By Elizabeth Warburton-Smith
As the executive director for a longstanding non-profit supporting community gardens, I like to get the word out about healthy eating. There is simply no comparison between the produce you find in a grocery store and home-grown fruits and vegetables, home raised eggs, honey, etc.
Let’s focus on just tomatoes. Did you know that there are literally hundreds and hundreds of varieties of tomatoes? Consumers are lucky to get 3 kinds in a grocery store. Unless it’s a health food grocery store, you will find all the selection to be hybridized tomato varieties and rarely are they organic. (Of note, while hybridized plants can be grown organically, most are not). Hybridized simply means cross pollinating different parent plants for the selection of specific characteristics that you would like in the new plant. For example, the vast amount of produce in the grocery store is bred to strengthen features like uniform size, able to hold up during transport across the country (or countries) and extended storage times past harvesting. Flavor is ignored as one of the features to develop. There is a biological reason for this that ties into corporate efforts to increase profit margins: Once a vegetable or fruit is fully ripe, it produces loads of enzymes peaking its flavor and color. Another thing that happens when the enzymes are at their highest levels is that the nutritional value of that veggie or fruit skyrockets. But, the production of enzymes triggers that produce to rot soon thereafter.
In nature, the plant is designed to entice an animal to eat its fruits when the seeds are perfectly ripe so that the animal can then go deposit the seeds somewhere else, ensuring successful germination of new plants helping that plant species survive. That enticement happens when the fruit is the most flavorful, the most colorful, most fragrant, and has the highest amounts of nutrition for the animal. If no animal happens to come by and feast on the bounty, the fruits are destined to then rot, fall off and germinate when it lands on the ground. The pulp of that fruit or vegetable turns into fertilizer for the seeds (just like the manure is the fertilizer when the animal deposits the seeds in a new location).
Going back to grocery stores, growers pick tomatoes when they are green, no enzymes have had time (or will have time) to be produced by the plant and transferred to the fruit. The way the distributors turn tomatoes reddish in color is they gas them with ethylene as they sit in crates in a warehouse. In addition, all fruits and vegetables begin to lose nutrition as soon as they are harvested because they are no longer attached to the plant that supplied those nutrients. So, then the fruit or vegetable carries on its next function, decaying and germinating its seeds.
There is a very short period of time after harvesting when it is absolutely ideal to consume, usually less than a day from picking it off of the plant but the sooner you consume it, the better it is for your body. Of course, refrigeration, freezing, dehydrating, and such slows down this nutritional deterioration, but the clock is ticking so it’s still a significant decrease from freshly harvested.
Bottom line, if you want to stay healthy, avoid processed and non-organic foods at grocery stores, eat only “living foods”, grow your own produce, join a community garden, and buy your food at local farmers markets. If enough informed consumers switch to healthier options, the message will get out and eventually set the bar higher for grocery stores and big food conglomerates churning out highly processed foods in bright, colorful packages instead of colorful, fully ripened whole food ingredients.
