Why I Need To Grow My Food Instead Of Buying From The Supermarket

Video Transcript:

Hi, I’m Chris from Aqua Gardening.

Today I want to talk about why you need to consider growing your own food at home instead of buying groceries from the supermarket.

We all lead busy lives so convenience and fast access to the food we want is so important to every family, which is why the supermarket is so popular in the first place.

The problem is most of us give very little thought to where our food comes from, how it is grown. This is where it gets interesting!

So let’s go on a quick trip into the fruit and veg journey before it reaches your shopping trolley.

Our food is grown on a large scale to meet supermarket and consumer needs – and the nutritional value and flavour are not as highly regarded as the shelf life and the appearance of the fruit.

Farmers are businesses that operate for profit, and to maximise profit they need maximise yield while fulfilling the supermarket’s requirements. And the supermarkets say “eye appeal is buy appeal” – and demand no obvious disfigurement among other strict screening criteria similar to a modelling agency!

So firstly, to ensure the food looks really good they have to spray the fruit and vegetables with pesticides to keep all the bugs and worms from spoiling the crop yield. These modern day pesticides have been linked to all sorts of chronic illnesses. The people who are most effected are the families that live close by to the farms that are exposed to all these toxins and chemicals. But the food itself, the carrots, lettuce, tomatoes and fruit also carry inside of them some these toxins which end up in your body when you eat them.

It was once common practice to freeze slightly green or ripe produce, and then thaw it later in the year when the produce was out of season. But due to negative feedback from consumers about cold storage, scientists have developed new methods to make the produce available year round.

For example, although a picking season is between January and April for apples, the fruit is on the shelf year round. Once picked, the best fruit are taken and effectively put to sleep, sometimes for up to 11 months. The process they use is called controlled atmosphere storage where the apples are kept at zero degrees and deprived of oxygen at the same time. This slows their metabolic rate to prevent full ripening. Pears and blueberries are often “put to sleep” in the same method.

Gassing the fruit in cold storage is another common method. Using a chemical called SmartFresh, the fruit’s ethylene production is blocked, which switches off their ability to ripen. This has resulted in plenty of complaints from consumers about the lack of flavour and concern about the nutritional values.

A post harvest expert from the University of NSW simply says “if people want apples year round there has to be some compromise”.

And if it is not apples being gassed or put to sleep, the rest of the fresh produce is picked early to meet the demands of transport to locations thousands of kilometres away. Truss tomatoes are amoung fruits which have been bred to look red in store, without actually being ripe enough to eat. Other fruit growers simply drop the varieties which don’t look as good in store, and plant the ones which have the best shelf life.

So by the time you pick up an apple or “fresh” vegetable to eat it, it has been exposed to so many chemicals and toxins that are harmful to your body. Not only that, the consequence of all these chemicals and manipulated ripening methods is that the nutritional content and taste of the fruit and vegetables gets compromised. You end up eating groceries that look great, have very little taste and are laced with a whole host of chemicals and toxins.

The price of convenient supermarket food is that you could be harming your children’s health, your health and damaging the environment at the same time.

So what’s the alternative? No one has much time nowadays to tend to a traditional soil garden, and not everyone likes gardening, or has the space to have a soil garden at home, especially if you live in an apartment.

That’s where we come in. At Aqua Gardening we specialise in safe, healthy food that grows itself. There is no use of nasty, dangerous chemicals, so you can have the peace of mind you are looking after your families health. Our automatic garden systems take care of themselves, and rapidly produce fresh tasty herbs, vegetables, fruit and even fish, growing 3 times faster than a soil garden. What’s even better is they take up minimal space so you can have these on your apartment balcony or outdoor area. And if you are one of those people who cannot keep plants alive, don’t worry because you cannot kill these plants, they literally look after themselves!

Why not find out how you can save time and money growing your own produce at home, while ensuring you are getting the maximum nutritional benefit and best flavours from the fresh produce you eat? Click on the link below to see how.