Who Can Afford to Go Organic

Lets, face it, most of us cannot afford to provide organic foods to our families, even if we decide to adopt a Vegan lifestyle and eat only, vegetables, fruits nuts and seeds. I am managing to do so for my family but I am a professional cook with thirty five years of knowledge in the field of health cooking and I know my way around town. On any given day I waste gallons of gas picking up “clean food” at the various markets that I frequent. The cost of providing these foods has nearly tripled our budget and shopping time.

Take a typical single low income (and the number is rising) parent in Los Angeles, generally a mother. She gets her children off to school long before the morning bell rings so that they can have a subsidized breakfast of GMO grain sweetened cereal, milk(I don’t even want to go there), and perhaps a piece of fruit which they will probably toss out. After the mother lovingly and painfully drops her kids off to breakfast and a day at school she scurries off to her job, perhaps at a Beverly Hills home where she is a housekeeper making a damn good wage of $15 per hour with out benefits, since the employer has her working only part time, four twelve hour days instead of five eight hour days. Of course she volunteered to do this so that she could have three days with her children; only the employer wants her to work weekends. She dare not refuse him.

If she earns enough money to own a car, pay insurance and maintenance, and has a place to park off the street, she is lucky, which is generally not the case. Keeping a car in Los Angeles is hard for the single parent but an absolute necessity. Somehow, she manages to get to her job and she puts in a hard day while her children attend school and then the afternoon Star Program which basically baby sits the children until mom can pick them up .It’s always frantic at this point because it is “rush hour”

So now mom has her kids safely with her and they need to rush home to finish homework, have dinner and get ready for the next day. Hopefully they are well and no one is sick with the flu, or any other child hood ailment that needs medical attention. Now mom has to think about preparing dinner, do you think that she is thinking about buying organics? She goes to the closest market to her home and buys the least expensive foods or the most convenient foods. She is not concerned and cannot afford to be concerned about the quality of the food her family is consuming, she relies on the FDA to keep them from the doctors office .She does not recognize the difference between a sixteen dollar free range chicken and a four dollar toxic bird. She says to herself “I wish that I could feed my children the way my employer feeds his. Tonight he is feeding his kids Vintage New York Steak on the grill with organic russet potatoes topped with organic sour cream from a creamery in Sonoma and locally grown asparagus ,because his wife is asking him to go “green.”

So now mom has to shop and prepare dinner for her children. Tonight they are having Hamburger Helper made with two dollar chuck, perhaps she will throw in a little frozen broccoli which she picks up on sale for less than a dollar because she heard somewhere that cruciferous vegetables were healthy for you. In addition to that she buys a corn-laden GMO and enough MSG to flavor a piece of cardboard dessert of pretty little animal shaped cookies for the kids. They will wash it down with a corn sweetened imitation juice.

I am standing in line behind her and watching and my heart is bleeding. I have just come from my job as a private chef. Tonight I made Vintage New York Steak on the grill with organic russet potatoes topped with organic sour cream from a creamery in Sonoma and locally grown asparagus because his wife is asking him to go “green.”