The meta-analysis cited at the beginning of this article has problems. But even if it didn't, you only need to read the conclusion to know the headline writers are getting this wrong.
As alluded to in that conclusion, the study isn't so much a comparison of organic vs. conventional as it is a comparison of grass fed vs. grain fed animals. The article does refer to this in passing and then continues along.
And it is odd to tout the increase in omega-3s anyway. "Yay, we raised the omega-3s found in beef from a tiny-amount to a statistically-interstingly-higher-but-still-tiny-amount."
Going on to the next study cited in the article doesn't help it. Note how the article shifts from saying that the compounds are potentially beneficial over to saying they are. And then it ignores the evidence mounting that maybe all of our hopes that lots of dietary antioxidants would help us live longer/better may have been sadly misplaced.
Did you read the whole article? I was composing a similar comment in my head, but then got to "switching from conventional milk to organic milk would increase omega-3 intake by only very small margins... protein levels were lower in organic crops such as wheat... from a health perspective, what you eat matters more than whether you choose organic or conventional."
I agree that any science-for-the-public reporting tends to do a bad job of conveying the inherent uncertainty in current research, but I feel like this was not terrible.
Take it from the source - NPR is playing to a pro-organic audience.
I personally hope organic is healthier because I can afford to buy it, but I'm reminded of watching the super at my old building toss the recycling into the regular trash - perhaps it's all really treated the same.
My understanding is that the testing regime for organic is very weak. I would be surprised if this doesn't happen a lot. Perhaps genetic testing could give some hints? (Of GMOs if not pesticides?)
Carrots are highly absorbent, more so than other vegetables. They absorb so much that can't be washed or peeled away.
With milk, I just want to know the cow is happy. Buying organic increases the chance of that. You may laugh, but we all have our reasons.
I'd be interested to hear what other products people here consider a must-buy-organic. I can't afford to buy everything organic, but I'm willing to expand my essential organic list if convinced.
> I'd be interested to hear what other products people here consider a must-buy-organic.
Then you want to take a look at the Dirty Dozen or the Dirty Dozen Plus. Actually, it's better to view the complete list at http://www.ewg.org/foodnews/list.php.
Btw, Carrot is at #25, so it's not even the worst offender.
Thanks for link. It would be nice to know the methodology used. Surprised to see bananas higher than mushrooms and cauliflower considering their protective outer skin.
"I'd be interested to hear what other products people here consider a must-buy-organic'
I prefer organic eggs, meat, poultry and tomatoes. I'm not much of pro-organic or environmentalist, but they taste so much better, I don't mind paying extra.
Do you run an organic dairy farm? No. You're just another armchair expert, pretending to have a monopoly on the facts.
The organic milk I buy comes from a dairy farm about 90 min drive from where I live. It runs about 150 head of cattle - Freisian/Jersery cross on 300 acres. Their milk processing plant is next to the farm.
Whether you "organic or not organic" is up to you, but I try to source milk from local farms with an emphasis on welfare of the animal and quality of the product.
Supermarket milk is generally ultra-heat treated to increase shelf life, even the so-called "organic" variety. The animals are packed in to increase "efficiency" and make the milk cheaper.
In the end, I don't mind paying more, and I'm supporting local dairy farmers. What the hell are you doing?
> Supermarket milk is generally ultra-heat treated to increase shelf life, even the so-called "organic" variety.
Yes, it is, but I'd like to know why you frame this as a bad thing.
> In the end, I don't mind paying more, and I'm supporting local dairy farmers. What the hell are you doing?
While I appreciate your good intetions, I think the "What the hell are you doing?" is a little bit overstated, since this is a low-impact, low effort activity and, really, does the fact that you're doing something oblige me to somehow "one-up" you?
Over-heat treated milk = poor taste. It's a balance, and the correct balance is usually not achieved by the popular supermarket milks.
> does the fact that you're doing something oblige me to somehow "one-up" you?
Not unless you called me an idiot for doing something. Which you didn't, but the person I was replying to did.
I don't mind at all if someone calls my argument into question, but at least come back with more than opinion. There are plenty of reasons beyond the welfare of animals to support local business. I admit it's not just the happiness of the cow which motivates me. Perhaps I should have explained that.
The more money we can circulate in the local community, the healthier that community is. I'm no economics expert, but I have a hunch that spending up at my local restaurants, cafes, dairy farms and businesses is doing my bit to improve the region where I live. I also try to do my "bit" for the environment and animal welfare within the eating habits I currently enjoy. Hence.... "what are you doing" was an invitation to suggest a "non idiotic" approach since they thought so little of mine!
happy animals (milk, eggs), lower chance of toxins (roots, fruits without skins), and higher micronutrients / antioxidents which are produced when plants are subjected to slight stresses that make them "stretch" get all the nutrients they need since they arent being forcefed by fertilizers or bombed with pesticides.
