Organic Blasphemy

Just noticed this fine piece of blasphemy debunking organic food myths via the corner:

They’re not healthier or better for the environment – and they’re packed with pesticides. In an age of climate change and shortages, these foods are an indugence the world can’t afford, argues environmental expert Rob Johnston

I disagree, actually. They’re faddish hypocritical nonsense that we can easily afford. If farmers want to supply hippies with their organic nonsense so that hippies can feel better about themselves I’m fine with that. But it’s still nice to see these myths being busted in the Independent of all places.

40 Replies to “Organic Blasphemy”

  1. Thanks Jaeger. As you get older your taste buds do tend to atrophy. How well I recall my father in law’s complaint that “nothing tastes as good as it used to be”.
    I confess that despite my natural cynicism, I sorta/kinda occassionally fall for the organic myth having once had a tomato that tasted more like it did in my youth. But deep down I know it’s a racket.
    Why, recently, I bought “ethical bananas” for my cereal. M-m-m-m-m good, taste and virtue-wise.
    Yeah, it’s probably conspicuous consumption alright, ya know, “heh, I can afford to pay twice what you pay for the same thing, and now you can, ahem, watch me carry it out to my Lexus* ….”.
    (* 1997 entry level ES300, with nothing wrong over 10 years, expecting to keep at least 5 more, so even here, virtue!)

  2. I buy organic food because it often tastes better. Try buying some organic and non-organic strawberries and see the taste difference.
    As for “our world not affording” organic food, this is the hysteria of the ecofunamentalists and those plagued by misplaced “Western Guilt” which says that since we are the most powerful we must be responsible for all the worlds troubles.
    Often countries don’t have food because they have bad governments or in PC language “they make cultural choices inconsistent with food production”. Male promiscuity in Africa is a greater cause for poverty and hunger than supposed Western excesses. We have excess because we make better cultural choices. Consider Zimbabwe, while I am sure that some leftist will consider that countries problems our fault, anyone reasonable knows that it is their own damn fault.
    This said, there are places in the world where hunger is caused by factors beyond the control of the local cultures. Giving to the Canadian Food Grain bank is a great charity. http://www.foodgrainsbank.ca/

  3. Organic food is actually a form of nature magic, a piece of hippie mysticism that lives on because there’s money in it. Its the same thing as pyramid power, just has better propaganda.
    Free range eggs do taste different than factory style, but that’s because of what the hens eat and the fact that they get to run around. Not because they are “natural” or “organic”. Check out what’s involved in free range eggs labor wise some time and you’ll understand why egg factories were invented.
    Plus, if you’ve ever tried to -eat- a free-range chicken, you’ve discovered the reason chicken soup was invented. Like trying to chew a bed spring.
    Organic produce sells well in the city. People who grow the stuff laugh all the way to the bank.

  4. The fact of the matter is that the tomatoes that come from my garden taste a damn sight better than anything you’ll get from a store. I’ve never understood why the store bought ones taste like cardboard while every bite of the home grown ones can only be described as a “mouthgasm”.
    Same thing goes for the corn, the peas, the potatoes, and the squash. The store bought stuff just isn’t as good and we mourn the end of the season when we run out of fresh garden goodies and have to start buying the flavourless stuff again.
    People with their own gardens know EXACTLY what I’m talking about. People who don’t garden, well, you’re all idiots anyhow and your opinion doesn’t equal the worth of a turd. >:-)
    Now as to organic farming, my father-in-law has never used chemicals and has always rotated his crops and rested his fields. It’s not because he’s a “hippie”, it’s just the way his father did it and the way he does it. That being said, his crops (and soil) invariably look better than the neighbors, there are fewer weeds in dad’s fields, and he still gets a damn good yield. And we know who always takes home the first prize ribbon for his wheat from the local ag fair. It’s not the Roundup Ready crap, I’ll tell you that much.
    Thanks to the organic food craze, dad doesn’t have the input costs of the chemical heads and he’s getting $28/bushel right now. I’ve never seen him so happy. Extravagance pays.

