This week’s harvest: purple carrots, cucumbers, zucchini, onions, tomatoes, basil, tomatillos, garlic, hot peppers, sweet peppers, eggplant, green beans, leeks, cabbage, head lettuce, chard, kale.

Raina has a book called “The Feel Good Book” that asks us to think about what makes us feel good. Tonight she said “carrots from the farm make me feel good.”  For her, I think they “feel good” because she loves the taste and maybe the surprise of discovering a hidden colorful vegetable completely under the ground. But, in thinking about it, carrots from the farm make me feel good too for so many additional reasons. The way we farm has so many benefits including “righting the wrongs” from so many of our society’s biggest problems.

One of the most common reasons why people say they support our farm is because they want to eat produce free of pesticide residues. I honestly couldn’t imagine having to work in a poison cloud and then eating the crops afterwards, but this is how the majority of the food we eat is produced (never mind all the additives and preservatives added to processed food).

However, while pesticide residues found on food are a valid concern, numerous studies have found that the higher doses that farm workers and their families are exposed to cause numerous illnesses including cancer, hyperthyroidism, respiratory diseases, and many more. Farmworkers also suffer thousands of diagnosed pesticide poisonings each year. The knowledge that you are not supporting a food system that subjects farmers and their families to high doses of pesticides “feels good” and this is just one of many reasons to “feel good” about our food.

So even though you might not be able to taste the difference between produce from our farm and that from the store (although many times you can), the knowledge of where the food comes from and how it is grown makes you “feel good” when you eat it and that information alone, for me, makes it taste that much better.