I Lied on Instagram

Several months ago, I posted the picture below on Instagram, along with a caption about how dumping the contents of one's snack bowl on the deck results in snack time becoming foraging time. I reassured my plethora of faithful Instagram followers that everything on the surface of the deck was organic. No need to worry about the toxins LEG (that's my new super secret blogger name for my toddler offspring) could be ingesting.

I'm sufficiently freaked out about weirdos on the internet that I cropped out some of LEG's vaguely identifiable features while prepping to blog about this pic.
Any blog stalking weirdo could certainly identify her by the top of her head, right? 

I lied. The cereal pictured up there isn't organic. It isn't even name brand. It's this.                            

Not organic. Not name brand. Poisonous and cheap. 

Child Protective Services, are you reading?

Is organic better? I don't know. Mainstream thinking for the past 10ish(?) years seems to be yes. Organic is better. But there are two sides to everything, right? This article is one of the first I've read on the subject that presents both sides of the organic argument. My key take-away from it is still "I don't know, it's hard to tell, and there are two sides to everything." I've recently started buying into the idea of the dirty dozen in the produce world, and do keep my eyes open for organic produce from that list at the places I usually shop. 

The main reasons I don't solely buy organic produce are shelf life and source. There are certain fruits and vegetables my family eats year-round. Consequently, in the off-season, if I buy them organic, they're not from a local farmer's market. They're from the regular ol' grocery store where that poisonous cereal pictured above came from. So they've gone through all kinds of "bad" processes to get here. Burning fossil fuel to truck them across the country, being harvested when they're not ripe so they'll ripen on the way here, etc. And they don't even last long. I pay a premium price for them, and they go bad 10x faster than the non-organic store brand poisonous produce. Then again, there's really nothing wrong with enjoying a few fruit flies with snack, is there? Fruit flies are probably some sort of live active culture. 

I usually buy organic milk and yogurt for LEG. She consumes a massive amount of those, and I have reasons to believe those are better for her than non-organic. My reasons are based on someone I trust having extensive experience in the organic dairy industry, so obviously those reasons are skewed, but I'm sticking with them for now.

It's a balance. Budget-friendly, easily attainable, locally sourced, and healthy. A hard to balance to achieve, one I haven't achieved, and one that changes constantly.