Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeff Cox, former editor of Organic Gardening magazine, helped lead the organic movement from a fringe idea to a phenomenon. He was the host of Your Organic Garden on PBS and Grow It! on HGTV and is the author of seventeen books, including the James Beard Award-nominated The Organic Cook's Bible. His Web site is organicfoodguy.com.

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Why Should You Choose Organic Foods?

Organic food has never been more popular, and for good reason: it tastes better, it's more nutritious, and it's better for the environment. This handy guide shows you how to select the freshest, tastiest varieties and transform your organic groceries into memorable meals. You'll find guidance on what to look for when shopping, how to handle each food in the kitchen, and why, when foods are organic, they're so darn good for you. Here's everything youneed to enjoy food that you can feel great about eating:

• Profiles of more than 100 organic foods

• Complete coverage of fruits, vegetables, nuts, herbs, dairy, eggs, meat, and more

• At-a-glance advice on peak seasons, nutrition, good varieties, and what to look for

• Detailed information on preparation, storage, complementary flavors, and kitchen uses

• More than 100 tasty recipes and dozens of cooking tips

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The Organic Food Shopper's Guide

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

When I worked at Organic Gardening magazine during the 1970s, the company had a lunchroom in a house on Main Street in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, called Fitness House. Clients and special guests were taken there to sample real organic food and healthy cooking. It served the most unpleasant food imaginable: unsalted buckwheat groats, sweet potatoes without butter, potatoes boiled in milk, musty-tasting sprouts. At that time, organic food was thought of as good for you and good for the environment-clean, pure, and nutritious-but not all that tasty.

I usually passed Fitness House by and went to Richard's Market for a really delicious Italian hoagie or one of Richard's hot ham sandwiches on a sesame bun with horseradish sauce and melted cheese.

Granola and groats became synonymous with organic food in many places in the 1970s. I ate many an awful meal at back-to-the-land communes from Maine to California. Thank goodness that era is long gone.

Nowadays organic food has come to be appreciated for its richness of flavor, its freshness, and its purity. But as the years passed, I wondered if a special organic cuisine would develop-something that could truly be called organic cooking. And I wondered what it might be. Would it be in the gourmet style of organic cooking found at some trendy restaurants? Writing in the New Yorker in 2003, Dana Goodyear described the fare at Counter, an organic restaurant in the East Village in New York City:

This is a meat-and-potatoes kind of joint, if by meat you mean "meat loaf" made of portobello mushrooms ground up with almonds, macadamia nuts, and cashews in a porcini-mushroom-and-cabernet gravy-and by potatoes you mean cauliflower and pine nuts whipped into a fluffy cumulus and seasoned with parsley and a few shards of uncooked garlic.... The menu attracts a loyal crowd of long-haired sirens so eerily happy-looking and outgoing they might be mistaken for members of a West Coast religion.

While such creative dishes can certainly be tasty, connecting such fabrications with organic food is limiting. This isn't how most people cook at home every day, and it hardly reflects the range of organic cooking.

Organic cooking is real food for real people-good, solid, everyday food made with organic ingredients. It's no longer about faux potatoes made from whipped cauliflower and pine nuts or imitation meatloaf made from portobello mushrooms, and you won't find recipes like those in this book. Good organic cooking can mean cooking in any style, if only because we live in an age when ingredients once found only in ethnic enclaves in America, or in the homelands of different ethnic groups, are available to us fresh, in season, and often in organic form. In fact, organic cooking is most interesting when it is inclusive.

To understand how organic food can enhance any sort or style of cuisine, the organic cook needs to take a good look into the heart of the organic method of growing food, because it's there that the secret of its quality lies. So please bear with me as I condense the knowledge I've gained over thirty years of writing and gardening into a few paragraphs that I hope will be enlightening.

Compost

Healthy soil makes healthy plants makes healthy people. -Old organic maxim

Put simply, "organic" is a method of growing food using only naturally occurring substances. Properly done, it recycles all wastes and improves the soil as it increases crop yields, working with nature's laws and tendencies, rather than attempting to counteract or defeat them. Practitioners of the method conceive of all life in an ecosystem as an interrelated whole to be strengthened, rather than as a group of creatures to be selectively supported, suppressed, or chemically eliminated.

Compost is the heart and engine of the organic method. The rotted remains of what was once living tissue is both the source and destiny of life. What was alive dies and decays to form a nourishing seedbed for new life: the concept is as old as life itself. Go into the woods and look closely at the forest floor. You'll see the leaves and twigs of past years decaying to form a rich, spongy duff that nourishes the trees and plants currently growing there, which will in turn eventually die, decay, and nourish yet another generation of plants. William Shakespeare articulated it well when the friar in Romeo and Juliet proclaimed:

The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb; What is her burying grave that is her womb.