You may laugh.. But you want to know what kind of milk makes cows most happy? Soy milk
Or almond milk. Or cashew milk. You know, the stuff that's often in the same cooler as the organic milk? The stuff that's healthy, that can be bought organic, that tastes great once you get used to it, and that doesn't involve the cow being suctioned (without antibiotics to treat its almost inevitable udder infections) for its entire life until it's slaughtered?
It's probably not really about the cow being happy though, is it? It's about what is better in your cereal.
Your approach is a distraction. If we were talking chocolate, would you enter the discussion with "hey forget chocolate, eat carob."?
No. I like milk, as do billions of people. And discussing how to find and encourage quality of the milk, welfare of the cow, and protection of the environment via methods such as organic farming, is a worthwhile discussion.
As I mentioned in another reply, organic or not, I source my milk as locally as possible from dairy farms that process their own milk on site, and who run their farms with an emphasis on welfare of the animals and minimal environmental damage.
I wonder where that soy milk you mention comes from? Probably not down the road from my house. I actually did drink soy for a long time until I got sick of it, and lost trust in it.
I wouldn't mention carob, unless you had expressed a distaste for everything having to do with the sourcing of chocolate.
I don't, by any means, assert you or anyone else should care about the welfare of cows. I also don't assert anyone should care about minimizing environmental damage. However, if you do claim to care about those causes, it strikes me as the height of irrationality to choose to support an industry so massively at odds with them, especially for something as trivial as a sip of milk. When you care so little that it's non-distinguishable from not caring... you don't care.
I'm not trying to pick on you. So many people today just seem to "care" about things only because it's trendy, and then only the minimum amount necessary to be able to consider themselves caring individuals.
It's fine. The catalyst for good discussion isn't typically everyone agreeing and getting along.
Dairy products assist intake of the full spectrum of nutrients. It's not just about a "sip of milk" or what I like on my cereal.
A million people caring a "minimal amount" is better than a million people not caring at all.
Meat - an industry at the very top of the environmental impact list. I call for the abolishment of live export and improvements to other factors of the industry such as slaughterhouse standards. I eat meat infrequently and place importance on where it comes from.
To suggest that it's the "height of irrationality" that I eat any meat at all, is to claim that by buying meat I somehow support the entire industry with all its flaws and variables. But I can eat meat and actively vote and push against the standards I disagree with within the industry.
Everything we do has some issue, environmental or otherwise up the chain. The mining of precious metals, or the massive problem of e-waste doesn't mean I will avoid buying gadgets, but I may buy them less frequently and choose the gadgets built to last. If millions do that, industry change can happen.
Even if the nutrition is the same or worse ("organic" or not), varieties of fruit and vegetable that aren't big, brightly colored, perfectly round, non-bruising, transportable, shelf-stable, beautiful, tastes-of-nothing garbage are better in my opinion.
Why? Because if they actually tasted different to all the other processed junk out there, then maybe people would choose them instead.
> varieties of fruit and vegetable that aren't big, brightly colored, perfectly round, non-bruising, transportable, shelf-stable, beautiful, tastes-of-nothing garbage are better in my opinion.
Heirloom varieties (what you seem to be praising) and organic methods have only a casual relationship (sure, organic certification may require non-GMO, but lots of the work on big, brightly colore. perfectly round, non-bruising, transportable, shelf-stable, beautiful varieties -- that incidentally produces tastes-of-nothing garbage -- is non-GMO "traditional" breeding methods that's perfectly capable of being organic, and often is what you get when you buy organic. Heck, because of the way GM methods work, you end up preserving other traits besides the one you want to change better than "traditional" breeding.)
Yes, that's why I put "organic" in scare quotes. George Carlin's piece food lingo said it better than me:
Natural
The last one of these bullshit food words is natural. And these comments are directed at all you environmental jackoffs out there. The word natural is completely meaningless. Everything is natural. Nature includes everything. It's not just trees and flowers and the northern spotted owl. It's everything in the universe. Untreated raw sewage, polyester, toxic chemical waste, used bandages, monkey shit. It's all perfectly natural. It's just not real good food. But you know something? It is zesty. And it's tangy, too. Bon appe'tit, consumers.
"Organic" methods produce considerably less food per unit of land (and other inputs) than conventional farming [0] (that being one of the reasons for the price difference). How does that make it "more sustainable" ?
