Photo credit: Muffet via Flickr

Recently, a young girl named Elise conducted an experiment that shows us why buying local and organic food is a better choice. She created a video explaining her experiment and uploaded it to YouTube (see the video below). Her experiment was to see how long it would take for a sweet potato to grow vines. She purchased the sweet potato from her local grocery store and placed it in water with toothpicks to suspend it. She waited three weeks with no results. Elise tried again with a second sweet potato for three additional weeks with no results.

Elise returned to the grocery store and was told that the sweet potatoes she purchased would not produce vines because they are sprayed with Bud Nip to keep them from sprouting. She then purchased an “organic” sweet potato from the same grocery store. The sweet potato finally sprouted a few small vines after four weeks. Elise finally purchased a sweet potato from a local farmer’s market. The sweet potato practically sprouted a tree after only just one week! Elise then researched what Bud Nip is and reveals that it is Chlorpropham.

According to Cornell University, “Chlorpropham is a plant growth regulator used for pre-emergence control of grass weeds in alfalfa, lima and snap beans, blueberries, cane berries, carrots, cranberries, ladino clover, garlic, seed grass, onions, spinach, sugar beets, tomatoes, safflower, soybeans, gladioli and woody nursery stock. It is also used to inhibit potato sprouting and for sucker control in tobacco”. It is moderately toxic by ingestion, but chronic exposure of laboratory animals has caused “retarded growth, increased liver, kidney and spleen weights, congestion of the spleen and death”. Long-term exposure may cause tumors, and in one experiment the chemical initiated skin cancer in mice. Chlorpropham has the potential to contaminate groundwater, and is strongly absorbed by organic matter. With so many negatives, it makes one wonder why a chemical like this is used at all?

The answer…Bud Nip keeps produce from sprouting during transport and while it sits on the shelves of a grocery store, thereby enabling the grocer to sell older produce without anyone being the wiser. Less waste equals more profit.

Now that we know just what we’re getting when we don’t buy local, let’s look at a few benefits of what we get when we do. Local foods have the widely known benefit of being fresher and tasting better, but they also usually have less environmental impact and support your local economy. They don’t need to be shipped from across the country, and therefore leave a far smaller carbon footprint. Buying local also means you know who and where your food comes from, which means you know a lot more about the food you’re buying.

So, the next time you have a choice to buy local and organic or to save money, hopefully you’ll look for ways to save money elsewhere and visit your local farmer’s market. In this case, you really do get what you pay for. Buy local. Buy organic!

What do you think about Elise’s experiment? We’d love to hear from you! Please leave a comment below or on our Facebook or Twitter pages.

Source: (http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/carbaryl-dicrotophos/chlorpropham-ext.html)

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