The Bad Seed

Have you ever gone out to your backyard on a hot summer evening and plucked a perfectly ripened tomato off the vine?  Still warmed by the sun, you bite into that plump tomato and the juices drip down your chin. And the flavor…oh my…the flavor.   

There’s no comparison to the hard, tasteless tomatoes you often find at the grocery store - that were grown who knows where, treated with who knows what, and God only knows how long ago they were picked.   

When you consume fruits and vegetables from your own garden, you know exactly what you’re eating. You can enjoy the fresh flavor, knowing it wasn’t treated with harmful pesticides.  Plus, you have the added satisfaction of having grown it yourself. 

You don’t need a huge plot of land to grow a few fruits and vegetables.  Many plants can be grown in containers, and the benefits far outweigh the effort. 

One thing you can do to make sure you’re planting the healthiest fruits and vegetables possible is to buy seeds that have not been genetically modified.  Decades ago farmers and home-gardeners would dry the seeds from this year’s crop to plant the following year.   

Then we got greedy (or maybe just curious).  We started experimenting with those seeds to see if we could produce bigger crops and faster harvests.  We did this by modifying the make-up of those seeds.  “Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, are created when a gene from one species is transferred to another, creating something that would not be found in nature.”[1]  In order to make this transfer, the gene is often attached to a virus.   

We can’t predict the effects of eating plants that are grown from seeds that have been modified with materials from animals, other plants, medications, and even plastics.  “The European Union has banned GMOs, as have Australia, Japan, the UK and two dozen other countries that recognize that a lack of long term studies and testing may be hiding disastrous health defects.”[1] 

“Non GMO seeds are as they were created. They have all of the nutrition that the human and animal body needs for optimum nutrition and growth. Traditional seeds develop into plants that organisms have been eating for thousands of years. The results and effect on the body are predictable.”[2]

Here are some sources for non-GMO seeds:

http://rareseeds.com/

http://www.johnnyseeds.com/

http://www.seedsavers.org/

http://www.southernexposure.com/

http://www.underwoodgardens.com/

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[1] http://www.organicauthority.com/foodie-buzz/eight-reasons-gmos-are-bad-for-you.html

[2] http://organic.lovetoknow.com/Non_GMO_Seeds