A review of existing research on the purported health benefits of organic foods confirms that organic food is no better for you than "conventional" food. From Reuters:
Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said consumers were paying higher prices for organic food because of its perceived health benefits, creating a global organic market worth an estimated $48 billion in 2007.The study was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The abstract is here.A systematic review of 162 scientific papers published in the scientific literature over the last 50 years, however, found there was no significant difference.
"A small number of differences in nutrient content were found to exist between organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs, but these are unlikely to be of any public health relevance," said Alan Dangour, one of the report's authors.
"Our review indicates that there is currently no evidence to support the selection of organically over conventionally produced foods on the basis of nutritional superiority."
This finding is no surprise. As I posted years ago, the organic food industry has never had any scientific evidence to support the widespread belief that eating organic is better for you.
It's also doubtful that organic farming has any clear environmental benefits over conventional agriculture. A major 2002 study (which I noted at the time), suggested that organic agriculture could be less energy-intensive, but some dispute this claim. State-of-the-art conventional techniques are far more energy efficient than they used to be. In other respects, organic agriculture appears to be environmentally inferior to conventional farming techniques. In particular, organic agriculture tends to be less productive than contemporary conventional farming, yielding less per acre. For those of us concerned about protecting species habitat and reducing agriculture's "footprint," this is a big deal.
But is organic food better in some other way? After all, haven't you ever had a meal featuring local, organically grown produce that was over the top? I sure have. But I doubt that the organic nature of production is the relevant variable. Rather, fresh, locally-grown produce will often taste fresher because it is fresher. Having grown up in Philadelphia, I can tell you that nothing beats some of the fresh produce we could buy along the roadside in south Jersey. Nothing — and I mean nothing — beats a fresh south Jersey tomato — [Okay, I really meant "no tomato"] but this is true whether or not organic techniques are used.
So, as I've said before (and will probably say again), eat organics if you want, but don't think you're doing yourself or the planet any favors. To the contrary, there are many good reasons not to be a food elitist.
but then again, i'm the type of guy the buys whatever is cheapest in a grocery store...which is almost never the organic product.
Without being able to read the full article, this reeks of cherry-picking.
I will be on the lookout for this presentation.
To date my favorite is the presentation dealing with "premium" bottled water, an almost perfect analog to organics.
Much more likely that it is what the animals are fed that makes the difference. From what I've read commercial hog operations now use a diet extremely heavy in soybeans, for example. That is likely to produce bland meat.
As for girls entering puberty earlier, my first suspicion would also be dietary richness. Bodies have all sorts of mechanisms for dealing with famine in a relatively healthy way. There is much less tolerance on the other end of the scale.
This seems like a more reasonable explanation. Anytime I hear about some exotic explanation like bisphenols or hormones in meat, I tend to roll my eyes. When you remember that most species treat reproduction as a luxury to indulge in once there are sufficient resources, it seems much simpler that faster sexual maturity in girls is just caused by a rich and plentiful diet. Obviously, it could be that and other things, but the higher number of calories and protein consumed seems like the dominant factor.
Not by a long shot.
I should add that Pollan is no apologist for big organic farmers, some of whose practices sadly resemble some of the worst of conventional, industrial farmers.
My brother, who farms small grain and corn, pays tens of thousands of dollars each year to spray for (increasingly resistant) stray volunteer weeds and for some insects. When I worked on the farm we sprayed the cattle twice a year (with DDT!!). That was, as you can imagine, some time ago but the extent of fertilizer, herbicide and insecticide that is applied to US farmland is shocking.
Purchasing organic produce is not for my health it is for the health of the food-producing land and possibly for the health of the Gulf of Mexico. Just avoiding meat that is produced with the aid of antibiotics is a civic virtue. I don't know who it helps or what it helps but using antibiotics as livestock food should be a crime.
If I wanted gamey and tough, I would hunt for it myself.
The point of organic farming was never to produce more nutritious food. It was, and is, to produce food in a way that is sustainable: that is not destructive of the soil, the water supply, and the other environmental necessities of growing food.
