Are your vegetables actually vegan?
There's a good chance that your veggies aren't as organic - or vegan - as you think.
As Eat.Drink.Better recently pointed out, some "organic" vegetable growers still use animal products, like bone meal, blood meal and animal waste fertilizer to help the plants grow. And along with animal products comes - you guessed it - e.Coli and salmonella. In addition, the animals that produce the bone meal and fertilizer aren't coming from humane, organic farms, but from factory farms, where they arvee fed with food altered with hormones and antibiotics, increasing the risk that those chemicals will eventually wind up in your produce.
Instead of getting bone meal from factory farmed animals, some farmers only source the by-products from trusted farmers. Thankfully, many U.S. and Canadian organic farmers are going one step further, and starting to practice "stock-free" farming, by utilizing no animal by-products, whatsoever. To find one near you, you can visit the Veganic Agriculture Network's list of farms in the U.S. and Canada.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-06-2008 @ 2:18PM
Phil L. said...
Well - be careful of extremes. Mother Nature has been using animal byproducts are part of your topsoil since time began. Who will make sure there's no bird or rabbit dirt in the field that produces vegan crops?
On the other end of the spectrum, a county near me will be using using road-kill deer as a compost ingredient:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/05/AR2008070501401.html
With some 3000 deer killed by cars every year in the Washington area (the automobile is one of their few remaining predators), I guess you've got to do something...
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