Organic food v/s food grown with chemicals, any opinions?
vid- http://www.storewars.org/flash/ [lol]
Seriously though, I prefer organically grown food myself, but I don't exclusively eat it. Should I?
Posted 17 January 2006 - 07:05 PM
Posted 17 January 2006 - 11:15 PM
Posted 17 January 2006 - 11:22 PM
Posted 17 January 2006 - 11:32 PM
Posted 17 January 2006 - 11:37 PM
Posted 17 January 2006 - 11:47 PM
Organic farming is harmful to the environment (inefficient land use), and the financial cost to health benefit ratio is highly questionable. A budget life extensionist would do far better to invest the premium required for organic produce in supplments with known powerful preventative benefits, such as Omega 3 fatty acids, vitamin D, folate, etc.
---BrianW
Posted 18 January 2006 - 12:21 AM
The idea of "regular" farming as truly effcient in any way is upsetting and offensive to any serious ecologically minded life extensionist
Posted 18 January 2006 - 12:38 AM
Posted 18 January 2006 - 12:47 AM
Don't get me wrong. Just because I say I personally don't like organic farming, and think that people who do are mostly wasting their money, doesn't mean I don't think people shouldn't be free to do it. I'm not a collectivist, and I generally don't care how inefficiently people use land they own. But since advocates of organic farming so often are collectivists, and do presume to tell other people how best to use their land, I couldn't resist turning it around!Organic farming would set the price of food to a more supply/demand curve. Basically, the cost of organic food is higher because it's harder to do. That's fair. It's fair to be allowed to spend more money to get a rarer type of food.
I couldn't agree more. And there you have an example of something that's not only inefficient, but actually bad for your health.You want to look at inefficient land use? Look at the beef industry.
Posted 18 January 2006 - 01:56 AM
Sorry to disagree a little here, but I doubt we would be able to feed nearly 7 billion people if we suddenly resorted to all organic farming. It was doable when the planet held only 2 billion, but nowadays it would be extremely difficult. Also, despite all the chemicals in "inorganic food" the average human lifespan keeps increasing. (Ok, that could be due mostly to better late life care, but you probably get my point)
Posted 18 January 2006 - 02:08 AM
Don't get me wrong. Just because I say I personally don't like organic farming, and think that people who do are mostly wasting their money, doesn't mean I don't think people shouldn't be free to do it. I'm not a collectivist, and I generally don't care how inefficiently people use land they own. But since advocates of organic farming so often are collectivists, and do presume to tell other people how best to use their land, I couldn't resist turning it around!Organic farming would set the price of food to a more supply/demand curve. Basically, the cost of organic food is higher because it's harder to do. That's fair. It's fair to be allowed to spend more money to get a rarer type of food.
I couldn't agree more. And there you have an example of something that's not only inefficient, but actually bad for your health.You want to look at inefficient land use? Look at the beef industry.
---BrianW
Posted 18 January 2006 - 04:38 AM
Posted 18 January 2006 - 05:04 AM
Posted 18 January 2006 - 09:13 AM
Posted 18 January 2006 - 04:23 PM
In animal/dairy class, I was told it took 8 lbs. of grain to make one pound of beef, 2 lbs. of grain to make one pound of chicken, 4 lbs. of grain to make one pound of pig. That is something to think about when buying meat
Posted 18 January 2006 - 08:51 PM
Posted 18 January 2006 - 08:53 PM
Posted 18 January 2006 - 09:13 PM
I somewhat regret bring up the collectivist space efficiency issue because it sidetracked us from the question of whether organic food is actually healthier. As individualists, who cares how much land it uses if it's healthier and we can afford it!
If anyone has any DATA showing organic food is healthier, please bring it on. Arguments like "obviously pesticides are bad" don't cut it. It's not obvious that pesticides ingested in quantities found on washed food are signficantly more unhealthy than all the natural toxic compounds inside plants. Aflatoxin anyone?
---BrianW
Posted 18 January 2006 - 09:14 PM
Posted 18 January 2006 - 09:39 PM
November 2005 - In Washington, big agribusiness interests are pressing to cut funds for programs that help farmers protect water and wildlife and deny food stamp benefits to 300,000 people in low-income families, rather than accept tighter annual limits in crop subsidies to large farming operations. In Geneva, global trade negotiations aimed at boosting the prospects of the poorest nations are deadlocked, largely because status quo commodity interests in the U.S. and Europe are fighting efforts to trim farm subsidies and lower trade-constricting agricultural tariffs.
November 2004 - The data from 2003 suggests that wealthy agribusinesses continue to collect the bulk of taxpayer subsidies, hurting small farms. -- Taxpayers doled out $16.4 billion in farm subsidies last year, a 27 percent increase over 2002, for a total since 1995 of $131 billion, according to the latest update of EWG's Farm Subsidy Database.
January 2003 - This is the most comprehensive study ever conducted of multiple chemical contaminants in humans. -- Blood and urine from nine people were tested for 210 chemicals that occur in consumer products and industrial pollution. We found an average of 91 industrial compounds, pollutants, and other chemicals in the nine volunteers.
July 2005 - A benchmark investigation of industrial chemicals, pollutants and pesticides in umbilical cord blood -- Though scientists once thought that the womb largely protected developing babies, a new study of umbilical cord blood from newborns found an extensive array of industrial chemicals, pesticides and other pollutants. Ten newborns averaged 200 contaminants, and 209 pollutants had never before been detected in cord blood.
