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210 Comments
- jgatz, on 08/27/2008, -6/+38have you ever tried shopping at whole foods
half the stuff you can find at a normal grocery store for about half the price
I live about a block from one and due to time I will often shop there
its literally double the cost of shopping organic at a regular supermarket even if your getting there certified organic products
more like whole wallet amirite - atdigg, on 08/28/2008, -10/+37I think this misses an important point, it's not about what you eat, the point is that organic is a sustainable way to grow fruits and vegetable. Non-organic means using pesticides and even if they don't reach your body directly through your mouth they do go somewhere, they pollute waterways and land and most likely end up in the food chain somehow.
But of course, what do I talk about, the air and the ocean are INFINITE and we can dump whatever we want and don't care, right? - lordterrin, on 08/28/2008, -3/+25buried for being an absolutely retarded article. It doesn't give any information on WHY organic is worth it/not worth it. It's like a puff piece for people to visit the website. Can we get some real news back on digg please? kthx
- AmyVernon, on 08/27/2008, -8/+28Interesting. The milk surprised me. It did address the issue of antibiotics in the milk, but what about the growth hormones? Milk is one of the few organic items I do buy regularly.
- misspiggymess, on 08/27/2008, -4/+21Good info, organic is not always worth it. However locally grown can mean much more sometimes.
- dylandaring, on 08/28/2008, -3/+18My advice: find a local farmer, find out how he grows his produce, buy local. Certified organic doesn't mean anything in Mexico where half our produce is grown.
- ErickStevenson, on 08/28/2008, -2/+14Eat what you want and can afford... people are ***** starving because they have no ***** food to eat and we are here trying to choose if I should eat an apple with or without the skin. I'm just glad I have something to ***** eat.
- MorganMghee, on 08/28/2008, -9/+21Yes, they are worth it. And, the more we buy them the cheaper they get.
- dvsbastard, on 08/28/2008, -4/+15One of my weekend hobbies is going into whole foods with a concealed bottle of pesiticides and spraying as much produce as I can...
You're not so organic now are you?! - inactive, on 08/28/2008, -2/+12I love whole foods. Lots and Lots of MILF'S there!
- TheWorm, on 08/28/2008, -13/+23Organic fruits and vegetables simply have better flavor.
- inactive, on 08/27/2008, -1/+11that's why i eat potato skins
- njunderground, on 08/27/2008, -15/+24man i work near a whole foods and that place has a line out the door. i'll stick to my kraft macaroni and cheese...
- barfooz, on 08/28/2008, -9/+18But that's what America's all about. Finding a sucker (in this case, rich bleeding heart liberals) and milking him for all he's worth.
I celebrate Whole Foods and their nefarious organic ways. - inactive, on 08/28/2008, -2/+10http://www.epa.gov/opp00001/health/human.htm
It is a fact that there are pesticides used that are toxic carcinogens. As stated in the article, however, depending on the toxicity and exposure of the pesticide, it may still be considered "safe" by the EPA. This is debatable. I'm no health food nut (my mom works at a health food store, so I am somewhat knowledgeable, however), but I don't think it hurts to be wary. - inactive, on 08/27/2008, -8/+15That's a good point about peeling vs. eating the skin of the fruit or vegetable.
- prguitarman, on 08/28/2008, -7/+14"Organic" is just a trendy phase. It's the same exact thing as "Going green". I actually went to a Whole Foods for the first time about a week ago and it was probably the grossest and most insulting shopping experience in my life. First of all, the people there were stuck up and very snobby. They literally think they're better than you just because they're shopping there! The soaps smelled absolutely foul, and they had rows upon rows of raw meats and soggy vegetables just sitting out in the open with no sneeze-guards, so anybody could just walk up and infect the entire table with Hepatitis, or something. That, and the prices were ridiculous. I'll stick to Wal-Mart and Target, thank you very much.
- Frozo, on 08/28/2008, -0/+6TOMACCO!!
