We are dying everyday | Bitter truth behind food we consuming 😟

Food is basic need of our life. We eat food for daily requirement of nutrients and energy. However, have you imagined the food we eating is killing us everyday? The food supposed to be for our healthy life, but it feels bad when we realise the food we eating is slow poison. 

Looking back at great grandparent's and our current grandparent's life; our great grandparents and grandparents used to grow food for themselves without using any chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Life was hard but healthy at that time. Since then time has changed a lot and a lot to our current generation; from traditional farming system to modern cultivation system, subsistence to commercialize farming and important one is laziness and unhealthy flashy competition among people. People had started thinking farm work is low level work, started choosing foreign employment over farming and rest of family started migrating over cities as a flashy competition. It had created active labour scarcity in farming area and left the farming land barren. Farming area are left barren which shrunk the total annual production of food. The trend is increasing every year. People are moving to cities to have luxury life; no farm work is given a tag of freedom for everyone. Living with no farm work is becoming a definition of proud and happy life. 

The major consequence arouse from this is the more food demand in market and low production in farming site. because of higher food demand and low food production within the country, we are depending heavily on neighbour countries for importing food. Complete dependence on market available food which have imported from other countries may not always be healthy because we can not trust the quality of food. 

Importing food from neighbours and question on food quality

Domestic production is not not enough to support domestic demand. Therefore, we have many food items comes from overseas. From spice to cereals, vegetables and fruits, almost everything we eat and cook in everyday life comes from foreign countries. However, the situation in our neighbour countries is also not good in order to produce healthy food. Majority of the farmers use heavy dose of chemical pesticides than recommended dose. The main aim of producing food using heavy dose of chemical is to produce market appealing products to fetch good price.  

One research shows that, majority of Indian farmers use heavy and heavy dose of pesticides/insecticides in their farm for products they sell in market, however, for themselves they grow food separately in organic farm. Even these farmers are not trusting the food they have grown themselves, how we trusting blindly without any question? 

Research shows that, farmers in our neighbouring countries such as India are not following chemical standard, they are using haphazard dose of chemical pesticides/insecticides, they are using far more heavy dose than required and are also not following 'after chemical application' standard. We should have to give few days to month before harvest after applying chemical pesticide, however, in ground level farmers are not doing this, they are harvesting immediately applying pesticides/insecticides. Same food is coming everyday in our market and we are consuming these foods. 

These chemicals persist for long time in our food and in our body as well.  It can not be washed off completely, so whatever we eating today it is contaminated with even few amount to heavy amount of pesticides/insecticides. 

Porous border and weak law enforcement is killing us

Nepal has porous border to India, we all know about it. So, it is easy for frauders and local venders to transport agricultural products without following any testing procedure from illegal points into Nepal. In other hand, for legal checkpoints, there is no any chemical testing lab and standard procedure to check chemical in food before entering into our local market. These foods are entering into our market and into our daily food without any restriction. 

Who is ready to question about this issue?

Being a consumer, we always look the price tag and the attractive and appealing food. We consumer even do not care about where and how it has grown. When we get food items in low price, we just buy it with happy mood without thinking it could have been grown with chemical application. Furthermore, we even do not follow the standard washing procedure to wash off at least some of the chemical available in the food. It mean, we always look like a happy consumer for getting appealing and low priced food in the market. 

So, unless consumer do not realise the impacts of chemical based foods and until they realise it is not good for our healthy, who is questioning against this slow poison cooking in our kitchen?