Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Scary Beans


Sometimes I have wondered if Organic food is really any different. I decided to do a little home experiment with some Garbanzo Beans. This is the type of bean used to make hummus.
I sprouted two sets of beans, organic and non organic. One set ( a set was organic & non organic) was sprouted in my new handy dandy sprout house and the other set was sprouted in glass jars. Both sets looked the same no matter what way they were sprouted.
To the right are the beans after sprouting. The beans on top are non organic. You can see how few have sprouted. They also had a very slimy coating on them that was very hard to get off even after repeated rinsing. They also had a taste of chemicals, sort of like bleach. As far as them tasting like a Garbanzo bean, the flavor was almost non existent.
The organic group looks much different. With the organic group almost every bean had spouted. They came out very fresh looking and lively with no slimy coating and required no rinsing at all. They tasted fresh and had a flavor of the bean, not of chemicals.
I really did this experiment with what I feel was no bias. I wanted to buy the non organic beans as they are cheaper!
In the past I have used non and organic beans for my sprouting and wondered why sometimes they just did not turn out. I blamed it on a host of elements, none of which were ever the quality of the beans.
There is a big push right now by Big Agra Business to own the patents to seeds. They have started to make seeds with a shelf life. These seeds are called "Terminator seeds". They have started to make plants that cannot produce seeds. All of this is very bio-scary. They have the ability in their patents to make it illegal to take a plant that you have grown and let go to seed and put those seeds in the ground and grow something.
I wonder just how far this has gone without our knowledge. How much of their Frankenseeds have migrated into our back yards?
What is wrong with the non organic garbanzo beans that I tried to sprout? Are they sprayed with chemicals that inhibit sprouting or are they bio engineered Frankenseeds doomed to die with no Life Force in them?
Nature cant be contained, as it just loves to mingle. Some smart fellers think they can mess with Mother Nature, oh how wrong they are.

3 comments:

  1. Whoa. That is really scary. I guess it's not that hard to conceive, but really scary nonetheless. Thanks for posting about your experiment. All the more reason to buy organic, I guess.

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  2. I don't think Monsanto has bothered with terminator chick peas yet, just corn, wheat and soy beans. Their focus is on things making them a profit for now. Probably the difference was in the variety. I am guessing the organic variety was chosen for different reasons like pest resistance and the non organic was probably a variety for increased volume.

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  3. dear celtic,I can understand the variety aspect, but why did they not sprout at the same rate and what was the slime that would not wash away?

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