"Right now, roughly 800 million people suffer from hunger and malnutrition, and about 16 million of those will die from it17. If we were to switch to entirely organic farming, the number of people suffering would jump by 1.3 billion, assuming we use the same amount of land that we're using now."[0]
... and yet the world produces on average more than 5000 calories per person. Is "increased productivity" really what we require?
There is also the issue that the idea of greater productivity is highly geographical and seems to be valid in the context of European and North American monocropping agricultural systems. Other farming systems may produce a lot more overall nutrients - it is not at all clear that systems fueled by synthetic fertilisers are more productive as far as overall ecnomic/livelihood benefit or nutrients are concerned in East Asian and African agriculture. Results got from research done in Europe and North America (greater productivity in monocropping non-organic systems) are often suggested as valid in the context of "ensuring sufficient food production Africa / East Asia" which at least from what I know of Bengal seem to be a truth which requires substantial modification (see for example a relatively conservative discussion in [1]).
Further, Rodal Institute's longitudinal study[1] seem to suggest that organic practices can indeed match conventional.
Finally - hunger and starvation is generally not an issue of too little food production as Amartya Sen's nobel prize winning research on Bengal famines highlighted.
Eating organic, for me, has very little to do with whether organic is more nutritious or not, but about not ingesting pesticide residues when I'm eating.
That's really what it's all about - for me. That organic tends to be more nutritious is a bonus,
Now that really depends on the 'organic' standards the farmer has decided to follow.
The UK Soil Association Organic standards (http://www.soilassociation.org/organicstandards) are known to be some of the strictest. And section 4.11 on controlling pests and disease makes me very pleased to support organic farming.
> Organic crops tend to be exposed to higher levels of stress — including insect attacks, Seal says. And in response, they form compounds to help combat the stress.
I wonder then... what about indoor grows using organic methods that are bug free and stress free with all variables controlled for optimum conditions.
Yes they definitely can and I've battled them indoors myself but I'm thinking about the real high end grows that make the chances extremely low for pest invasion. Or any indoor grow in theory that doesn't happen to have a bug problem where things like humidity, temp, watering, airflow, air quality, feeding etc. are all controlled for "optimum" growing conditions. Is it really optimum after all
Unless you are sterilizing everything entering the cleanroom, that is simply not possible. Fungal spores, bacteria, and viruses are everywhere. If one of your workers is a smoker, they can spread Tobacco Mosaic Virus, for example.
Clean rooms are not perfectly clean. I've always wondered if Intel, which is famous for wanting all of their fab cleanrooms to be the same, also infects them with the same bacteria and mites...
The best thing about organic food is that it uses no gas to produce fertilizer like for conventional food [1]. Using gas to produce food is just crazy if you think about it.
> Using gas to produce food is just crazy if you think about it.
I thought about it. It sounds like using energy to make a system move in a direction away from the point of lowest energy (decayed fields on a rocky, dead planet), which is basically what the Universe and the human race do for a living. So it's not crazy.
Whether or not it's the best use of energy, and whether or not the effects on future generations is good or not, I don't know.
"Does the world produce enough food to feed everyone?
The world produces enough food to feed everyone. For the world as a whole, per capita food availability has risen from about 2220 kcal/person/day in the early 1960s to 2790 kcal/person/day in 2006-08, while developing countries even recorded a leap from 1850 kcal/person/day to over 2640 kcal/person/day. This growth in food availability in conjunction with improved access to food helped reduce the percentage of chronically undernourished people in developing countries from 34 percent in the mid 1970s to just 15 percent three decades later. (FAO 2012, p. 4) The principal problem is that many people in the world still do not have sufficient income to purchase (or land to grow) enough food."
However, there's also an argument that this difference is largely mitigated by the extra gas you burn fueling the farm equipment, largely due to the lower yields from organic farming. I'm less certain that there's a strong argument for organic once you consider the overall impact.
For example, pastured livestock on a commercial scale, such as what this article is promoting, is an absolute disaster form a carbon footprint perspective.
As alluded to in that conclusion, the study isn't so much a comparison of organic vs. conventional as it is a comparison of grass fed vs. grain fed animals. The article does refer to this in passing and then continues along.
And it is odd to tout the increase in omega-3s anyway. "Yay, we raised the omega-3s found in beef from a tiny-amount to a statistically-interstingly-higher-but-still-tiny-amount."
Going on to the next study cited in the article doesn't help it. Note how the article shifts from saying that the compounds are potentially beneficial over to saying they are. And then it ignores the evidence mounting that maybe all of our hopes that lots of dietary antioxidants would help us live longer/better may have been sadly misplaced.
Bah...I hate the state of health news reporting.