Organic Foods: For people with more dollars than sense (buying, better, garden)

[RememberMee]

yeah. science is for idiots.

Carefully selected science can manipulate "educated" idiots better than religion can manipulate uneducated masses. PR and prepaid "studies" affects only educated idiots, uneducated idiots are immune to the modern manipulation methods. We, skeptical "idiots", should believe obscure hacks who cherry picked 162 studies (you have no clue about) more than we should believe our direct experience and old fashioned common sense. Yup, rubber tasting CA tomato grown on the same field year after year is just about the same nutritionally as a home grown ones. If 162 studies can convince you that is "true" you can be manipulated into just about anything. I've seen another prepaid "study" on eggs claiming that caged farmed eggs are nutritionally identical to homegrown ones, common sense and simple decency rests, it's all about funding. It eggs are identical nutrition wise why bother with all those Frankenstein ingredients in the feed to paint yolks yellow?


Nutritional content of foods is not a red hot research topic, corporations don't pay for that, they charge by the pound not by nutrition value of the foods. They pay only for the research that maximizes quantities of the pounds to sell. Yet, there is enough of mainstream research pointing at the fact that nutritional value of commercial foods is plummeting. Of course, large corporations wouldn't be so successful if they could not "guide" consumer sentiments and choices using strategic PR, marketing and prepaid researchers.

[RememberMee]

Originally Posted by plwhit

I have better things to do with my life than play farmer brown out in the country.

Doing what? Typing 8800th post on the evil of small scale agriculture (you have no direct experience with) and nutritional superiority of the conventional foods? Growing little bit of your own food takes much less time than typing 1168 posts on city-data and its helluva lot more satisfying, believe me, you don't have to play a farmer. Besides all of the farmers (including the ones you see at farmers markets) do it FOR PROFIT, growing food for yourself is something else.

[RememberMee]

Originally Posted by uggabugga

to feed billions of people, your model fails to make the grade.
you can't feed the billions of people who live in an urban environment with small scale organic gardens.

"Feed the people" again. It's postulated that "billions of people in urban environment" is something to be maintained at all costs, including long term survival and sanity. Large chunk of those billions people were locked in urban environment not because of their choice but because they were robbed of their subsistence means by big agriculture and landowners who "coincidentally" make big bucks in feeding inferior food stuff to the dispossessed. It's sorta "positive feedback" that depopulates rural areas, concentrates human mass in large urban areas and wealth in a few pockets.

Big agro produces lower cost food items because and only because it can externalize its costs on the environment, future generations and society at large. Include those externalities in the price of commodity foodstuff and it's not gonna be cheap anymore.

[Submariner]

Originally Posted by RememberMee

... Big agro produces lower cost food items because and only because it can externalize its costs on the environment, future generations and society at large. Include those externalities in the price of commodity foodstuff and it's not gonna be cheap anymore.

Also 'Farm Subsidies' come into play to keep conventional farming profitable and food prices low. While small scale organic production does not receive those artificial benefits.

[greatblueheron]

Thanks uggabugga...

rotenone I use for rooting plant cuttings...well, maybe not now

I am a firm supporter of organic eggs & milk. That's it, though...







eggs, probably, the rest i've tried and it's kinda hit or miss..[/quote]

[uggabugga]

Originally Posted by RememberMee

Carefully selected science can manipulate "educated" idiots better than religion can manipulate uneducated masses. PR and prepaid "studies" affects only educated idiots, uneducated idiots are immune to the modern manipulation methods. We, skeptical "idiots", should believe obscure hacks who cherry picked 162 studies (you have no clue about) more than we should believe our direct experience and old fashioned common sense.

'carefully selected' and 'cherry picked,' huh? and you know this - how?
where are your reports that contradict what was found in these 162 studies? if they were cherry picked, there must be plenty of other such studies out there that contradict their results. right?
why do you consider the faculty of the london school of hygiene and tropical medicine 'obscure hacks'?

162 studies (you have no clue about)

no clue about? i've read over a dozen of them so far. how many have you read?
the review and ever single reference is right here:

Yup, rubber tasting CA tomato grown on the same field year after year is just about the same nutritionally as a home grown ones.

you're confusing issues here - the topic is organically-grown vs. non-organically-grown.
but in any case, feel free to present your evidence of the higher nutritional values of your organically grown tomatoes. here is what the 'obscure hacks' at the World Vegetable Center found:

In general, we could not identify significant differences between tomatoes grown under conventional or organic farming systems. With the exception of fruit pH, there were no significant differences identified for fruit quality parameters (soluble solids, acidity and color) or nutritional parameters (lycopene, β-carotene, ascorbic acid, total phenolics and antioxidant activity). (http://www.avrdc.org/publications/technical_bulletin/TB34.pdf - broken link)

If 162 studies can convince you that is "true" you can be manipulated into just about anything.

why do you hate science? just curious.