Posted 18 January 2006 - 10:51 PM
This is not rational. I can pick any of a thousand daily hazards from diesel soot to cosmic rays and accuse you of not caring about your children because you expose them to it. Like, "How dare you expose your children to bacteria in manure used to grow organic food?" The question is not whether exposing people to trace amounts of pesticides or manure is a good idea. The question is whether the cost of mitigating a hazard is reasonable. Otherwise I can take the same money and use it to mitigate some other greater hazard. This requires some kind of quantitative judgement of what the level of risk is. Observing that a risk exists is not enough.2. Until someone shows study data directly proving a correlation between consistent lifelong pesticide/argo-chemical exposure and poor health, there's no reason to avoid such a scenario. Nobody seems alarmed about those daily "small" doses going into babies and young children.
Posted 18 January 2006 - 11:20 PM
Posted 18 January 2006 - 11:36 PM
Covering the conference, the Los Angeles Times reported: "[S]ince 1989, when organic-food activists raised a nationwide scare over the pesticide alar in apples, many scientists have seethed quietly at what they perceive as a campaign of scare tactics, innuendo and shoddy science perpetrated by organic food producers and their allies."
Some schemers in the green fringe don't even bother hiding their food-scare game plans. In April 2002, Organic Valley Marketing Director Theresa Marquez described her strategy of hoodwinking the public into thinking organics are always worth their premium prices: "We think it's important that people pay more for food," she said. "The question is: 'Will consumers pay more for that?' and 'How can we convince them to do that?'" And citing over-hyped scares like mad cow disease (which has popped up on organic farms too), pesticide residues, and antibiotic resistance, the Organic Trade Association's Katherine DiMatteo told the Times that the success of organic food has: "a lot to do with these food scares."
Posted 19 January 2006 - 12:08 AM
Posted 19 January 2006 - 12:14 AM
Posted 19 January 2006 - 07:07 PM
I'm hostile for good reason. As just a small sample
http://www.consumerf...m/headline/2643Covering the conference, the Los Angeles Times reported: "[S]ince 1989, when organic-food activists raised a nationwide scare over the pesticide alar in apples, many scientists have seethed quietly at what they perceive as a campaign of scare tactics, innuendo and shoddy science perpetrated by organic food producers and their allies."
Some schemers in the green fringe don't even bother hiding their food-scare game plans. In April 2002, Organic Valley Marketing Director Theresa Marquez described her strategy of hoodwinking the public into thinking organics are always worth their premium prices: "We think it's important that people pay more for food," she said. "The question is: 'Will consumers pay more for that?' and 'How can we convince them to do that?'" And citing over-hyped scares like mad cow disease (which has popped up on organic farms too), pesticide residues, and antibiotic resistance, the Organic Trade Association's Katherine DiMatteo told the Times that the success of organic food has: "a lot to do with these food scares."
---BrianW
Posted 19 January 2006 - 07:08 PM
and as an aside I will say I was quite surprised when I saw these two above initial articles enough so that I did a lot more reading on pubmed etc. which largely supported the above.
Before doing that research I had more or less taken for granted that organic food=better.
Conventional and organic Italian foodstuffs made up of maize, wheat, rice or mixed products were compared for the Fusarium toxins fumonisin and deoxynivalenol. Fumonisin causes cancers of liver or kidney along with blood disorders and pulmonary edema in farm and experimental animals. Deoxynivalenol (vomitosin) causes anorexia at low levels and vomiting at higher levels, and also damages the immune system. Both organic and conventional foods contained the toxins, but more of the conventional foods were contaminated than organic foods. The highest deoxynivalenol levels were found in conventional rice-based foodstuffs while the highest level of fumonisin was found in conventional maize-based foodstuffs. Organic foodstuffs contained consistently lower contamination than conventional foodstuffs [9].
In the nine comparative studies that have been published in peer-reviewed journals, mycotoxins were detected 1.5 times more frequently in conventional samples compared to organic samples. The levels of mycotoxins found in conventional and organic samples can be compared in 20 of the 24 cases. Across the 20 cases, the levels reported in conventional food exceeded those in organic food by a factor of 2.2.
Back in 1992, the FDA decreed that genetically engineered foods were no different than conventional foods. Under FDA law, unless a food is "generally regarded as safe" (GRAS), a legal determination, it must be thoroughly tested. Because biotech foods have been determined "GRAS," they undergo no independent safety testing. Instead, government regulators rely on biotech companies to do their own safety tests and also determine themselves if the product in question is GRAS.
Testing biotech crops for their environmental safety is equally lax. It is up to the USDA to ensure that genetically modified crops are ecologically safe. The New York Times recently reported that the agency has not rejected a single application for a biotech crop and that many scientists say "the department has relied on unsupported claims and shoddy studies by the seed companies."
Posted 19 January 2006 - 07:45 PM
[lol] [lol] [lol] [lol]Cuba has converted it's once totally intensive farming operations to 100% organic with total success, after chemical fertilizers were no longer readily availble due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's now against the law to produce food in a non-organic way. Are they luddites? No, they aren't. Cuba is considered by many to be a world-wide leader in biotechnology, and they have a growing, powerful pharmaceutical industry already worth 100$ million.
Posted 19 January 2006 - 07:51 PM
Posted 19 January 2006 - 08:10 PM
mitkat wrote:
[lol] [lol] [lol] [lol]Cuba has converted it's once totally intensive farming operations to 100% organic with total success, after chemical fertilizers were no longer readily availble due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's now against the law to produce food in a non-organic way. Are they luddites? No, they aren't. Cuba is considered by many to be a world-wide leader in biotechnology, and they have a growing, powerful pharmaceutical industry already worth 100$ million.
Reminds me of how in the 1970s I used to hear people upholding Albania as an agricultural model for the world. Funny how the world's leading agricultural technology centers also lead the technology race to convert 1950s era automobiles into boats bound for Italy and Florida. [tung]
Some Canadian relatives of mine just came back from Cuba wickedly sick from food they ate there. Must be all those modern agricultural practices.
---BrianW
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