Eco Child’s Play

A new site called What’s On My Food just launched this week. It is a godsend for moms everywhere who are concerned about pesticides in our and our babies’ food, not to mention water systems and the air. Did you know that the average American child gets five plus servings of pesticides in their food and water daily? Did you know that Atrazine, a potent endocrine disrupter banned in Europe, is found in 71% of US drinking water? What’s On My Food is full of horrific little tidbits like these and provides easy-to-grok visual breakdowns of pesticides in common foods.

Pesticides are a big problem for little bodies.

Babies and children have high metabolisms and they eat and drink significantly more, in relation to body weight, than adults, all of which further concentrate pesticide deposits in their tissues and still-developing internal organs. Pesticides and other pollutants can interfere with proper sexual differentiation; they can also cause other birth defects and multigenerational health problems such as allergies, immunotoxicity, neurotoxicity, and cancer in the individual, that individual’s offspring, and subsequent generations.

So what can you do?

1. Put your money where your mouth is (buy organic)

Yes, it can be more expensive. But think of all the purchasing decisions we make in a day or year. Think of all the silly things you’ve spent money on. In my opinion, buying organic is one of the most important ways we can vote with our wallets. Buying organic from your local farmer’s market is even better.

2. Grow your own veggies

Gardening has come a long way in the last decade. It has become much simpler, and even chic, to grow what you put on your table. Plus, gardening gives kids first-hand knowledge of where their food comes from. Check out Sustainable Urban Gardens for tips and ideas for how to do it yourself.

3. Use Environmental Working Group’s shopping guide (pdf or super cool iPod app)

Environmental Working Group has been around since 1993 and specializes in providing useful resources (like Skin Deep and the Shoppers’ Guide to Pesticides in Produce) to consumers while simultaneously pushing for national policy change. The shopping guide provides a list of “The Dirty Dozen”, (must buy organic) and “The Clean 15″ (foods that are not as critical to buy organic because they absorb less pesticides).

4. Read Marion Nestle’s What to Eat

Nestle walks readers through every supermarket section–produce, meat, fish, dairy, packaged foods, bottled waters, and more–decoding labels and clarifying nutritional and other claims (in supermarket-speak, for example, “fresh” means most likely to spoil first, not recently picked or prepared), and in so doing explores issues like the effects of food production on our environment, the way pricing works, and additives and their effect on nutrition. It is a great, often funny read, and a good way to educate yourself on something we ingest multiple times a day.

As citizens and consumers, our actions are critical, particularly with something as important and pervasive as food.

Photo courtesy of Tarlyn via Flickr under Creative Commons license.

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