I've seen another prepaid "study" on eggs claiming that caged farmed eggs are nutritionally identical to homegrown ones, common sense and simple decency rests, it's all about funding. It eggs are identical nutrition wise why bother with all those Frankenstein ingredients in the feed to paint yolks yellow?

wow. so all these 162 studies, from all over the world, were part of a giant conspiracy theory, funded by some evil entity to present false data? that's quite a stretch. what 'frankenstein ingredients' are you talking about?

Nutritional content of foods is not a red hot research topic, corporations don't pay for that, they charge by the pound not by nutrition value of the foods. They pay only for the research that maximizes quantities of the pounds to sell. Yet, there is enough of mainstream research pointing at the fact that nutritional value of commercial foods is plummeting. Of course, large corporations wouldn't be so successful if they could not "guide" consumer sentiments and choices using strategic PR, marketing and prepaid researchers.

are you saying that all 162 of these studies, by groups in the US, canada, south america, europe, africa, and asia, were corporately funded?
present your evidence for this.

[uggabugga]

Originally Posted by RememberMee

"Feed the people" again. It's postulated that "billions of people in urban environment" is something to be maintained at all costs, including long term survival and sanity. Large chunk of those billions people were locked in urban environment not because of their choice but because they were robbed of their subsistence means by big agriculture and landowners who "coincidentally" make big bucks in feeding inferior food stuff to the dispossessed. It's sorta "positive feedback" that depopulates rural areas, concentrates human mass in large urban areas and wealth in a few pockets.

you expect 6.84 billion people to all live in a rural setting?

Big agro produces lower cost food items because and only because it can externalize its costs on the environment, future generations and society at large. Include those externalities in the price of commodity foodstuff and it's not gonna be cheap anymore.

i guess you've never heard of economies of scale. that is where the lower cost comes from.

[uggabugga]

Originally Posted by greatblueheron

Thanks uggabugga...

rotenone I use for rooting plant cuttings...well, maybe not now

I am a firm supporter of organic eggs & milk. That's it, though...

hi gbh, i think you may be confusing rotenone with rootone, which is completely harmless. keep on using it

[RememberMee]

Originally Posted by uggabugga

you expect 6.84 billion people to all live in a rural setting?

You expect 9 billions to be "concentrated" in a few dozens of urban areas to be fed by Global agribiz and global transportation network? For how long that could last? It doesn't take a genius to understand that separation of humans from their environment, turning urban areas into isolated space stations among corn fields, garbage dumps and feedlots requires humongous amount of energy, damages and waste. Traditional agriculture is not perfect by far, but we have suicidal insanity going on right now and some believers pretend that it's not insanity it's the most "efficient" way to do things that can be sustained for thousands years.

Hauling beef from Brazil to New Jersey, hauling food waste from New Jersey to rural Pennsylvania and Canada, hauling raw potatoes from Canada to Pennsylvania, processing them into junk food precursors there and hauling precursors to Ohio junk food factories to be converted into packaged junk food to be shipped back to Pennsylvania and New Jersey, garbage is to be shipped to PA dumps. You mistakenly believe that large agrobiz is the most "efficient" way to grow and distribute food. "Efficiency" is not a self-evident concept, it requires definitions not faith.

i guess you've never heard of economies of scale. that is where the lower cost comes from.

Apparently, you never heard of the sad fact that economy of scale has rather low "ceiling" for agriculture. 10,000 cows dairy is not more "efficient" than 400 cows dairy even if we accept output per dollar of investments as the ultimate definition of efficiency. Benefits of economy of scale are very limited (outside of commodity grains), yet agribiz is mushrooming as we speak. Why? Targeted governmental policies allowing big agribiz to "externalize" costs is a part of an answer. Consolidation and integration of food manufacturing is another reason. For an integrated agribusiness controlling everything from seed to final products, all that matters is final profit. Integrated agribiz may take a loss on large scale agriculture per se (to be subsidized by tax dollars and bankrupted contract growers), the loss is to be recouped in marketing and distribution that are uniquelly suited for economy of scale. You can learn this from here: John Hopkins Lectures, Food Production, Public Health and the Environment (both MP3s and slides), Food Production, Public Health, and the Environment : Lecture Materials
> Lecture 13

Economics of Industrial Agriculture and Rural Communities (Bill Weida)
Slides: Part A - Part B
MP3: Part A - Part B

[RememberMee]

Also, for an integrated operation the prices of agricultural commodity provided by its subsidiaries are largely irrelevant (within legal limits of course). Subsidiary A can sell commodity X to subsidiary B at a huge loss, what is a loss for subsidiary A is a gain for subsidiary B. At the end it doesn't matter. However accounting tricks + monopolization = small unaffiliated producers need not apply because in the best case they will be "offered" price well below their production costs. What is an accounting trick for an ingegrated agrobiz is a bankruptcy for independent producers. And all that most people see - "inefficient" small producers who could not compete in the economy of scale. On top of that agricultural subsidies further twist common sense to the limits.