(1)
About 10 years ago, she developed environmental sensitivity, triggered by working in a greenhouse where insecticides and herbicides were present.
She finally was able to get her sensitivity under control, although she will never be rid of it, by eating healthy food, seeing medical specialists, and avoiding airborne chemicals, as well as such things as moulds, chlorinated water, and food additives, including monosodium glutamate (MSG) and nitrates.
Now, with her husband Rick Trudeau, she has started a business supplying people and restaurants in the Thousand Islands area with fresh food, locally grown and free of additives.
She even supplies gluten-free sausages which, for me, were something new. I didn't realize that a filler, usually wheat, is often added to sausages to stretch the meat further.
"I'm a farmer's daughter," she says. "I grew up healthy." But then she started a greenhouse business selling flowers and bedding plants. "I was working long hours in an enclosed environment, buying flats of flowers that had already been sprayed. There was moisture, humidity, mould, stress was high, and my eating habits were bad. I was eating packaged food. In the end I was dragged right out."
Her hands and feet went tingly and numb; she lost her vision in one eye; she became lethargic; her thinking became fuzzy; she developed allergies, arthritis in her hips, ankles, and wrists. "I was in pain all the time. And then my equilibrium went."
Doctors suspected a thyroid condition. Then lupus. Then Lyme disease. Then multiple sclerosis. Finally a doctor told her to get out of the greenhouse and seek alternative medicine. The greenhouse is killing you, he told her.
She quit the greenhouse, and spent five years reading everything she could get her hands on about food. She ate only fresh food, made sure she was well rested, drank plenty of unchlorinated water, and saw auto-immune specialists, a physiotherapist specializing in integrated manual therapy, and a doctor specializing in environmental medicine.
She has regained her sight, and her sensitivity is now under control, but she will never be free of it. She will always have multiple chemical sensitivity. But she's full of energy, and in her new business, she finds that she is her own best advertisement, not just because she now knows so much about food, but because she's a walking testimony to eating well.
One of the main things driving her is the conviction that, "I don't want anyone to go through what I did, not knowing what was wrong with me. What saved me was that I ended up with an extensive education about what's in food."
In supermarkets, shoppers simply don't know where their food is coming from, she says. And most people buying packaged food can't interpret some of the language used in describing ingredients. For instance, she says, hydrolyzed plant proteins can mean wheat is an ingredient. And mini-carrots sold in bags have often been washed in a chlorine solution.
"Food that's sold needs to have the producer's name on it," she says, "so that it's traceable." Then buyers can make more informed judgments.
She began deliveries in April, picking up fresh produce and meats from suppliers in the morning and delivering them in the afternoon. Already she has 85 regular customers, among them Kingston chefs delighted with the taste of fresh-picked food.
The dilemma for busy people is where to find time to go shopping for fresh food. Wendy's mobile market is an answer – a throwback to earlier days, before packaged foods and long-distance refrigeration.
View Cameron Smith's columns at www.cameronsmith.ca.
