Treat all your vegetables as though they've been pooped on

In reality, there are no toilets in the fields.

Photo by Envirolet C. Toilet. (License: Creative Commons Attribution)

WASH your vegetables. Wash them again. Then wash them a third time.

If you have ever helped prepare dinner with a family in China, you have observed a meticulous protocol for handling food. It speaks loads about this ancient culture.

For thousands of years, the Chinese have been organic farmers. Even while western farmers were slowly destroying their land with chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the Chinese were constantly renewing their fields with "night soil."

So, most assuredly, they would always carefully clean their vegetables. And they continue to do so--- at home anyway.

This precious material that we call "waste" and flush into the oceans is still collected in the countryside, mixed with straw for composting, and spread in the fields. French novelist Victor Hugo stated it best when writing about China in Les Miserables that: "To use the town to manure the country is to ensure prosperity."

My French stepmother told me that when she was a girl in the 1930s, people sold human excrement to farmers with wheelbarrows. They must have read Hugo.

"Do we know what this human muck and sludge really is?" Hugo asks in his famous book. "It is the flowering meadow, green grass, marjoram and thyme and sage, the lowing of contented cattle, the scented hay and the golden wheat, the bread on your table and the warm blood in your veins – health and joy and life."

Composted "humanure," as The Humanure Handbook. Jenkins Publishing, calls it, does not stink and is not repulsive. "Proper thermophilic composting converts humanure into a pleasant-smelling material devoid of human pathogens," according to the handbook.

But sometimes the night soil is not composted thoroughly or people poop is spread directly on crops. And note that there are no WCs for peasants collecting the harvest, and there is likely not to be toilet paper either.

Although organic fertilizer is cause enough to ritually clean your vegetables, another reason is the poisonous chemicals that are increasingly being used today.

So, with onions, cabbage and lettuce, I throw the outer layers into a bucket with a tight lid. Into that pail also go shredded cornhusks, garlic skins, fruit peelings and other vegetable matter for composting. Yes, I compost in my apartment, but that's another story that doesn't include humanure.

The water from scrubbing those ears of corn and cleaning potatoes, etc, is set aside for houseplants and flushing the toilets.

Finally, here are some other veggie safety tips from the Asian Food Information Centre:

·Avoid touching your face when handling food and wash hands for 20 to 30 seconds with soap and hot water before and after contact with any food product.

·Use separate chopping boards for cooked and raw products.

·Scrub the drain board, sink, utensils and chopping boards with hot soapy water.

·Discard worn-out boards, as cut marks hold viruses.

·Wash sponges and towels frequently with bleach solution.

And scrub those vegetables not once, not twice, but three times, even if you are not in China.

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