  5. “Plus, if you’ve ever tried to -eat- a free-range chicken, you’ve discovered the reason chicken soup was invented. Like trying to chew a bed spring.”
    The ones we’ve been buying from a neighbor taste just fine and are perfectly tender. Sure it’s not just your lousy cooking? 😉

  6. As my brother used to rave about ‘organic’ fruits and nuts; I acerbically retorted:
    “Have you ever heard of inorganic nuts?”
    That pretty much broke him up and we started laughing hysterically.
    Cheers
    Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht BGS, PDP, CFP
    Commander in Chief
    Frankenstein Battalion
    2nd Squadron: Ulanen-(Lancers) Regiment Großherzog Friedrich von Baden(Rheinisches) Nr.7(Saarbrucken)
    Knecht Rupprecht Division
    Hans Corps
    1st Saint Nicolaas Army
    Army Group “True North”

  7. OT, a Mother’s Day haiku
    Cherry blossoms break
    Winters harshest blows are done.
    At least, so I hope.

  8. Jaeger your argument is too simplistic. Some of the organic stuff is indeed better. Free range eggs are 10x tastier than eggs from chickens that are locked in cages all their lives.
    I’ve always found organic avocado’s ripen better and are better tasting than the non-organic variety. Nothing beats a wild salmon compared to something from a farm. Just two examples of many.
    I totally agree with Sean, unless you’ve had your own garden you can’t appreciate how lousy mass-produced food tastes, where low cost and max yield are the only objectives, and flavour and nutrition are a distant third.
    Every now and then SDA gets on the bandwagon that organic food is “faddish hypocritical nonsense” for “hippies”. You can surely do better than that.

  9. Sean, I expect that the reason that the veggies from your own garden taste better is that they are fresh. God knows how old the ones are in the grocery store are before you buy them. I was in Florida once and had an orange fresh of the tree. It was an almost religious experience. I haven’t been able to eat an orange from a grocery store since. Apples are packed in nitrogen so that they don’t oxidize. They last for years, but after being in a warehouse for a year they don’t taste like much.

  10. Apples last for months if packed in a nitrogen atmosphere, not years. And thank science for it, it is the only thing that makes apples edible past January.

  11. I heard a report on CBC radio last year that said if you believe our produce tastes better than that raised in southern areas, you are right. They explained it is the longer hours of sunlight,the cool nights plus the soil nutrients that makitsie for sweeter more tasty fruits and especially vegetables. The studies were done at the U.of Sask. ag department.

  12. Yes, veggies grown in our garden have a lot more flavour than store bought.There is no comparing a home grown tomato’s taste to a store bought,no matter the variety.

  13. Well, I’m finding I’m agreeing with pretty well everyone.
    minuteman: Man, I had that experience with a roadside-vended orange in S. California back in the early 80s. It was a platonic experience — “so that is the perfect form eh!?”. I’ve never forgotten it – it was revelatory, a flavour bomb, like everything prior was a pale immitation.
    “And I don’t what’s up with the Papayas!!!!!!!!”
    – Kramer.

  14. The reason your garden produce may taste better – it fully ripens on the vine/stock. Instead of, picked early as it will spend a week or so in transit/ distributing ect. It has nothing to do with organic.

  15. ” … Sean, I expect that the reason that the veggies from your own garden taste better is that they are fresh. God knows how old the ones are in the grocery store are before you buy them. I was in Florida once and had an orange fresh of the tree. It was an almost religious experience. … ”
    Regardless of whether you use chemical fertilizer or “organic” nutrients , the vegetables taste the same , and it depends what variety you grow , and the overall health and tilth of the soil.
    Varieties of tomatoes such as Beafsteak etc. have tremendous flavour , but part of it is having them FRESH , not sitting on the back of a truck for a week !
    The tomatoes from Mexico etc. are a variety that ship well , look good on the shelf and taste like cardboard. Ditto for strawberries and many other items.
    Packaged sweet corn in the stores is a joke. Sweet corn loses 50% of it’s sugar content 20-30 minutes after being picked , so after a week on the shelf it is mostly tasteless starch !
    Most people in the city have zero idea how crops are raised , or how easy it is to grow very tasty veggies in your backyard.

  16. Yet it’s also kind of depressing growing your own.  Vegetables from our garden (where we use appropriate amounts of DEM EBIL KEMMIKALS) taste fabulous, for about two weeks or so.
    Then the season’s over.
    I sometimes think it would have been better for me if I’d never tasted a tomato right off the vine, corn right off the stalk, etc.  Then I wouldn’t know what I was missing, eleven months of the year.
    And Calgary’s climate.  Don’t get me started!  Damn near impossible to grow decent vegetables here (Edmonton was way better…).