Compost is the perfect fertilizer. It contains plant and animal remains, which have the elements needed for the construction of new plants and animals. But compost is much more. It is teeming with microscopic life of many kinds and functions. A teaspoon of fresh compost may contain billions and billions of living microorganisms. They tear apart and digest the remains of old plants and multiply in a tumultuous explosion of life. A well-made compost pile can reach temperatures of 140 to 160 degrees Fahrenheit as these tiny bits of life colonize the feast of organic matter laid out for them.

Within each microorganism is a fluid that's slightly acidic. When these tiny single-celled organisms die, this acid spills into the soil, where it dissolves various elements, forming soluble mineral salts that further enrich the compost. Some of these soluble mineral salts, such as potassium nitrate, are plant nutrients, which get absorbed by root hairs; without the acid from the compost, much of the soil's mineral content would remain trapped in its insoluble state, of no benefit to plants.

Meanwhile, as the old plant matter (dead roots, leaves, and stems) is chewed up by the life in the soil, it eventually becomes a substance called humus. If you could shrink down small enough for a particle of humus to seem as big as an automobile, you would see a dark, almost black lump with deep crevices, nooks, crannies, and channels creating an enormous surface area in a compact space. If you could stretch the automobile-sized particle out flat, the surface area would cover several acres. This humus particle is negatively charged, and it attracts positively charged ions.

Now nature, being the wonderful mother she is, has given the soil solution (as the soil water is called) a remarkable property called its cation exchange capacity. As plant roots absorb and deplete positive ions from the soil solution, the cation exchange capacity replaces the ions to keep the cations at a fixed, balanced level. The replacement cations come from the humus particles, where they are stored on those negatively charged surfaces.

There's something else remarkable about the soil cations. Because they are the product of biological activity, their molecules are configured in a special way; soil scientists describe them as "left-handed." This is exactly what growing plants require to build healthy tissues, because plants, being biological entities themselves, must have left-handed molecules to work with. Fertilizers made in a chemical factory, on the other hand, contain a random mix of left- and right-handed molecules, which throws a chemical monkey wrench into the whole process.

As soil temperatures rise in the spring and plants start growing rapidly, they need more nutrients from the soil solution, and the cation exchange capacity doles them out. Warmer temperatures also stimulate the growth of a whole range of soil microbes, such as nitrogen-fixing bacteria. These little guys live on the roots of legumes-a class of plants that includes beans and peas. You may remember from high school chemistry that nitrogen comprises four-fifths of the atmosphere and that a nitrogen molecule is [N.sub.2], or two nitrogen atoms linked strongly together. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria have found a way to move an electron or two around and unhook the bond that unites the two nitrogen atoms-like taking apart one of those metal Chinese puzzles. The free nitrogen atoms then combine with oxygen to form nitrates, and the nitrates feed the beans and peas. It's a neat, symbiotic arrangement that costs the farmer or gardener nothing.

If, however, you fertilize your soil with chemical nitrogen fertilizer manufactured in a factory using costly fossil fuel (and lots of it), the soil becomes flooded with nitrogen, which turns off the nitrogen-fixing bacteria permanently. You end up destroying a free, natural system and replacing it with a costly, pollution-causing system for which you pay dearly. And yet this kind of wasteful substitution of industrial chemicals for natural processes happens all the time on factory farms.

To put it simply, compost feeds plants what they need, in forms they like, at just the rate they require. And nature is just full of simple cycles and processes like that.

Farming without Agricultural Chemicals

Chemical fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, nematocides-there are thousands of agricultural chemicals that fall into these categories, and a few others as well.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 60 percent of all herbicides, 90 percent of all fungicides, and 30 percent of all insecticides are carcinogenic. The organic grower avoids using any chemicals that can harm people, the environment, or the ecology of the diverse creatures that are a part of it. Organic food is also free from genetically modified organisms, hormones, and antibiotics. Land can-and is-being farmed all over the world quite well without these substances.

Importantly for the cook, organic food is thrifty. That's not a reference to the cost of production-thrifty is a grower's term that means the plant or animal is well-built, sturdy, and compact, without a lot of weak, watery, excessive growth or spindliness. Thrifty plants and animals are healthy because they get the care and nutrition that they require. Plants have proper color and well-developed roots from being grown in healthy soil fertilized with composted plant and animal residues. Animals are lively and lean without being scrawny; their health derives from eating a nutritious diet of plants raised within this natural system. For people, a healthy diet consists of organic grains, vegetables, fruits, nuts, fish, cheeses, milk, and meat that are all raised within the natural system.