Chemical farming treats growing food as a chemistry problem: how to transmute fertilizers and water into food plants, while avoiding unwanted interference from environmental variations such as soil microbes, insect life, or weeds. The environment is a chaotic, disruptive source of problems -- weather, pests, diseases -- that intrude upon the smooth working of the chemical equation. The soil is dumb matter that holds the food plant up while we feed it fertilizers.
Organic farming treats growing crops as a biology problem: how to integrate the growing of food plants into the existing biological system of soil and water. The environment is an existing, working, functional system that is to be adapted and worked within, not broken down and overridden. The soil is a living system that we cultivate and nourish, which in turn nourishes the plant.
As a workplace analogy:
Chemical farming is like the new manager who comes into your workplace assuming that everything you are doing is wrong, and that it all has to be torn down and rebuilt according to the business plan he learned in MBA school in order to get anything at all done. Any existing culture and relationships are his enemy, because they get in the way of reshaping the business according to his vision.
Organic farming is like the new manager who comes into your workplace and spends the first three months just observing what's already going on. He observes that things are already getting done -- that the business is not a blank slate, but a working system, albeit not a perfect one. He works to cultivate the existing business and grow it, not to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch.
What is wrong with using antibiotics on cattle? If antibiotics help humans fight infections, then it would seem to me that antibiotics would also help fight infections in livestock. If that's true, then eating meat from an infection-free steer would seem to be a good thing, not a bad thing.
Why do "organic" ranchers shun antibiotics?
My experience is that some types organic food taste better. However, I'm not sure how much this has to do with organic per se. Mass market tomatoes taste like cardboard because (1) they're breeds selected for being easy to harvest, package, and transport, which means they're tough and dry, and (2) they're picked green off the vine and ripened in trucks, which generally makes them taste bland.
And while the dairy farmer on the airplane doesn't put much stock in Pollan's work, I came away impressd in The Omnivore's Dilemma with Pollan's extraordinary research, thoughtfulness, and scholarship. I thought Pollan did a nice job in the book with taking criticisms of organic farming at face value and, in some instances, agreeing with them.
Finally, it may be that Pollan has advocated mandatory household composting at some point. I'd be a little surprised, though, since that is certainly not the thrust of the Omnivore's Dilemma. In addition, in a recent blog post, Pollan notes that among the more worrisome consequences of conventional agriculture is how energy intensive it is, accounting for 19% of US consumption of fossil fuels and as much as 37% of production of greenhouse gasses. That being the case, it would surprise me if it made economic or environmental sense to Pollan to require city and suburban residents to drive small amounts of compost to rural farms. Maybe there's some context to this argument that the Reason piece didn't provide.
Pollan's writing about our food and food delivery systems raise serious and complex questions that, I think, merit serious consideration. I think we're dismissive of them at the peril of our health and safety.
Why do "organic" ranchers shun antibiotics?
The animals are generally raised in conditions that lend towards infection. Rather than treat infected animals individually, the antibiotics are given to the animals indiscriminately. These are conditions that tend to create antibiotic resistant bacteria. This is a bad thing, especially when the antibiotics are closely related to various last line of defense antibiotics. In other words, while I do think that organic farming is better for the environment (and I don't think it's more healthy), what I care about much more is not dying of a staph infection.
See, for example, this article in the Washington Post.
Livestock are given antibiotics in their feed, under the expectation that they are living in a septic, befouled environment and some number would become sick without the antibiotics. Humans are given antibiotics only when they have been diagnosed with an infection.
When livestock are raised without antibiotics, they have to be kept in conditions that are less filthy and disease-ridden. This is a good reason by itself to prefer antibiotic-free meat.
1. Tastes better
2. Has more nutrients
3. Is better for the environment
4. Is safer (in the sense that eating or working around chemical grown food shows less incidences of cancer or other disease)
I'd be curious to know. Afterall, organic food was the traditional form of farming from the dawn of civilization until around the 20th century, so the burden should be on the pro-chemical crowd to prove that it is overall better for us and the planet. Until they can do that, than perhaps it's best to stay with the tried and true.
