How You Can Tell That You’re Getting the Best Agri Products
You might know the term “agri products,” or perhaps you have not encountered it yet. Agri means agriculture or agricultural. When you hear the term agri products, that is an item that comes to you through an agricultural production process.
You can find thousands of agri products in a good-sized grocery store. For instance, you might buy bags of rice, un-popped corn for popping, fruit, tree nuts, and so forth. You may not feel certain you’re getting the best agri products, though. How can you tell?
We’ll discuss that in detail right now.
How Many Ingredients Does the Product Have?
First, you might examine an agri product’s ingredients. If you are buying a bag of uncooked rice, it should contain rice, and that’s it. There’s no reason it should include any other additives.
If you’re buying an agri product that requires some refining, it might have additional ingredients. Usually, the manufacturing company uses those ingredients to preserve the product so that it has a longer shelf life.
Generally, there’s nothing wrong with that. If you buy a fresh product with no preservatives, it contains no harmful chemicals, but if you don’t eat it within a day or two, it might rot. If that happens, then you wasted the food and your money.
If you buy an agri product that has preservatives, it should not contain more than three or four ingredients, including the key one. For instance, if you purchase some nuts in a bag, you should not see anything other than nuts and salt and perhaps one or two additional spices you know by name.
If you see two dozen ingredients on an agri product’s packaging, that’s a bad sign. There’s no way an agri product should have that many ingredients, especially a simple one that doesn’t need much refining.
Frozen meals often contain a couple of dozen ingredients because they’ve gone through a lengthy refining process. You should never see that with a simple agri product.
Does It Have Any Ingredients You Don’t Recognize?
You should also look at the agri product’s ingredients and see whether there are any unpronounceable chemicals. If you see words that you can barely pronounce, that’s another sign that you’re getting a product that has gone through a lot of modifying for preservation.
You should not eat those foods very much. You might have one occasionally as a treat, but if you eat them all the time, you are ingesting those chemicals a lot, and that’s seldom a smart idea.
These chemical preservatives often have cancer-causing agents. A frozen dinner probably won’t hurt you if you eat one or two of them per month. If you eat one every day, you have much higher cancer risks as decades pass.
If you eat more raw food products or ones with minimal processing, that’s much healthier.
Research the Company
You can also research the agri product’s company to learn more about it. If you pick up a product and see that a huge conglomerate like Nestle makes it, you will probably find out some things about that company that you won’t like very much.
Some huge companies have good reputations, but many reached that size by using practices that harm the planet. You can visit the company’s website and see how they create their products.
If they create products using minimal processing and they don’t harm the planet, then that’s a winning combination. Companies that care about Earth and use sustainable practices should always get your money.
See Whether the Company Does Fair Trade
You can also see whether a company does fair trade. Fair trade means the company engages in practices that are fair and equitable to local farmers and others in their supply chain who they use as growers, collectors, or other crop facilitators.
Fair trade companies harm the planet very little, and they give the farmers and others who create their products a fair cut of the profits. If a company doesn’t do fair trade, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re doing anything harmful, but they merit closer scrutiny.
The best agri products look and taste good, but you can go a little further and find out more about them before you start buying them every week and making them a staple. A certain food might taste good, but if it’s made by an irresponsible company or has many unhealthy additives, it’s an inferior product, and you should look into other options.