How to get kids to eat healthy

As a child I was never fond of broccoli. Now I know why. It was the quality of the broccoli. Yesterday I was in a organic garden with a man who uses worm extract spray on his vegetables and has the complete organic loop in his garden. In other words he has fresh water, well composted fresh soil with worm castings and only fertilizes with worm oil. He picked off a head of broccoli and told me to eat it.

My childhood taste buds were screaming "NO", but I trusted him. The taste was amazing. It was actually sweet. He tossed a piece to his dog and the dog ate it ravenously. The over grown, nutrient poor vegetables that taste like cardboard from our grocery store are a big part of the failure to help us eat healthy food.

I challenge you to find a organic gardener who practices this technique and compare the food. If your child started its taste bud memories with that kind of flavor they will gladly eat healthy.

Now that was an easy thing for me to challenge but you and I know this kind of grower is rare. So this brings us back to the truth that we are going to have to make that effort to grow our own food if we are going to take real steps to healthy food.

I have to say, do not trust the word organic. I go to lots of organic food retailers and never have I had food that tasted the way that broccoli did. The problem is they are not nourishing the soil with fresh worm composting, feeding the soil with the minor elements that are so needed in our diets. They simply are using a compost with high nitrogen to produce a fast plant and not using chemicals. That is all it takes to be called organic but it does not give us food with all the nutrition our bodies hunger for.

When I stop at a organic retailer I ask how they prepare their soil, where their water comes from, do they let the land rest or do cover crops. If they can't give you this information than that should be a warning. If they are not into putting nutrition into the soil, then this is not what you are looking for. The final and best test is taste. Good nutrition taste good, if it doesn't have much taste then it is lacking these elements.

Contaminated Water Exposure in our Garden

We drink bottled water to avoid chemicals. And we addressed the issue of plastic bottles being a problem. But what about how we water our garden plants.

Water is the key uptake our plant is working at. The cell structure in the plant tries to filter that water but then we eat the cells that did the filtering. So it is important that we give the plants we consume water that is pure.

This brings us back to plastics: So many people feel they are doing so well by using rain water, but what are they putting that rain water in?

The other mistake missed is what is the rain water running off of? Is the roof feeding this drain made of asphalt shingles? And what happens to the water as it sits in the sun in this black plastic, percolating?

As a rule of thumb, trust your senses. If you can smell the plastic, then then avoid how you are using it. If the water does not smell right, then get rid of it and do not use it on your plants.

You may have to get much more creative here; and I guarantee it will cost more to use a clay pot, or more earth born container, to do the same process. But if you want to truly be serious about avoiding the effects of the un-natural environment our scientist have created, you will have to make the effort.

Plastic and our Food

Plastic is probably the most ignored area of our health chain. It touches almost everything coming in contact with the food coming from our grocery; and even in our own gardens.

More and more there is a concern that this could be a leading problem in our health. Plastic as a petroleum processed product, that we now know, can leach and off gas into our food.

So how do we avoid it in a world that has driven all our food products and tools toward it?

Look for the alternative which is glass. Glass has been avoided due to breakage, but it is one of the best products for clean containment and easy recycling.

We take glass jars that have had jams or other food items in them and recycle them for our garden produce. Lemonade, Ice Tea, it's all in glass jars. Interesting enough you can really taste the difference if you pay attention, everything seems colder or hotter than something stored in plastic.

We also ask our local organic supplier to let us see where they grow the food. We look for plastics in that growing process. Often the water is coming through black plastic exposed pipes. If you sniff these pipes in the heat of the day, you can actually smell the plastic off gassing. We look for growers that use natural dirt corrugates or have a steel pipe system.

Let's be honest, this is really a pain to try and investigate and avoid plastics in our food. But consider how much plastic we are exposed to. If we can reduce that exposure we are taking the steps to a healthier life style.