I will admit that the chemical revolution has resulted in a dramatic increase in the amount of food produced worldwide. so now we have a population explosion that require ever more intensively farmed land in order to meet the higher demand. But this is an experiment that we have conducted on the planet's resources only for the last 60 years or so. What are the longterm effects on our planet? Is anyone studying that? Is output per year the ONLY factor worth considering?
I would like to see studies that examine the nutrients of vegetables from your ordinary supermarket. My guess is that they probably have less locally grown food, just because they were picked before their peak of ripeness, and usually the nutrients don't actually get into the tomatoes or other veggies until they are at peak. (Which is why frozen fruits and veggies are actually healthier than so-called 'fresh'). These studies seem to indicate that they pick the veggies at peak flavor, and then immediately examine them, which is NOT how the typical shopper gets theirs.
Because of this, I believe I'm right that it is indeed law that even "organic" producers are required to administer medicine to needy animals. Antibiotic-free is a label for likely unhealthy animals, and you are wrong if you think "organically-raised" animals are somehow mystically less prone to the same diseases other animals are.
I'm waiting for clear proof hormones are a health issue from conventionally raised food. We have never found a proven cause of endocrine disruption among human consumers. BUT! We do know that organic products (personal hygiene soaps and shampoos) with lavender oil and tea tree oil have caused young boys to develop breasts. Translation? The boys' endocrine systems are being "disrupted". If conventional food was implicated you could imagine the headlines, but coming from an organic product . . . the silence continues to deafen and the incuriousness is hypocritical.
I guess since the product was natural, the endocrine disruption from an organic product is acceptable and part of the cycle of life, sort of like letting your animals become sick and frail, or using the human nerve-disruptor "organic" pyrethrum as a pesticide, er, I meant "plant input".
Conventional farming requires large amounts of capital, energy, petrochemicals and water. If any of those are disrupted yields drop precipitously.
An organic-friendly gardener, interestingly enough, just pointed me to the book: The Truth About Organic Food, by Alex Avery. That book can answer your four questions.
It is heavily critical of the hype from the organic marketers, but in my reading, is not critical of organic products themselves. Indeed the author admitted being a consumer of organic some certain produce because of superior quality.
I would not hold Pollan up as an exemplar of careful research. For example, he's off on the discussion of the changes in farming since 1920 or so. I believe he cites a figure of 235 tractors being used on American farms in 192-something. The correct figure was 235,000 tractors. Wrong too is his blaming Earl Butz for a revolution in US farm policy in the 1970's. Didn't happen as he says.
I'd use lots of salt with anything written on food, whether it's by Pollan, Kingsolving, McKibben, or by their opponents.
My own personal interest is in the terrible taste of vegetables produced by current methods. But I suspect that's more down to a combination of selecting bulkier-but-tasteless cultivars in order to maximize yield, and picking things raw and letting them ripen in the truck, which are both separate issues from organic vs. non-organic farming.
Overuse of antibiotics is an issue with more than just beef. It is big in mariculture, e.g., salmon farming, especially in Chile. And residues of quinolones, especially in imports from China, are a worry.
HANOVER COUNTY, JUST ABOVE RICHMOND. THEY ARE TASTY
FOR THE SAME REASON SOUTH JERSEY TOMATOES ARE TASTY.
SANDY SOIL.
ALSO, THEY ARE USUALLY RUTGERS "BIG BOYS" OR "BETTER BOYS"
THAT ARE LARGER, JUICIER AND THINNER SKINNED THAN THE
TYPES GROWN FOR TRANSPORT AND SALE IN GROCERY STORES.
AS SOMEONE WHO GREW UP IN SOUTH JERSEY AND NOW LIVES IN
CENTRAL VIRGINIA, I WOULD BE HARD PRESSED TO CHOOSE
BETWEEN A JERSEY 'MATER AND A HANOVER. BOTH ARE HARD TO
BEAT. ADD FRESH PICKED SWEET CORN AND WE'RE TALKING
"HOG HEAVEN"
WILL FREISMUTH
That is in exact opposition to pretty much every claim I've heard from organic farming fans since at least the 1970s.