- ReidFleming, on 08/28/2008, -0/+6The problem is that the article is very short-sighted and only focuses on one aspect of 'organic', residue on the food itself. There are many other ways which could directly or indirectly impact humans. Such as, how does the run-off from a non organic farm affect the local lake that it drains into? Is it bad for swimmers? Is it bad for the fish that get eaten by people?
- ajames01, on 08/28/2008, -9/+15I worked at whole foods/whole paycheck for about 6 months (in produce). Other then being prejudice ***** as all the top "team leaders" were... the fact is that most of the "organic" food co-mingles with the non-organic at some point, defeating the whole purpose. They only work on this when they assume an inspection is coming.
Many of those who also end up spending all the extra money on their useless organic fruits also put them in the same bag as the non organic which again is basically defeating the point. - jcorn1, on 08/27/2008, -4/+10This is worth thinking about, still weighing those pros and cons.
- CRCulver, on 08/28/2008, -0/+6"Organic does not automatically mean better, but when it means sustainable topsoil nutrients, less pesticide residues and runoff, and better taste, well it's hard to argue against that."
What about when it means an unsustainable farming model that keeps rich people feeling good but couldn't possibly support the hungry people of the Third World? - inactive, on 08/28/2008, -2/+8For many vegetables and fruits, the skin is the most nutritious part.
Beyond that, unless your fruits grow with plastic skin, anything sprayed on the outside has the potential for absorption. - TheEarthlings, on 08/28/2008, -0/+6You guys are missing an extremely important point. You have to take into the account the whole production process, not only the product itself!!!1!
1) Organic cows get lots of organically grown food, which uses way less pesticides and fertilizers which then do not pollute your local nature, your food chain and your water supplies. There are lots of external costs to "conventional farming" like increased costs for cleaning your drinking water, increased costs for treatment of allergies and other environmentally induced diseases etc.
2) Organic cows have a way better life than their "conventional" counterparts. Have a little empathy!
3) With buying organics, the likelihood of your money supporting family farms and the local economy is way higher than when you directly throw your money at conventional agro-business.
4) Think about buyin local and seasonal as well. Be the Change! - ajames01, on 08/28/2008, -0/+5When was the last time you got that mole checked out?
- TheEarthlings, on 08/28/2008, -1/+6ridiculous. carrying them in the same bag defeats which point exactly?
1) organics is not about your own petty health alone. It's about finding ways of production that can sustain life on this planet for a bit longer than your short-sighted ego is able to see...
2)Wash your fruits before you eat them! just thinkin...basic hygiene considerations? - topbob, on 08/28/2008, -0/+4You do realize how much cheaper energy wise it is to grow things organically.
No chemicals used means energy is not spent in the production, transportation, and nothing harmful to leak into the ground and into water. So anyone who thinks not buying organic is being pretty ignorant, only thinking about how the fruit or vegetable will effect them. - DickyT83, on 08/28/2008, -0/+4You, sir, are organically incorrect.
- blast_flame, on 08/28/2008, -5/+9Sounds like a placebo effect to me. You expect the organic food to taste better so it does.
- blast_flame, on 08/28/2008, -0/+4Not if you're using the chemistry definition of organic.
- inactive, on 08/28/2008, -1/+5no.
- cloudberries, on 08/28/2008, -0/+4I get about half of my vegetables delivered fresh from a local farmer. No pesticides, and covered in 100% real dirt! From the ground!
- joeanon, on 08/28/2008, -1/+5You guys DON'T KNOW JACK.
Organic food isn't cheaper. We all know this, but who's objective is it to attack organic food ? Leading mega-corporations mass producing the food that right this very second is slowly clogging your heart. I believe you have the right to die, whether by assisted suicide or Hamburger Helper every night. It's really you're lack of knowing what your talking about that makes this article shine.
Organic food's MAIN advantage is not merely your health, but the health of everything that touches the concentrated chemicals we pour, spread, and spray throughout the hundreds of millions of US farming acres which run off into rivers, causing OCEANIC DEAD ZONES to form and changing ecosystems in it's wake.
