I have to admit, whenever I see something like this, my immediate response is: who paid for them to write this. I am reminded of the many talking heads in finance prior to 2008 who assured us that our financial system providing more debt than ever to support home loans was good for the economy.
I'm not saying it's impossible for organic to have downsides. It's not even impossible that those downsides might be substantial. I am saying it's impossible for me to trust an article that says so, given the way our newsmedia industry works. A good portion of our news is ghostwritten for them by industry, and this looks a lot like what I might pay for the ghostwriting of if I were, say, Monsanto. Is this true? I have no idea. But I am suspicious.
Ad hominem: the article author, Bjorn Lomborg, is a noted climate change skeptic[1] whose work has been declared "scientifically dishonest" by watchdogs in the past[2].
The money seems to come from his being an environmental edgelord. Private funding -> almost nonexistent foundation -> Lomborg's pocket[3].
What are you talking about? Organic foods are an absence of herbicides, pesticides, and narcotics. It's not like you're choosing the lesser of two evils or something.
> The pesticides that are allowed for organic food production are typically not manmade. They tend to have natural substances like soaps, lime sulfur and hydrogen peroxide as ingredients. Not all natural substances are allowed in organic agriculture; some chemicals like arsenic, strychnine and tobacco dust (nicotine sulfate) are prohibited.
A challenge is that with this debate (say organic vs GMO) both sides have a lot at stake financially and you can make this argument either way. How then should one decide what to trust and read?
Does “organic” necessarily mean non-GMO? Personally I think GMO is great but dislike massive use of fertilizer and pesticides. And really, that’s mostly for downstream effects. I want to encourage sustainable land use and reduced environmental harm. Fine with me if we need to hack some plants to enable that.
I recognize that genetic modification is sometimes used to enable greater use of these chemicals (eg roundup ready grains).
Well in such cases, I apply the precautionary principle and do the thing that is the least risk. In this case, it's minimizing unknown chemicals in my body.
I tend to go by:
1) which side has more money to spend?
2) which side is introducing more foods/chemicals/conditions which are more different from what my ancestors evolved for?
Curiously, our ancestors evolved to eat cooked, genetically modified food. Modified by selection yes, but genetically different from anything that came before.
The odd 'paleo' diet is nothing we're equipped to handle anymore. Nobody has eaten like that for 100,000 years, and we've moved on biologically?
How about taking the competing arguments at face value and evaluating them against each other? If qui bono is the only question you ask, you shut down a lot of your brain.
Let's look at three of the things this article claims are "debunked":
>Green tea - drunk in vast quantities it may cause a
>condition called fluorosis, which can lead to brittle
>bones and teeth
No one is telling you drink Green tea in "vast quantities". Most recommend an 8oz cup a day, which is perfectly safe.
>Kale - this so-called wonder food is goitrogenic,
>meaning it contains substances (goitrogens) that may
>contribute to an enlarged thyroid in some people, if
>eaten by the sackful.
Again, no one is telling you to eat kale by the sackful! Drinking a sackful of water a day might cause problems for you as well, but no one is dumb enough to try to claim that water is unhealthy.
That stuff _is_ ridiculous. I don't know if the human bladder is sized for that level of tea.
On the other hand, it looks like an infographic-style addition, added by the newspaper to make the article more interesting, rather than the contribution of the author.
> "But surely organics avoid pesticides? No. Organic farming can use any pesticide that is “natural”.
This is misleading. Organics do avoid pesticides - just not all of them. This is a step in the right direction.
> "Conventional food, it’s true, has higher pesticide contamination. Although it is still very low, this is a definite benefit of organics.
So basically, because "Organic" is still new and hasn't weeded out all the toxins yet - it's a total failure.
Sounds like the same logic used on cryptocoins, universal basic income, solar battery banks, and many other "work-in-progress" fields.
Organic means we didn't pollute the environment, animals, and humans as much. It's not like it's something new - it's simply the lack of hundreds of common poisons.
True if you are only concerned with the data void of any timeframe. I'm speaking about the public momentum causing the reduction in known poisons. Progress always starts somewhere.
So basically an article about how every health food will kill you. I think this wins clickbait of the year award.
In other news: ingesting too high a dose of vitamins causes disease. Film at 11.
On the "lower productivity economic impact" comment: productive compared to what? A large majority of our crops are soybeans and corn, which we subsidize mainly for industrial and export purposes, not to feed our people. In no way would we need to clear-cut parklands to produce more organic crops.
News flash: we don't grow all our food. The US spent 137 million dollars on food imports last year, compared to 43 million in 1999. A majority of our imports are horticultural and tropical. However, our exports (grains, feeds, soybeans, livestock, horticulture) always top our imports.
This is especially funny coming from a British rag. More than half of the UK's food is imported, and they always have a large trade deficit, which the US does not. They whine about US greenhouse gases, whereas the UK outsources its food production to other countries, thus claiming they don't produce as much greenhouse gas in the UK - because they're producing it elsewhere. The land required for producing UK food has increased by 23% since 1986. What was that about us having to clear-cut our parks again?
"Essentially, organic food is rich people spending their extra cash to feel good". Except that organics are now getting cheaper, more plentiful and more efficient, as the common consumer demands more organics as well. The overall push for more organic and less harmful food has resulted in better conditions for livestock and less harmful feed additives.
Organic food has fewer pesticides, as this article reluctantly admits. There's not enough oversight from the government as to the health of these, so for some set of vegetables/fruit where the additives cannot just be rinsed off it makes sense to buy organic.
Quite so. The article states "no robust evidence for organics being more nutritious" but that isn't really the argument many have for eating organic veg. It's the pesticides that the non-organic vegetables have been soaked in that are potentially dangerous to our health.
“Scientific studies do not show that organic products are more nutritious and safer than conventional foods.”
The absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. The truth is we have no clue what the long-term effects are for the chemicals we're exposed to -- for all we know, the 50% drop in male sperm count over the last 30 years is related to pesticides. [1]
Additionally, there's something a little forceful about the tone of this piece that I find very suspect. If organic pesticides like copper sulfate are dangerous, doesn't this just mean we need even higher standards for organic?
> If all of the United States were to go organic, the cost would likely be around $200 billion annually from lower productivity.
This is a strange argument. Eating organic hurts the economy? The whole point of the economy is to make our lives high-quality.
"Science-denying is not helping us out, nationally or worldwide. Lets stop."
That's exactly why I take my time to shut down articles like this. [Written by a climate-change skeptic, to point]
I've spent quite some time researching pesticides and if you're unaware of the sordid history (how large a proportion have been pulled for saftey reasons, and how long it takes to discover most pesticides aren't actually safe) then I encourage you do so yourself.
I'm not saying it's impossible for organic to have downsides. It's not even impossible that those downsides might be substantial. I am saying it's impossible for me to trust an article that says so, given the way our newsmedia industry works. A good portion of our news is ghostwritten for them by industry, and this looks a lot like what I might pay for the ghostwriting of if I were, say, Monsanto. Is this true? I have no idea. But I am suspicious.