The "sustainable agriculture" bit has only come to the forefront in the last few years, since the Internet makes it easy to find out the actual science involved. For decades now, I've been reading or hearing "organically grown (insert food here) has more (insert nutrient here) than normal food!" Of course, when you look at the studies, it's always a comparison of some small farm's output of three-times-as-expensive hand-raised blueberries compared to a basket of "how cheap can I buy them" stuff that you can get by the ton.
Do a Google search of "organic farming nutrition," and get ready to read page after page of either organic farming advocates claiming all sorts of nutritional advantages of what they're selling, or government-conducted studies that show no difference whatsoever.
Very true. Going back even further to one of the founding fathers of the anti-synthetic farming movement, spiritualist Rudolf Steiner, vitality/vitalism (i.e. nutrition) was what made non-synthetic farming techniques produce food that was better for humanity. In the 1920s, he railed against synthetic nitrogen fertilizers as "dead" and created dead food.
"Locally grown" is probably an even better proxy for quality, so I'm looking forward to that picking up steam also, of course not everything can be grown locally.
Repeated studies have found that perception of quality heavily influences how "good" something tastes. People will swear that the same wine sold for $100 with a fancy label tastes better than if sold for $10 with a cheesy label.
There are a few, very few, foods where the production heavily effects the outcome. Tomatoes probably being the biggest examples. (On the other hand, I hate most organic and homegrown tomatoes; they tend to have a very pungent "grassy" taste to them and are usually too sharp for my palette.) But I seriously doubt more than a handful of people can tell the difference between organic corn and mass produced corn.
(This reminds me of self-proclaimed audiophiles who claim all sorts of things only to have every claim utterly collapse on itself when subjected to double-blind testing. There are a previous few people who do have extraordinary hearing abilities, but the rest of self-deluded pretenders.)
There's nothing "mystical" about being raised in a humane way, with sufficient room to roam about as opposed to spending much of your life knee-deep in your own feces.
By the way, nice way to insinuate that organic producers are cruel to their stock and would withhold treatment. You must be one of guys producing all those cool anti-healthcare scare ads...
Besides, if these guys just measured nitrogen and phosphorus, what does that prove? These are not the nutrients on any of our food labels. How do you tell the contents of minerals, vitamins, non-saturated vs. saturated fats, omega-3 etc. ?
Unfortunately, the efficiency and footprint of your argument is probably true. Still, the organic farmlands tend to grow different variety of foods to fight off the pests compared to vast acres of land devoted to only one type of food in traditional farms, so organic farming may be able to sustain more of a wildlife.
In any case, at least in the short term, there is not enough organic food to go around, so the more ignorant, dismissive people out there, the better. You know the kind that labels people "elitist" whenever they disagree with them.
<blockquote>There's nothing "mystical" about being raised in a humane way, with sufficient room to roam about as opposed to spending much of your life knee-deep in your own feces. </blockquote>By the way nice way to insinuate that all conventional producers are cruel to their stock and don't care about each animal. :D
One of the biggest lies that anti-environmental folks tell is that there is a rivalry or opposition between humans and the environment. This is idiocy. Things that are bad for the environment are bad for humans too -- indeed, one of the best ways to know whether something is bad for the environment is to observe its effects on human health. Smog makes kids sick. Carbon monoxide kills people. Chemical fertilizers create runoff that causes poisonous algae blooms, which make you sick if you swim in the lake.
Criticizing organic agriculture for not containing more nutrients is like criticizing environmentally-friendly power plants (e.g. nuclear) for not producing better electricity than coal power plants. The point isn't to produce better electricity; it's to produce electricity in a way which is better for everyone.
1) Local (more important than organic)
2) Organic
If you are frequently eating organically grown pineapples in Washington State instead of locally grown cherries, you aren't doing the earth any favors.
