What Farming Taught Me About What I Eat
GARDENER OF LIFE — Food & Diet
I spent twenty-six years farming in California’s Central Valley. We grew crops, we worked hard, and we used chemicals — a lot of them. Herbicides, pesticides, fungicides. It was just how farming was done.
Then something shifted. A county farm advisor started talking to us about chemical exposure — not in an alarmist way, just honest. He knew what we were handling and what it meant for our bodies. Around the same time, studies started coming out. Warning labels got more serious. A couple of the chemicals I’d been using since the seventies were outright banned.
When you’re putting on tons of product and thousands of gallons across your crops, you start doing the math. I’m eating this stuff. What am I thinking?
Gradually, as I phased out of farming, I started paying closer attention. Not just to what I was growing, but to what was on my plate.
Then in 2005, I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. That changed everything.
I started reading labels. Researching ingredients. Noticing patterns. Ultra-processed food was spiking my blood sugar in ways I couldn’t ignore. The connection between what I ate and how I felt became impossible to dismiss.
I’m seventy-six now. I live in an independent living community in Utah — a long way from those California fields. And I’m still learning. Still paying attention. I’m not perfect. But I’ve built a small system of tools that help keep me honest.
The Yuka App
Yuka lets me scan barcodes right in the grocery store. I point my phone at a product and within seconds I can see the ingredients broken down, a health rating, and a plain-English explanation of what’s actually in it. It takes the guesswork out of label reading — and there’s a lot of guesswork when you’re standing in an aisle trying to decode a list of forty ingredients.
Eating Well — The Daily NOSH
This is a newsletter from the Eating Well team, and it lands in my inbox regularly. Good recipes, sound food guidance, and a section I find especially useful: FDA recalls. Contaminated produce, recalled meats, frozen foods pulled from shelves — it keeps me current on what to watch for. In a world where food safety news moves fast, having that land in my inbox takes the work out of staying informed.
EWG Healthy Living
The Environmental Working Group takes a broader view — food, cosmetics, chemicals, environmental impact. Their approach is research-based, which matters to me. There’s no shortage of blogs and influencers pushing food recommendations that have no science behind them. EWG helps me cut through that noise and focus on what the evidence actually says.
Three tools. None of them perfect. Neither am I. But after decades of learning — first on the farm, then at the doctor’s office, now in the grocery store — I’ve come to believe that paying attention is the whole game. You don’t have to get it right every time. You just have to keep showing up and making the next choice a little better than the last one.
That’s what I’m working on.
