Organic vs Normal food, go.

[GoDM1N]

I started this topic in another forum and between the time I went to sleep and woke up it for some reason pissed up the admin so much he locked it.

So I'm moving it here to continue seeing why people think Organic food is better.

This kinda gets on my nerves, a long with people who rant about how getting any kind of shot is poison. What I don't mind is when people just like organic food for reasons of philosophy, however health reasons are pretty ridiculous as organic food is actually less healthy because the bugs and other organisms that infect the food is a greater risk than the pesticides we use today. Organic food is a trap, like many marketing campaigns are. It's a way to get you to pay more for the same product, which is lesser in this case as a normal tomato has a better chance of not being effected by bugs and in the genetically altered category, weather, so it grows stronger.



Adding to this, if we didn't use pesticides and genetically alter our food as we do, we wouldn't be able to produce enough food for earth with our current population. Food grown in these ways allow farmers to grow food in places organic food wouldn't be able to in third world countries. Assuming we did do away with these techniques 2-3 billion people wouldn't be able to eat.

[Failhorse]

Hah.

Saying we need GMOs and pesticides to produce enough food is BS. I won't bother with links, because most people won't click them. But there are many 'organic' farms outproducing GMO farms per acre.

My issue with any GMO is you have no idea what you're really doing. Activating 1 gene thinking it'll only change 1 thing about the plant is mindlessly stupid. In corn for instance, they thought there were at least 100,000 genes. Turns out there are only like 30k in 10 chromosomes. That's more than us smart humans. And a bit of radiation screws up 1 thing about us, 100s of things can go wrong. Same goes for corn.

But it's not just GMO's that are fucking us up. Remember I have kids. Both grew up to have ADHD and a bunch of other stuff. In lieu of going the chemical suppressants to fix them, we started a careful diet. My kids rarely go near processed foods. No soda, chicken nuggets, ect. We make our own juice. And they get (hate to fucking say it.) Organic Milk. They don't even get sodium soup... I mean Cambells. A couple years of this. They still have problems, but not nearly as bad. I think of the kids that get McDonalds all the time. Shit. A bun from them is like 300-400 calories. WTF is in it? I make a loaf of bread. Eat the whole thing and it's like 200 max.

For us alcohol drinking adults. Beer is a bitch too. Any major uses GMO's. And many of the craft companies can't confirm what goes into their beer.

[Beartato]

This topic is incredibly complicated and doesn't really have a precise answer; in the end, it really is a preference issue.

I'll start by mentioning that the USDA regulated label is far from the definition of organic used by the traditional and original movement. Processed foods, food raised in monocultures, and food flown in from thousands of miles away can all get the label while blatantly breaking the basic tenants of the True Organic movement. The reason this happens is because the USDA answers to Big Agribusiness and their associated Big Food companies, thus allowing those two industries to write the regulations that will help them market their products.

However there are a lot of small farms out there that adhere to the original tenants of the organic movement and they are arguably doing a lot of good. Look up biodynamic farming and permaculture to learn a bit about how many farmers are able to create giant yields of various crops by working with nature, rather than against it. While it's not possible for a biodynamic farm to have a higher corn yield than a conventional farm, it could easily have a higher total yield when you include the companion crops grown with the corn such as ssuash and climbing beans (aka the three sisters). Adding in livestock to a polyculture can further increase the caloric yield per unit of land well beyond what conventional farming currently accomplishes and while reducing the inputs needed to maintain the land such as topsoil and fertilizer.

As far as pest control goes, it's actually arguably better to go organic. Pesticides are an escalating arms race in the same way that antibiotics are with germs. Every pest that survives a pesticide spraying is going to reproduce a generation of offspring that will likely be as resilient as it was. Pesticides are just helping to speed up evolution in the pests. On the other hand, organic farms can control pests by growing plants that attract predatory insects. You can control aphids on your tomato plant just by having flowers nearby that attract ladybugs. The added benefit of using beneficial insects and other biodynamic farming tricks is that you don't contribute to pesticide loading in water sources, which can cause severe environmental damage. Silent Spring, the seminal work of the American environmental movement shows just how damaging pesticide application can be to ecosystem and even human health. It also shows how corrupted the USDA was by big industry even back in the 60's; things haven't changed much.

Then there's the fact that a lot of conventionally grown produce is just gross. A lot of it is picked before it's fully ripened, is a lot less fresh than you think it is (especially out of season), is grown to be big rather than tasty, etc. The tomato is actually one of the best examples; conventionally grown tomatoes are not even in the same league as those grown by a small farm or even in one's own garden.

Lastly, we don't really need pesticides and fertilizers to feed people. Reducing the amount of meat wealthy global citizens eat would go a lot farther than pesticides and GMOs. Fixing the economics of food would go a lot farther too. (There have been many countries in the past that have suffered mass starvations despite being food exporters.) Pesticides, artificial fertilizers, hormones, antibiotics, and GMOs are just ways to try and cut the number of people needed to run a farm, further increasing margins for the big industry players. Not to mention that most of those technologies are being used in countries that have stagnating or declining populations. Places with starvation issues are still predominantly farming the old fashioned way and among the more successful ways of increasing food yields and access are microlending and farmers' cooperatives.

I could go on a lot more about farming if anyone is interested. I could recommend a couple of books that got me interested on the topic. I also have a bunch of random knowledge from my past involvement with a small organic farm and from working in a soil nutrient analysis lab that ran my state's agricultural cooperative extension.

[Maringue]

I'll jump into this, why not.

First, the safety of chemicals used in agriculture is not as well know as you would think. The long term effects of agro-chemicals are almost never know because they come out with new ones faster than the FDA can examine the results of the old ones, and when you combine that with the knowledge that Big-Agro uses thousands of tons of the stuff a year, it gives me pause.

Giving antibiotics to animals who have no health problems is probably the worst idea you could possibly come up with if you know anything about bacterial resistance. Combine that with the fact that there is next to no new research in the area new antibiotics and you might as well be asking for a super bacteria to pop up and kill off lots of the population. They've even disproven the idea that low dose antibiotics help animals gain weight faster, but companies still engage in the practice.

And I can tell you as a scientist, modifying the genes of a plant has more unintended results than intended ones. The ratio is usually greater than 4 to 1 for most genes. That's not saying they should be illegal, but I sure as shit want to have GMO food labeled as such.

Most people don't realize that changing genes is not like changing code in a computer program. Genes are massively interconnected and often changing one gene for a single protein can affect the function of dozens of other proteins.

[Maringue]

Also, I would call foods grown organically "normal" before calling anything Big-Agro produced as "normal" since they are adding dozens of chemicals to the growing process as well as into the food itself.

[Thret]

I call for organic just because I'd rather clean off a bug than not know what went into it. The exception to this I think is with fruits or anything that needs ripening. For foods like that, frozen is better than the rest because non frozen fruits need to be picked earlier than normal so they can ripen in time to get to the store. Frozen fruits can be picked later since they're going to a location maybe a day away at most to get immediately cleaned, cut, and flash frozen; thus frozen fruits have more nutritional value.

In all honesty, neighborhood and backyard gardens should be a bigger thing. They don't necessarily need to be organic. People have such a huge disconnect with their food and don't know where it came from. I'm buying a tomato from Mexico when I go to the grocery store and I have no idea where in Mexico it was grown, that farmer's practices, etc. If people had more options to buy foods locally or to chip into a neighborhood garden then there's more responsibility for their food and they know, for the most part, exactly what went into it.

I'm more a proponent of knowing where your food comes from and how it was produced than I am of organic vs. non-organic.