24-carrot veg (or why you should get your vegetables in boxes)

Firstly, if you pick a local vegetable box scheme you’ll be supporting food producers in your area and also cutting down on food miles. Supermarket choice has erased all knowledge of what grows when, so something I personally enjoy is eating with the seasons, and this also means you are forced to eat things you wouldn’t normally think of buying. Also, the vegetables in your box will come unwrapped (except perhaps in a bit of mud). Compare this with supermarket vegetables which are (sometimes twice) wrapped in a layer of plastic and you’ll realise how much the boxes reduce non-biodegradable rubbish.

Eating organic vegetables encourages more sustainable farming practices that don’t harm the environment. An average Cox’s apple can be sprayed up to 16 times with as many as 36 different pesticides! On top of this not being particularly appetising, artificial pesticides and fertilisers don’t just stay in the ground and on your food but leak into rivers where they can contaminate water supplies and poison wildlife. £120m of tax payers' money annually is spent on removing chemicals in drinking water that have mainly originated from agriculture.

Organic farming also emits less CO2, not using products like inorganic fertilizer, antibiotics and pesticides (these consume a lot of energy in their production and transport). Also, organic farmland has higher biodiversity, as the lack of pesticides enables more species to live on the land and other plants growing among the crops means that there are seeds and berries for birds and more nutrients are retained in the soil, making it healthier. Personally I'm sceptical about the claims that organic food tastes better than non-organic (although Ella thinks it does) but it certainly doesn’t taste worse. Finally, the more people who buy organic produce the cheaper it will become. So no excuses now…

This is where we get ours from - http://www.paradisefarmorganics.com/

(Oh, and a special thanks goes to Matt Hawken for the title pun!)

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