So, basically, when oceanic dead zones are forming off your coast. You're doing something wrong. That's my masterful equation that seems beyond most people, corporations and governments grasp of the world.
Organic farming could help this by providing much safer, more renewable more degradable fertilizer. You can't deny this major advantage. Current chemical fertilizers are still cheapest, but they are not unlimited and like oil we will eventually reach peak nitrogen (if we haven't already). Organic run off is much less concentrated when applied correctly and I believe safer for the environment. Organic food sells for more, so it means more overall profit and more exportability which is a problem for the antibiotic and hormone laden beef stock of America. I would personally end the use of these extreme farming methods of high density cattle pumped with milk producing drugs, hormones, antibiotics, whatever else. It's just not worth the risk to use these mostly untested drugs directly on the animals we plant to eat.
In general genetic engineering of plants is fairly widely accepted so this is one major solution. We are in much more danger from dumping millions of tons of fertilizer which clearly run all the way through our rivers and into the ocean than we are from tweaking genes on plants. I believe altering bacteria and other more active or complex organism is vastly more dangerous. Where as, plants are more passive organisms, easy to control, easy to predict, and we've been engineer them through breeding for 10k+ years.
So engineering plants to use less fertilizer is one thing they are working on that's very practical, but in the bigger picture and with newer more efficient lighting and hopefully renewable power generation we will rely more on hydroponics.
Here is another great technology that has TONS to offer in terms of efficiency, but gets benched because it's mostly about getting a low unit cost while basically dumping your industrial waste right into the local water system. If you added in the cost to properly dispose of that waste and the fact that we're draining are major aquafilters at an unsustainable rate with more drought predicted along with a shifting jet stream.
Well, then, with all those factors... factored in Hydroponic makes all the sense in the world.
Just as renewable energy did in the 70s, but was killed by Reagan and his corporate allies. Now here we are facing the spike in price of peak global oil production along with rising demand, conflict in the middle east.
And, in the BIG BIG picture of things, it might not matter all that much, we might be able to suffer now and catch up in a few decades.
But for your life, right now. Can you feel the effect of our lack of foresight ? Can you feel the pressure of a desperate need for a solution weighing on people ? Do YOU personally want to be the one suffering ? I don't.
I think we have this same lack of efficiency in many US industries and years of prosperity have not helped efficiency or the idea of personal responsibility to government. They have instead made us feel invincible. So goes the strategies of the US corporations, make money at all costs. When things get worse, try to make more money.
However, it's clearly a job for the people through the federal government to force a higher level of efficiency on corporations because by nature, they will seek profit and low unit price above quality or total cost of ownership, which is a notion American's need to asking more about. .
What is... total cost of ownership. In the end how much does it really cost to drive you SUV around annually ? How much does that big house take to kept 78 degrees in the winter. American's are getting a lesson the hard way, for not paying more attention 30 years ago when US oil peaked as did our interest in the middle east.
The solution though isn't so bad. Algae Biofuel now capable of both diesel and gasoline could take most of the useless waste of the great resource that was/is oil.
Algae consumes CO2 and a well managed system could even reduce even coal power plant CO2 to 20% or less. This carbon is consumed with sunlight and sewage and becomes a highly oil rich algae. So rich in oil you can literally squeeze liquid oil out of them. Obviously it's not black crude from algae. It's a lipid or fat from the algae. So we take the fattest algae and grow it in enclosed tubes on arid land with salt water. This way we have no cropland competition including less demand on drinking water, but of course, and most importantly, we can actually produce enough oil to meet domestic demand with only a few million acres of land.
That's far less land than we commit to vegetable production and VASTLY less land than we use for cattle feedstock production. The USA is 2.3 billion acres. Sadly though hundreds of millions of acres are needed just to grow enough food to keep up with our McDonald's addictions, which is the main reason we can't all have 25+ acre lots. Much of the good land must be used for food.