  17. Any Organic food sickness or deaths ? Yup, lots.
    Conventional ? Nope.
    GMO ? Not even so much as a stomach ache.
    Note: Notice how most of the Fanatics dropped the GMO rants and migrated over to the latest craze, AGW ?
    Crazes are for the Crazies.

  18. Sean, one cannot be an expert in all areas. One of my areas of in-expertise is cooking.
    However! Has it occurred to you that the vegetable varieties you are growing in your garden (and the chickens your neighbor sells, you lucky SOB) are not the same ones commercial growers sell?
    Commercial tomatoes are a very specific hybrid that is optimized for surviving shipping and mechanized handling. They’re almost able to survive a direct hit from a forklift tire. Same goes for your commercial corn, oranges, blah blah blah. If not for that, you wouldn’t be seeing strawberries in the supermarket all year around.
    Organic has nothing to do with it. Nice for the farmer though, for sure.

  19. Free range advocates always make the chickens sound like they are Alexander MacKenzies or Edmond Hillary. Actually being decendants of guinea fowl , jungle birds they are more content to hide out and not move around much anyway. Easily domesticated.
    I dont mind free range hens or capons when I know where they came from.
    just be mindful of Hutterite friers brought door to door. they tend to be layers and should have been delivered to Campbells.

  20. Gotta agree with most of the posters here. I have a fairly large garden in my backyard (a rarity within the city limits of Winnipeg) and it’s no comparison. Even potatoes fresh out of the ground are bursting with flavour. And of course the snow peas, carrots, tomatoes, corn, onions, garlic, asparagus, strawberries, raspberries and (woohoo!) watermelon. Organic? Not a big deal. Freshness? It’s everything.

  21. For the third year in a row, a local farmer is selling “Organic Manure” for three bucks a bag.
    He is constantly selling out. The road where he lives is connected to Toronto so that may explain
    the interest and good sales.

  22. sounds like everyone here likes the CBCpravda 100 km challenge. try doing in Calgary where the frost free season is about 80 days.
    the only real organics here would be buffalo and saskatoons. pemmican all round till some of the boys arrive with bannock flour.

  23. Dude, where do you get your free-range chicken? Bed springs! The stuff we get is a little taste of heaven. You just bought an old bird.
    Ecofundamentalism aside, free range and organic food is often much better tasting.
    Plants grown in poop taste better than plants force grown in synthetic chemicals. It is one of the lesser ironies of life.

  24. Far be it from me to want to impose my beliefs on others or in this case “organic produce”. I practise organic agriculture or what I prefer to call natural common sense agriculture, and it was not invented by hippies nor have I ever been a hippy.
    The reason is that I do not want to consume antibiotics, growth hormones, pesticides, herbicides or GMOs nor does my family or our customers. Still I have never sought to ban other foods, as I believe consumers have (or should have) the right to choose for themselves.
    Am I “certified organic”? The answer is no. I know that it would not improve what I produce. Furthermore my style of farming predates the organic label, and to be honest I shy away from group identity as just about any such group can become rather fanatical. Mind you this also applies to what I call agribusiness.

  25. Phantom – “…Like trying to chew a bed spring.”
    That’s nonsense. I grew up on a farm where chickens wandered free and ate anything that couldn’t get away. The marketing term, “free range” hadn’t been dreamed up yet. They were just chickens. A tough chicken is simply one that lived too long. cf “tougher ‘n a ol’ hen.” The ideal age for a barnyard frier is 3 to 5 months.
    When I retired, I went back to the farm and, although they were a damned nuisance, I kept chickens for a couple of years. YUM
    I NEVER eat storebought chicken – not because it doesn’t taste “as good” as farm-raised but because I find both flavour and texture absolutely REPULSIVE. Same goes for pork except for ribs drowned in barbecue sauce to hide the unpleasant taste. So, I’m pretty much a beefeater who’ll eat the odd fish. Nevertheless, I would still prefer grass-fattened beef if one could buy it in small quantities. Even 60 years ago, when feedlots were little family operations feeding nothing but hay and grain, rural people used to speak sneeringly of “packer beef”. The price of progress I guess but, I do regret that my grandchildren will never know the taste of real, melt-in-the-mouth food. (My kids had that pleasure for awhile as they were lucky enough to spend a lot of summers with Grandma and Grandpa.)

