Of course, the food is important. The quality and variety of food is so important to the Spanish generally that it is said they spend a higher percentage of their disposable income on food than any other industrial nation. It is not because the cost of the food is higher in Spain than it is in France, Canada or Australia, but because the Spanish expect better food and a greater variety of it.–Ann and Larry Walker, To the Heart of Spain
Ann and Larry Walker are the authors of 6 books on food and wine, and regular contributors to numerous publications in the U.S. and abroad. They live near San Francisco in California.
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When interviewed by Flo Makani, Nicolas Zamaria, with a Ph.D. in nutrition and director of a medical biology laboratory made a highly cogent point: “During the course of a life, 30 tons of food go through an individual’s digestive tube.” Imagine that before the era of synthetic pesticides that began in the 1930s (the word pesticide includes fungicides as well as weed and parasite killers], if there was to find a “Maginot” date, indicating an “after” and therefore a “before”, all of what that individual ingested, in other words, those 30 tons of food people ate before the 1930s, was organic. Yes, organic, without making any big deal about it! This was simply because farmers were not yet able to “rectify” nature’s big homeostatic equilibriums and therefore to endanger them. Today, rightfully, we are entitled — and in desperate need — to ask ourselves how that same digestive tube will treat the truly problematic situation, from a nutritional point of view, of the 30 tons of food it takes in these days. Because, of course, apart from the organic-labeled products (in France, 2.5% of the total cultivated area was devoted to organic farming in 2009), nothing else is organic anymore.
