The value of organics and other fruit and vegetable headlines

A Los Angeles Times columnist takes up the issue of the value of organics, and offers an astounding proposition....

Weighing the value of organics
With the recession breathing down our necks, many people are looking for ways to cut the household budget without seriously compromising family well-being. So here's a suggestion: If you buy organic fruits and vegetables, consider switching to less pricey non-organic produce instead.

Hold the e-mails and hear me out: There really is no proof that organic food, which costs about a third more, is better than the conventionally grown stuff.

UCR researchers finds anti cancer link with fruits and veggies

Based on a new study they published, two UC Riverside scientists advocate a daily dietary inclusion of fruit and vegetables to help prevent cancer.

They found that apigenin, a naturally occurring substance in fruit and vegetables, improves cancer cells' response to chemotherapy.

Xuan Liu, a professor of biochemistry, and Xin Cai, a postdoctoral researcher in her lab, report that ingesting apigenin offers a novel approach to stop tumor resistance to cancer treatment.

Green carts and New York
In 2008, Mr. Bloomberg and the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, put their full weight behind a controversial (yet courageous) proposal to create a Green Carts program to place fresh fruit and vegetable vendors in underserved neighborhoods.

Some in the local food industry bitterly opposed that effort, hiring lobbyists to make two central claims, which just happened to contradict each other: one, that low-income people were too ignorant to know that they needed to buy fresh produce, so the initiative would fail because of lagging sales; and two, that the competition from the Green Carts would be so great that it would put existing food stores out of business.

I don’t necessarily agree that the initiative has been “slow to take off.” Many of us anticipated that an initiative so ambitious and new would take a while to be ramped up. In any case, in the antihunger community, we have already begun preliminary discussions on the possibility of combining bulk buying for green carts with bulk buying for pantries and kitchens. We welcome additional help from anyone with interest or expertise in this area.


Produce can harbor food pathogens