I agree with you for vegetables, but it's more complicated when it comes to meat — because meat comes from sentient beings, and true responsibility should entail empathy for their well-being. For instance, I pay a lot of money to buy all my meat from wild animals that are hunted in Texas. It's no environmental bargain to ship this meat all the way from Texas, and it would be a lot less energy-intensive for me to buy factory-farmed meat that was raised closer by. But in a karmic sense, I strongly feel that opting-out from the misery and horrors of the factory farm outweighs the extra fossil fuel that it takes to ship my hunted game from Texas.
I think you're laboring under the assumption that antibiotic-free means "they won't get medicine when sick", which seems erroneous (and exceptionally bad business sense). Instead, these are just animals who aren't constantly fed antibiotics every day. If I were butchered I imagine that (on top of being rather gamey and tough), I could be packaged as 'antibiotic-free'.
Also in The Omnivore's Dilemma Pollan explains that his model farm uses modern technology to harness ecological forces. Also, his model farm does not fit any kind of "organic" certification because it is largely irrelevant to the actual qualities that Pollan values so highly in food production.
Seriously. Read the book. It's really good, and something as fundamental as "where does our food come from" should be important to people of all ideologies. As a bonus for the libertarians here there is an extended aside about how USDA restrictions lower the quality of meat, reduce food safety, and harm small farmers.
As far as the myth that tons and tons of chemicals and pesticides are being dumped on crops, I ask everyone to check the price of these chemicals and find out just how much it costs to apply them. No one, I repeat - no one, is going to waste such products. That is akin to dumping $5 a gallon gasoline on the ground. Doesn't happen.
Agriculture is a professional endeavor now, not just a way of life. Most producers are acute business people who care greatly about their land and livestock.
The organic farmer is marketing the product to people who voluntarily buy it. I personally have no problem competing against them.
As a vegetarian, I can't comment on organic meat; however, I have noticed that free-range eggs have slightly less cholesterol (and perhaps more Omega 3s) than their normal counterparts. I don't know what farmers who make normal eggs feed their chickens, but the organic eggs are always labeled "Vegetarian-fed hens." It raises the question -- what on earth would you feed a chicken that isn't vegetarian?!
The oft-repeated statement about buying organic is that it's more important with apples and lettuce, which have more nutrients and fewer pesticides, respectively. (Apparently, lettuce tends to have a huge amount of pesticides - much more than other fruits and vegetables.) I've never really understood the thing for organic bananas or avocados - they taste the same and you end up peeling off anything that might have gotten icky pesticides on it.
Silly question: is it really a good idea to examine 50 years of research? I mean, we aren't tracking people over decades; we're trying to figure out whether or not modern organic food is more nutritious than modern non-organic food.
Chickens generally will eat anything they can find or catch. In the wild, a large part of their diet would be insects and even small lizards and mice. Chickens are not natural herbivores.
Chickens are omnivorous cannibals! They eat most any meat put in front of them. Our chickens are particularly fond of earth worms. After a rain, they run to the road to gobble up a belly full. They like insects too.
I'm nodding at your recognition that shipping your game from Texas isn't the most environmentally-friendly practice, but fascinated with the practice nonetheless. I buy only free-range meat--and I visit each farm from which I buy, which has beceome a LOT easier in the MA-RI-NH-Vt region--but your practice reallyl does, to my mind, represent the ideal. Aside, maybe, from doing all of our hunting ourselves, though I'm not really certain that I want the entire city of Boston turned loose in our local woods gunning away on opening day. In fact, no, I do not want that at all. But seriously: if you see this, can you tell me the name of your purveoyr?
Organics are a market choice, and we are getting better at monitoring and measuring impacts, so science is tracing the contours of what's going on. The stats chop the problem into little bits, so we can focus on the issues in turn, from biggest impact down until we just hit noise. So relax.
Most of the arguments here are indirect, attacking credibility, constructed contradictions, etc, yet are still lively and stimulating. Organics turns out to be pretty benign, as far as world issues go, yet textured and connectable to the perpetual and current tropes of politics, ideology, and simple cussedness. I imagine the curled lip some of you folks may exhibit as you hit submit.
