioned here from an elderly gentleman who had quoted the source to be a farmer again, and this time too, the farmer was not eating his own produce.
I on my part have tried growing both cabbage and cauliflower in my small organic kitchen garden and found that i could not save the cauli's even after putting the best of efforts. Cabbages, though recovered from initial setback to give me a decent harvest.
I blog about my experiments here
http://rajsmusings.wordpress.com

csm,
Hope to see you sometime at pR. The journey you have taken is really inspiring and hope someday i can do something similar to pR in my home state, Orissa.

Regards
Raj

csm said...

@raj - thanks brother.
nice blog you have.
would love to have to come around to pR.
and that would be the tipping point for you to head out to kalinga territory :-)

Raja Panda said...

Thank you so much for the invite.
Can you drop me a mail with little details of when and how it would be best to travel to pR.

Regards
Raj

csm said...

hi raj - mail me on sriramskd AT gmail DOT com
will send details of travel, etc

Rags said...

Hello,

I have been watching PR for quite some time, but only saw this blog today. Was extensively depending on tweets to follow the development. This will be by everyday read henceforth.

Coming to cauliflower, from what I know, this is not a local vegetable as far as south India is concerned. These will be attacked by bugs/pests as they consider it foreign.

In the small organic kitchen garden that we have in bangalore, we tried cauliflower once with no results.

Rags

csm said...

hi rags - welcome into this space. look fwd to hearing about your stories in your garden.

Padmaja said...

A Chinese hostelmate taught me how to remove the chemical from the grapes. She does it regularly.

She adds a spoon of any kind of flour like wheat rice in water and soak the grapes for 10mins. Then again she washes them.