Land however will continue to rise in price and once again hydroponics steps in as a clear answer to our problems.
We face limited fertilizer supplies, limited water supplies and limited land use. These problems will ONLY get worse (unless climate change kills a few billion people). So, in the future we'll need more hydroponics or less humans. Today's usage rates are already unsustainable by far. Having yards and growing your own is the best deal really since there is the lest overall cost, but transport costs can eventually be lowered again with new energy sources. Land however, will always have a tendency to rise in value as the world effectively becomes a smaller and smaller place full of more and more poor people and super rich people.
The poor will be consolidated more to cities and other low acreage living while the wealthy elite of not just the US, but of all the world, compete in a revolving game of who can be the richest and buy up all the land in the top industrialized nations.
Those millions of acres of farm land could be quite useful if we could either use less food, consolidate growing, use land better or produce much more food per acre as we could with hydroponics or perhaps genetic engineering.
With the proper setup much of our food waste should be recycled into fertilizer.
In my ideal world of great algae farms for oil production, the left over dried algae would be a great fertilizer or if not grown with human sewage, they could even be a human food. Organic algae is worth quite a lot per gram as a delicacy.
I really think the proper question is why NOT organic. It's a perfect slow release fertilizer that when done with today's microbiological understanding can outperform chemical farming. Chemicals adversely effect many of the microorganisms including bacteria and fungi in the soil which boost root nutrient uptake, so you actually take a hit to ideal conditions by dumping a bunch of chemical fertilizer on ... everything.
Another great thing about hydroponics... you don't have to spray the actual leaves and fruits of your crops with straight up chemicals which HAS to have significant enough residue to make the national knowledge base that you have to wash vegetables before your eat them because of pesticides.
Well, indoor hydro beats pesticides any day, and while it might not be possible to meat the US feedstock demand. It would easily be possible to meat US vegetable demand with hydroponics, using much less land and with hydroponics, genetic engineer and manipulating light cycles with an automated system can greatly increase per acre output. With renewable energy sources and direct solar light, it's possible to be competitive with today's price's, but most of those prices are actually transport, not growing.
Until fertilizers actually become limited or a true outcry against the observable effects of fertilizer run off the unit price will rule hydroponics and keep it down from any real mass attempts at productivity or innovation.
For now both Organics and Hydroponics a just niche markets but organic farming does have great potential and offers a renewable solution. In a time of great renewable energy interest I find it odd people don't just grasp that organic farming is a more green concept than chemical.
I wonder why this article is really on digg, is it like paid for by the farming industry of america and their chemical fertilizer buddies ? Not that such entities actually exist, but in analogy. People that don't like organic... uh.. buy cheaper chemical grown products. There probably isn't much of a health difference beside your fruits and veggies are coated with pesticide and chemical fertilizer residues. The actual fruit itself is probably just about exactly the same 'healthyness' for consumption, but the process of chemical farming is a practice of dumping chemicals onto hundreds of millions of acres of land which pollute our rivers and coastal areas and oceans. Much of the chemicals bind to sediment so they concentrate easily. We've already had new bacteria found thriving which caused an outbreak of the fish disease psteria (sp) linked fairly strongly to farming waste either chemically or in the forms of animal waste.
Neither should be allowed to just run off into our riverway's and oceans. That's just another form of industrial waste and these riverways are supposed to belong to the people, so it's OUR propertly they are dumping their waste in and basically expecting US to pay for it in some eventual clean up or technological breakthrough process.
I say, corporations need to pay for dumping waste of any kind not rely on carbon or fertilizer run off taxes to take decades to get into law after millions of dollars of propaganda and misinformation is created to keep the status quo while the public is denied clean streams and coastal fish populations are plummeting.
Sadly, there is more than enough food in the worlds oceans, still, the feed the entire planet without land based agriculture, but instead of eating the plentiful food created naturally be our environment, we resort to producing and dumping billions of tons of fertilizers worldwide. We kill the planet and we don't eat the food that's already there.