  26. Too bad plants can’t talk.
    Can a plant tell the difference between organic manure and eurea fertilizer ?
    Nope, a nitrate ion, NO3, is a nitrate ion. That is all they are interested in, their roots could care less.
    Humans, however can tell the differnce – ecoli from the manure, on the produce, can kill ya.
    What !? Plants do have feelings, can talk !!??

  27. What a coincidence, I spent much of the morning planting some hardy vegetables into the garden. Just in time to read that the weather forecast had changed. Once again global warming is set to strike and cause overnight freezing. I blame all you neocon knuckle dragging SUV owners.
    Now I have to leave and go find some old blankets to drag out to the garden. Only someone who knows how good garden fresh produce tastes would understand why someone would go to all of this trouble for a few vegetables.

  28. If you bother to look, you can find a LARGE number of double blind studies that show that blessed-sacred organics do NOT taste better than EVIL non-organics.
    You have to compare apples with the SAME apples, in the same state of ripeness, of course. But, when you do – there is NO DIFFERENCE. People who worship blessed-sacred organics cannot tell the difference. This can cause a severe religious crisis for the devout.

  29. Organic food may taste better, but it is terribly selfish to waste resources to satiate your ego and conscience.

  30. Grocery stores in many areas of southern Ontario will not stock local produce as it sadly has very little shelf life. Though I agree that the taste of naturaly ripened fruit like the fabulous peaches and other fruit in the early fall from Niagara is without peer its season is quickly over. I love Gala apples particularly from New Zealand where they were, I believe, developed. I have eaten them there and though great I also appreciate having them here in our winter.
    I am old enough to remember the short season for most of our produce and though the flavour is nothing like the old days at least we can enjoy fruits and vegatables throughtout the year. Read Fast Food Nation to see how agribusiness has ruined a good part of the food industry particularly the beef industry. Remember when we used to have our hamburgers medium rare, not any more.
    Having worked for the Oshawa Group, which owned several produce companies, I saw first hand the intricate supply chain that gives us our incredible array of produce in a safe and edible manner. Be cautious of organic foods as Ron in Kelowna has pointed out they may contain some pathogens that could do you real harm, buyer beware.

  31. Ron in Kelowna: THANK YOU. Every time someone comments on “organic fertilizer” I have a fit, as a plant cannot us an organic molecule. The plant must wait for the organic fertilizer to break down into its chemical components (i.e. becomes INORGANIC) before it can use the nutrients. “Organic” food is a nice niche market for a few farmers near large cities, but it won’t replace large scale industrial food production.

  32. It appears everyone wants their cake and to get to eat it too! A couple of posters have alluded to the fact that most of the stuff we buy in supermarkets is produced for a specific price point, is picked before it is ripe so it will travel and not bruise. Relatively speaking we have some of the cheapest food in the world.
    But I can attest to how great home-grown produce can be, but I shudder to think what the actual cost of that stuff is. Vancouver lot worth half a million, room for about 10 tomato plants, get a great crop of about 100 lbs, only needs about 20 hours of labour at $125/hour, I guess you get what you pay for!!!
    Everyone wants their cake and to get to eat it too?

  33. I make a point NOT to buy anything labeled “organic”. It truly is a huge scam. I’m all for free market and choice but what really irks me is the organic crowd markets their food not by its positive aspects but how evil and poisonous conventionaly produced food is.
    Like RoninKelowna has been saying plants dont know the difference between manure fertilizer or manufactured fertilizer when it breaks down into something the plant can use its the same thing.

  34. If the entire agriculture industry went organic a lot of people would starve to death. Manufactured fertilizer and pesticides have created a quantum leap in productivity and sustainability. 99% plus of farmer use them properly and safely.

  35. While there is certainly a lot of blather, there seems to be far less quoting from actual studies. The curse of the internet: thinking you know something when all you know is what someone else types.
    If you want to consume fewer pesticides, eat organic.
    See “Pesticide residues in conventional, integrated pest management (IPM)-grown and organic foods: insights from three US data sets”
    http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a713811051?back=.%2frelated~db%3dall~content%3da790414839~first%3d1~vaa%3d0%3fbookmark%3d2&words=&hash=

  36. “99% plus of farmer use them properly and safely”
    Closer to 99.9999999 %
    Still an extremely small chance, but one is more likely to die from eating mushrooms, organic or otherwise 🙂

  37. If organic is so great how come its so expensive? and its not neccasaraly more healtheir

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