So, I love Spinach but apparently they are sprayed with a lot of insecticides to repel crop eating insects and this rules out Spinach for me. How worried should I be about the use of fertilizer for crop production?
P.S: I have been hearing a lot about sweet potatoes and how they are the perfect food but I was wondering how those were grown, do they use a lot of harmful fertilizer or anything along those lines?
Thanks for all your answers guys :)
Not directly answering your question, but I’m an avid Gardner with 15 years of hobby experience and I stopped growing spinach because it attracted so many pests and I don’t spray. I found varieties of kale with delicate leaves better because they grow faster, were much more bug tolerant and tasted as good or better.
If you have some outdoor space and interest, growing some greens for yourself is very easy if you get the right varsities.
I hate to be “that guy” but this almost certainly depends on the specific fertilisers and insecticides used.
The biggest reason our food is not healthy is that it’s been bred for durability in shipping and long shelf life rather than flavour and nutrient content. Tomatoes are the poster child of this phenomenon. Compare backyard-grown heirloom varieties to store bought tomatoes and the difference is night and day!
There’s actually a pretty high correlation between flavour and nutrient content. This makes sense when you consider the purpose of taste and smell in the first place: to help us discern healthy food from poor food, to gauge ripeness, and to help us avoid poisonous or rotten food.
Of course highly processed food such as Doritos abuse this feature by targeting only the specific compounds responsible for great taste and leaving out everything else. This is why they’re so bad for you: highly tasty and addictive yet nutritionally empty apart from calories.