Anyway, organic may always be more expensive until chemical fertilizer supplies dwindle. But at some point, like oil, organic/renewable will be the obvious solution that the idiots before us overlooked. In this case however, we are the idiots they will be saying that about. The 20th century will be likely known as the most wasteful in history. But, then again, we have the 21st century and of course after that....
certain doom. :P
No wonder rich people want hotel's in space !! Earth is going to *****. - Murrabbit, on 08/28/2008, -6/+10Spoiler alert: Nearly everything you eat is Organic (with the exception of minerals like salt).
- inactive, on 08/28/2008, -0/+4Genetically modified foods are allowed under the organic umbrella.
- grantmoore3d, on 08/28/2008, -0/+4Try having a garden and grow some of it yourself... unless you live in an apartment building you should have at least some land to do so!
- chaiwalla, on 08/28/2008, -1/+5I have two young boys and I refuse to feed them crappy food full of poisons that will pollute the environment that they will have to live in. I can afford organic food if I don't fill my life with time wasting gadgets. So my kids eat very well, but don't have xboxes or ipods. We support local farmers by belonging to a CSA.
Why do people get so upset that some of us appreciate the quality of the food we eat and do not want to destroy the environment?
Read The Omnivore's Dilemma. It explains a lot. We were not designed to eat the modern diet based on industrial corn and soybeans. - rabidbob, on 08/28/2008, -0/+4Well regular supermarkets are pretty bloody expensive regardless. I don't know about the US but in the UK we have plenty of farm shops and they're almost always better value than the supermarket.
- jnordb, on 08/28/2008, -0/+3Dugg for your honesty! But are THEY free range organics?
- blast_flame, on 08/28/2008, -1/+4How so? What evidence do you have to support that claim?
- TheLoneWolf071, on 08/28/2008, -8/+11I hear all the arguments
"Oh, I like to support the little guy..." almost all organic food is grown by big companies, running under a subsidiary - blast_flame, on 08/28/2008, -0/+3Besides the problems with organic foods you do know that humans have evolved to eat cooked things right? Eating raw food you run a serious infection risk. Also it sound to me like your increased happiness is nothing more than a placebo effect (you think it will make you happier so it does).
- BaseballGuyCAA, on 08/28/2008, -2/+5Doesn't this violate the law of Supply & Demand? It would seem that the more we buy them, the more the quantity demanded for the product rises, the higher the price goes.
- dema, on 08/28/2008, -0/+3Or you could just buy skim and melt a few sticks of butter into it...
- inactive, on 08/28/2008, -1/+4i shop at whole foods too
with the rising cost of produce it often doesn't make that much difference
i buy my broccoli organic it tastes better it looks better also spinach and lettuce
organic fresh ginger vs supermarket the difference is obvious the supermarket ginger looks dead and has little juice
and stoneyfield french vanilla yogurt is divine
but mostly i buy from the farmer's market as much stuff as is local
living in miami we have tomatoes strawberries pineapples papayas and mangoes as well as avocados - Frozo, on 08/28/2008, -0/+3Oh the liquid cheese is sooo much better. Gimme a break lol
- grassiness, on 08/28/2008, -0/+3Absolutely true!
- blast_flame, on 08/28/2008, -0/+3Why can't we continue "factory farms" forever? We do have technological progress you know, a farming method only needs to be sustainable enough to get to the next method.
- covertbadger, on 08/28/2008, -0/+3I didn't call you holier-than-thou for saying fresh organic food is superior - I agree with that completely, which is why I happily pay the premium. I called you holier-than-thou for the smug condescending attitude with which you lord it over those who don't eat organic - either by choice or by circumstance - and your arrogant assumption that people who make different decisions to you must be envious of your financial means.
- plasmoske, on 08/28/2008, -2/+5just look up monsanto
and youll find the truth -
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