
Is a Food Revolution Now in Season? - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/business/22food.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
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poutine
Organic food has been demonstrated to be no better for you, no better for the
environment (and likely worse) and it doesn't have the crop yields and costs
to feed the world.

These days, especially in the US, the term organic doesn't really mean
anything anyhow. It's all marketing used by large business to charge you more
for essentially the same product while giving you a false sense of superiority
over the unwashed masses.

Your health and environmental impact have nothing to do with whether the food
is organic or not, rather it's whether you eat a burger or a salad.

For further discussion around organic food woo see the skeptics guide to the
universe, they regularly debunk this stuff: <http://www.theskepticsguide.org/>
(great podcast btw)

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sketerpot
Making food production more polluting per acre can be more environmentally
friendly as long as it raises food production per acre by a greater factor.

Say that using a pesticide means that farming causes twice as much pollution
per acre, but four times as much food per acre. That means you can feed people
with a quarter of the land, and therefore half the pollution. The real numbers
aren't so simple, but the principle still applies. This focus on local organic
food sounds driven more by warm fuzzy feelings than by reality.

~~~
skyfaller
If you just make up numbers you can justify just about anything.

Let us add in some more external costs to these imaginary numbers. What does
it cost to get the petroleum used to manufacture the pesticides, chemical
fertilizer, etc. used in conventional farming ( _cough cough_ war in Iraq)?
How much does it cost to transport food around the world instead of growing it
locally? What are the costs to public health from superbugs bred in feedlots
full of sick, bloated cows inundated with antibiotics?

I will now make up imaginary numbers for these costs large enough to trump
your imaginary numbers.

P.S. If you want some real numbers and facts, you should check out Michael
Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma", especially the citations in the back of the
book. It's also a damn good read.

~~~
sketerpot
I'm not saying what the real numbers are because I don't know. My point is
that the goal should be feeding everyone at minimal cost (environmental,
political, and otherwise). The arbitrary numbers I made up were solely to
illustrate that such analysis might lead to counterintuitive results that are
nevertheless right. Or it might not; it depends on the numbers.

