Why Organic Fruit is Better

With the green craze everyone knows that organic food is better food, but why? What makes an organic apple better than a "regular" apple? It rests in the methods used for growth, pesticide use, and soil conservation, along with the amount of shipping needed for the fruit to meet your supermarket.

For one, organic foods use no pesticides. They also use manure rather than chemicals as fertilizer. At the super market you may find both organic and natural fruits. While both are good, organic is better. Natural is grown under nearly the same process, but pesticides (albeit much less than other fruits) are used. So your exposure is lessened, but not completely avoided.

To piggyback on this, there are many fruits that have an incredibly high residual pesticide rate. Some, there may not be much at all, but with others, you might as well cover the fruit in the poison before eating it. This list (provided by planetgreen.com) includes: apples, peaches, nectarines, strawberries, cherries, pears, grapes, and raspberries. These should always be avoided from growers who use pesticides, as your body will be exposed to much more.

If you buy organic food, you will find it usually is made from local farmers. Thereby, you are decreasing the amount of fuel emissions to get the same fruit grown thousands of miles away.

There is also more to this. Organic farmers care about, and preserve, soil fertility. Other growers use herbicides and pesticides (also delivered from thousands of miles away) to kill anything in the ground. This allows the fruit to grow without any disturbance, but kills the soils nutrition. Thus, they have to have plant food delivered, again from far away, to feed the plants. Also, with the soil destroyed, it creates plains not much unlike Dust Bowl conditions.

Unfortunately, there is no research showing that just eating organically is going to definitely make you a healthier person. However, having less pesticides in your body, and less fuel emissions in the air has to account for something. Lower cancer rates, better quality of living, and much tastier fruits (since you don't need to eat apples with an overhanging of poison in the flesh).

If you care about the earth, and yourself, you will shift over from the standard fruit, to the much better organic variety. They taste better, are better for you, and let the earth (and us) breath fresh air and not noxious fumes.

Sources:

Information about what fruits hold more pesticides and the amount of transportation needed supplied by: http://planetgreen.discovery.com/food-health/organic-fruit-seward.html