The organic grower works within this system to strengthen and intensify it for the betterment of the crops. This leads to ecological diversity, among other benefits. The more participants in the growing system, the healthier the system becomes. One reason that organic growers can do without chemical pesticides is that a naturally occurring mix of insects will include beneficial insects and other animals that feed on pests. Surviving pests target weak and sick plants first, just as a pack of wolves targets a weak or sick animal. This culls the crop, and the strong, healthy plants persevere and reproduce. The surviving healthy, organically grown plants tend to resist pests and diseases, just as healthy human beings resist diseases. One definition of health, after all, is freedom from illness.

Without pests, what would the beneficial insects eat? Without beneficial insects, who would pollinate the crops? Without compost plowed into the soil, what would the earthworms eat? Without earthworms, what would nourish the plants? Without the plants, what would the pests eat? The interwoven web of life forms circles within circles, great and small, that add up to health and-in the case of organic food-good eating.

Similarly, organic growers can do Without fungicides. Organically amended soil is so thoroughly colonized by beneficial microorganisms that a fungus-or a disease-causing organism of any kind-often finds the competition too tough to gain a foothold. A myriad of other little creatures destroy it or hold it in check, multiplying and causing problems for it.

Most herbicides target weeds with broad leaves; grasses such as corn and wheat are left with a free field in which to grow. (Much genetic engineering has been devoted to making them able to grow in the presence of toxic herbicides.) This creates a monoculture: a single type of plant over broad acreage-and a feast for pests specific to that plant type. Organic growers deal with weeds by tillage and by interplanting crops with many other crops. This confuses pests. Instead of finding a field filled with its favorite dinner, a pest must search in order to destroy, and the level of destruction is therefore much lower.

Conventional Agriculture

Choosing organic food creates benefits in two directions. In one direction, the choice supports sustainable and beneficial farming practices that protect the environment and make for healthier, more varied, and tastier food. In the opposite direction, the dollars spent on organic produce do not support some pretty terrifying developments in conventional agriculture. Although nonorganic (conventional) farming is said to provide more food to people at lower prices, the practice poses various hazards.

GENETIC ENGINEERING

We're constantly being reassured by the biotech industry that genetically modified crops are safe and represent a boon to mankind. But experience gives us pause.

One genetic engineering technique causes new plant varieties to develop at evolutionary hyperspeed, which allows farmers to select for more "efficient" crop varieties faster than ever before. This technique is accomplished by splicing genes that cause colon cancer in humans into a plant's DNA, where they cause a chain of mutations that can produce thousands of mutated offspring very quickly. The offspring are then screened for useful characteristics.

Once these genetically modified varieties of plants (called genetically modified organisms, GMOs, or just GMs) are introduced into a crop, their dispersion is hard to control, as their pollen can spread and pollinate non-GMO plants, turning their offspring into GMOs. Genetically modified corn was inadvertently harvested along with soybeans for human consumption in Nebraska in 2001. That corn contained a gene to produce aprotinin, which belongs to a class of substances called trypsin inhibitors, known to cause pancreatic disease when fed to animals. It also acts as an insecticide, which made the corn poisonous to insects.

In a separate incident, a strain of genetically altered corn that contaminated soybeans in Nebraska was found to produce a glycoprotein found on the surface of two strains of HIV and the closely-related simian immuno-deficiency virus. Injection of the glycoprotein into the brain of rats has been shown to kill brain cells, while injection into the human blood stream results in the death of white blood cells.

The U.S. government ordered this corn crop destroyed, but a day after that order was given, it was discovered that the biotech company that had developed the corn had contaminated an additional 155 acres of corn in Iowa. That, too, was ordered destroyed. "This is just the tip of the iceberg," reads a report on the incident by Dr. Mae-Wan Ho of the UK-based Institute of Science in Society. "The true extent of the contamination remains unknown owing to the secrecy surrounding more than 300 field trials of such crops since 1991. The chemicals these plants produce include vaccines, growth hormones, clotting agents, industrial enzymes, human antibodies, contraceptives, immune-suppressive cytokines and abortion-inducing drugs."

One of the leading developers in GMO crops and other agricultural chemicals is a company called Monsanto. Monsanto sells dairy farmers a hormone that greatly increases cows' capacity to produce milk. An international committee has found that this genetically engineered bovine growth hormone (rBGH) may produce chemicals in the cows' milk that could cause breast or prostate cancer in humans who drink the milk (see Dangers in Conventional Dairy Products, page 257).

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Excerpted from The Organic Food Shopper's Guideby Jeff Cox Copyright © 2008 by Jeff Cox. Excerpted by permission.
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