I think the most interesting edge of our philosophy is the spiritual nature of animals. There's clearly a group of us that recognizes chickens as beings. But they sure are tasty.
I'd be happy to. The company is called Broken Arrow Ranch. They contract with landowners who collectively own 1 million acres in the Texas Hill Country. Broken Arrow Ranch is allowed to send their sharpshooters onto the land and hunt wild deer, nilgai antelope, and boar. The meat is then field-dressed and shipped FexEx overnight anywhere in the country. Definitely worth checking out, imho.
This comment is so much funnier when you read "sentient" the way it's generally used instead of how Cardinal seems to mean it.
Given the limited number of studys examined (plus their meta-analysis, which returned a number of p-values in the .06 to .1 range, for the studies did include), this is not strong evidence that there is no significant difference between organic and conventional produce.
i agree. cows (or animals in general) that eat their NATURAL (iow the diet they evolved to eat) diet are more nutritious AND tastier.
look at salmon. farm raised salmon flesh is almost white (vs. the pink of real salmon). why? because real salmon eat krill, etc. note that real salmon has a MUCH Better EFA profile.
the same can be said of farm raised beef. beef that is free range and/or eats what cows evolved to eat tends ot have a much better fat profile and be tastier than cows fed an unnatural (for them) diet.
it's not rocket science.
also, with eggs. chickens that eat a natural diet (for chickens) give eggs with a beautiful orange'y yolk not a pale yellow yolk. the former also have better nutrition and a much richer tastier flavor.
clearly, some have taken animal diets to a science, look at kobe (or wagu as the cogniscenti like to call it) beef. of course these cows eat an unnatural diet, but one that significantly changes the flavor, texture etc. of the meat in a positive way, thus reinforcing my point.
as for hormones, etc. i have challenged numerous liberals (who oppose hormones in beef) to come up with ONE peer reviewed study that show deleterious effects of growth hormone or trenbolone/progesterone/estradiol (three common components of injectable hormone pellets that are injected in the flesh of a cow's ear to spur growth) in the MEAT of the cow. none have ever been shown.
i think there is zero evidence that such hormones have ANY deleterious effect, tastewise or nutritionwise, on meat.
milk is a different story. imo, there is at least some evidence that gh etc. in cows that provide milk result in wacky IGF levels in the milk. generally speaking, though, igf is NOT orally bioavailable. so, i still take this with a grain of salt, but at least consider it a possibility.
Completely untrue, per mass cyanide certainly contains more nutrients than water, if you are speaking of carbon or nitrogen which are the two major components of organic matter.
Speaking of cyanide and other organic class pesticides including nicotine which are legal for use in organic farming how do folks feel about runoff of these compounds into their waterways?
Also it's been our experience that the farm is able to plant varieties that one normally doesn't find at the supermarket; I suspect that some of these varieties (for example, some of the heirloom tomatoes that one must eat in the next few days after harvest) don't necessarily stand up to the rigors of industrial agriculture.
It's been our experience that these more unusual varieties often have better flavor and/or other qualities.
Going to the weekly pickup to pick up our share, and to pick the u-pick portion is also a nice way to meet other people and socialize a bit. I also like the u-pick as it reminds me of my own youth in South Jersey (he's right about the tomatoes from there) where my mom would take us to some of the local farms where you could pay a small amount to pick your own strawberries, peaches, cherries, apples etc.
I think that the whole organic things is probably about more than just the food. I think there's also more than one flavor of organic.
I had a buddy in college who's family was from the Soviet Union (dating myself a bit). His grandmother, I think, went with him to a supermarket when they came to visit and left it in tears. They went to a different supermarket again shortly before they went back and she thought that they had moved all of the stuff from the first supermarket to that one.
In general, the supermarket isn't necessarily a bad thing. I think that people can turn stuff like "organic" into a bit of a political crusade.
