On April 10, it was announced that a Florida couple found the remains of a Mexican free-tailed bat in their container of Fresh Express organic salad from Wal-Mart. The couple found the bat after they had already eaten some of the contaminated salad.\u00a0 According to the New York Times, the bat was sent off to the Center for Disease Control to be tested for rabies, but the bat was too decomposed for tests to be fruitful.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not uncommon for bats to hang around organic farms, as they\u2019re often used as a form of pest control for organic farmers.\u00a0 Since organic crops are grown without pesticides, farmers have to be creative with how they keep plant-killing insects away from their produce.\u00a0 Many organic farms even have bat houses on their property to keep them near, so this bat probably died doing a very important job, protecting organic crops.<\/p>\n
Although this bat was potentially a hard\u2013working contributor of the organic farming community, it has been making avid salad eaters increasingly conscious of what is in their packages of healthy goodness.\u00a0 This incident begs the question: is going organic worth it? While the organic movement has been picking up steam for several years, there are still some things that the public is unaware of.\u00a0 So let\u2019s debunk some rumors.<\/p>\n
Myth: Organic food is too expensive just for the \u201cOrganic\u201d label<\/p>\n
Fact: While organic food is generally more expensive than conventional foods, you may find that, the benefits of eating pesticide\u2013free foods outweigh the few extra dollars you\u2019re spending.\u00a0 Organic.org, an online site that promotes educational reasons for eating organic, asks consumers to consider that organic farmers, unlike conventional farmers, receive federal subsidies.\u00a0 This is one reason organic prices are higher. Organic farming is also much more labor intensive than conventional farming, requiring organic farmers to hand pick weeds and trap pests instead of using pesticides.<\/p>\n
Myth: Eating organic means eating natural<\/p>\n
Fact: According to Cornucopia Institute, an online site that provides economic information to family farmers, federal law requires that organic food products promote ecological sustainability in production without the toxic inputs and genetically engineered ingredients common in the conventional food system.\u00a0 There are no such laws regulating foods labeled \u201cnatural.\u201d\u00a0 This means that \u201cnatural\u201d foods may still contain ingredients that have been genetically modified or treated with pesticides.<\/p>\n
Myth: Pesticides aren\u2019t all that bad<\/p>\n
Fact:\u00a0 Pesticides are, indeed, all that bad. According to Toxics Action Center, an organization that aims to reduce pollution in the northeastern United States, pesticides have been linked to a wide range of human health hazards, ranging from short-term effects such as headaches and\u00a0nausea\u00a0to chronic effects like\u00a0cancer, reproductive harm and endocrine disruption. According to thebalance.com, runoff from pesticides<\/a>\u00a0used\u00a0on farms or during production is known to kill animals, plants and trees. So think about whether the risks of ingesting pesticides are worth it when buying conventional food instead of organic.<\/p>\n While not everyone can afford organic foods for every meal, recent studies have shown that it is a safer option due to the risks pesticides provide to the human body.\u00a0 So while you may have to be a little extra careful not to take a dead bat home with you in your salad bag, eating organic is still the way to go in the long run.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On April 10, it was announced that a Florida couple found the remains of a Mexican free-tailed bat in their container of Fresh Express organic salad from Wal-Mart. The couple…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14712,"featured_media":8632,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[136],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14712"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8631"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8637,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8631\/revisions\/8637"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelink.harding.edu\/the-bison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}