Mono Monday : : Organic

It was hot enough this morning to cook this  yellow zucchini in our garden.. Although its planter box  does have some of OIlMan's homemade organic fertilizer in it, the dogs leave it alone because the squash plants are actually quite prickly....no chemical pesticides have been used on it, although OilMan has been known to shove smoke bombs down the rodent holes, and despite the fact that tomatillo plants and strange looking alien pumpkins are coming up everywhere, only hand weeding is done.

It used to be that practically every packaged food from boxes of cereal to bags of popcorn announced in big letters that they were 'organic'. Apparently the definition has been tightened as well as the labeling laws, because a quick survey of my larder revealed phrases like 'heart healthy' , ,Non GMO" , and 'no high fructose corn syrup" but the word organic was nowhere to be found. There is a whole section in the vegetable department at Oliver's labeled "organic' with special bags to put the veggies in so that the checkers can tell which is organic and which isn't.The organic items are usually locally grown and, paradoxically, much more expensive

Every day the results of  a new study proclaim that foods that were once considered healthy now are not. Labeling on packaged foods change accordingly with each new finding. Nobody knows what to believe, other than the old adage, 'all things in moderation'. Laws are enacted about what must be written on a package and what cannot be written on it. One requirement is 'serving size' I don'y know how these serving sizes are determined, but they are not always very helpful. For instance, who determines a serving size of Dijon mustard?  And why? When did eggs stop being bad and start being good?

It has reached the point that reading the labels on a single box of cereal could take longer than reading a novel. No wonder there are always people standing in the aisles at Oliver's staring at a bewildering array of packaged foods....

The simplest thing seems to be to plant a garden...no wait, that's not simple either. But if the dogs don't dig up the fertilizer, the rodents don't chew through the irrigation, it doesn't rain too much or too little and the birds don't eat the fruit, whatever produce survives can definitely be called 'organic'.