At the same time, community-supported-agriculture can be a pretty good thing, and eating local can be a pretty good thing in multiple dimensions.
The standard cow that the meat packers want since about the 1920's has been the 1,200 pound steer. Efficiencies involve how fast a farmer is able to achieve that weight. Early on the time for that was about 5 years. When we were operating back in the 70's we thought we were geniuses because we could get a steer to market in about 36 months (40 at the outside). This was mostly because of feeding them a high dose of corn, along with better beef breeds. Now an efficient operation can get a steer to market in 15 months, sometimes even less, mostly due to better feeds and procedures, antibiotics and steroids.
Corn has gone the same way. In the 70's we were better than any of the local farms. We were early adopters of no till, and were about to hit 60-80 bushels per acre regularly. This gave us a huge advantage over our smaller, less commercial neighbors who were getting 40-50 bushels per acre. Today about anybody can hit 200 bushels, and an efficient farm on good land can sometimes hit 300.
This same economic pattern has happened in every aspect of farming. Huge efficiencies have developed in the last 40 years on virtually every crop and animal. A small piece of the new efficiencies accrues to the organic farmers(better varieties, better rotation techniques), but only a small piece.
This is why organic farms have to convince people that there's something special in what they do -- better taste, better nutrition, better for the environment, etc. Organic farms are producing with the efficiency of good non organic farms of the 70's. Since by far the biggest investment is the land the lack of efficiency is a real problem for organic farmers. There is no way to compete without an extra something to overcome huge efficiency deficit.
There will always be a niche for organic farmers -- the guy who grows on his 2 acre lot for the local farmers market, the guy who grows organic arugula for the local foodies -- but as the efficiencies of most farms increase the inefficient, including the organic farmers, will be squeezed. And studies saying that the taste/health/environmental value of organics is overstated is devastating.
The key is, as much as possible, to know your food source. My wife and I get all our dairy, most of our meat, much of our produce, and even some baked goods from local farms here in Virginia or up in Pennsylvania. We can call up the farmers or even stop by for a visit and see what they're working on if we choose. It is truly a caveat emptor world - we're both aware about what we're getting (and what we're passing up), and knowledgeable about the *real* reasons why we're doing it (which vary depending on what it is we're buying). It's more expensive, yes (though not as expensive as, say, doing all of our shopping at Whole Foods) but for us it's worth it. If you'd rather get your produce at the local Food Lion, more power to you, but pointing to largely specious studies and calling someone foolish because they make different choices than you is a bit much.
For a pretty libertarian take on the whole issue, from a leader in the local farming movement - a guy who really knows what he's talking about (and incidentally, one of the farmers we regularly buy from) - read Everything I Want to Do is Illegal by Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm right here in Virginia. For a good, detailed distinction between the regular supermarket, "big organic" and locally grown foods, read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.
Eat whatever you want, but at least know why you're putting it in your mouth before you do so, and respect others who choose to do otherwise.
The next challenge is measuring nutrition, and the government becomes an obstacle again. Adler’s quoted study is from the UK, but the FDA doesn’t even recognize some essential nutrients, much less assess levels. Bureaucracy keeps them lagging science; vitamin C recommendations remain at ‘no scurvy’ levels; and although nutritionists recognized it for 50 years, the FDA didn’t acknowledge any benefit from DHA omega-3 until 2004.
Mjdaniels gets it right: if a person wants ‘good food’ it is still caveat emptor demanding self-education. To get better-than-normal means delving into the whole-food, local-food markets and farms; and delving into modern nutrition, a far cry from the government approved ‘food pyramid’.
Food can be better; both nutrition and flavor. The current labels —‘local’, ‘free range’, ‘organic’— don’t guarantee it. The only thing guaranteeing better food is knowledge and a free exchange system.
Now, in some cases excessive pollution has occurred but for the most part, farmers were the first environmentalists. They couldn't stay in business if they destroyed their land and using excessive amounts of chemicals increased costs.
I teach that organic farming is fine IF you like third world methods of production and third world levels of output.
Tiocfaidh ar la!
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