I get riled up. I admit it. When a topic that seems to me to be bleeding obvious comes along and stays along, I start to get punchy about it. And today I’m punchy about organic food. I have some friends and some parents (well, two parents to be precise) who will no doubt hate me for saying this, but it matters not. I’m too annoyed. If this offends you, then I’d say do something about it, but no doubt your bodies lack the hormones to rile you up enough to do more than piss in the wind about it.
Organic food is, by and large, a hoax. And it’s a hoax for rich people. I know, you’re thinking, “But I’m not rich! I live on a modest income and make sacrifices for better food.” Yes, you may not be rich in the context of your surroundings, but I’m pretty sure you’ve got amazing buying power next to your average Somali refugee. It’s all in the context, people.
Did we ever live in a time when we were at harmony with mother nature, taking from the earth as we needed and rejoicing in the splendorous gifts of nature’s bounty? Well, we tried, but nature’s a cruel bitch of a non-entity, and far too temperamental. When you rely exclusively on nature, you have good years and bad, and in the bad years, you hope to survive. That’s just not enough for a guy like me.
As soon as we learned that pooping on the garden helped some of the plants grow bigger, we started pooping on the garden. As soon as we learned that elemental sulphur kept bugs away, we began dusting with it. We encouraged through human selection plants and animals that best met our needs. We’ve done it all, we’re just getting better at it.
I recall a few years ago talking with a coworker about how great his garden was. He is a hick and lives outside of town, and he had brought in some examples of his produce-prowess, some potatoes as big around as my head, and probably as thick. They were magnificent. He then preened away about how he grew them organically. He praised himself for not using pesticides, and all the usual crap. And then he made a comment so stupid that it broke me. I tried. Oh lord, how I tried. But I couldn’t bite my tongue for long. He said, “At least I know I can pull a carrot out of my garden and take a bite of it right there without worry of the poisons I could be eating.”
You dumb fuck.
Studies about the danger of various pesticides are fairly clear. We can’t use them if they’re so effective they would cause us harm. We do know that there is every chance of cocktail reactions between multiple chemicals in our environment, but until we have a means of knowing what reacts with what, we’re going to have to trust our instincts here. So yes, there might be pesticides on my carrot (assuming for a moment I had a garden) but either way I’d wash the bejeebers out of that carrot because of all the dookie.
60 percent of the dry weight of your feces is bacteria. These bacteria live inside us, but are not a part of us per se. And they certainly aren’t rooting for us. Most of them are harmless (at least until they encounter an amoeba) but some of them will really mess a person up. Yes, I know, you don’t poop on your garden. But does your kittie? What about puppykins? The cow from the neighbors’ yard? People have this silly notion that you get E. coli from eating improperly butchered meat. That’s true, sure. But poop doesn’t only live in the slaughterhouse.
Most of us hadn’t considered this fact. We read our Fast Food Nation and decided that we would be immune to E. coli if we just stopped eating meat. Then 2006 reared it’s ugly head and reminded us that we weren’t quite as clever as we thought we were when spinach, and later lettuce triggered a rather significant outbreak resulting in 199 infections, 31 cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome (a type of kidney failure), and three freshly dead bodies. The determination of the cause of the outbreak was accidental contamination from an Angus cattle ranch.
Organic farming requires more resources. Because it is less adept at dealing with pests, more crop is lost, which means that if you want an organic farm to produce as well as a non-organic farm (presumably, a silicon-based farm?) then you have to grow more food on it. The bang-for-your-buck is dramatically lessened, as is the effective use of farmland. It’s not a sustainable model, especially when we look further than our own noses and see that the world has a huge population of no-condom-wearing baby factories. And we have to feed them.
Of course, that brings up the idea of genetically modified food, or to the general public, TOMATOES CROSSED WITH FLIES SO THE TOMATOES HAVE WINGS AND THEN HTEY ADD IN DNA FROM ICE CUBES AND SALMON AND THEYRE PLAYING GOD. Shut up, general public. You have no idea what you are talking about. We have been genetically modifying the foods we eat since we first started eating them. It’s called selection, and it’s kind of a big deal. Yes, we’re more able in this scientific age to splice DNA from one thing to another, as in the suggested solution to the banana problem, but how is that a bad thing?
The root cause is distrust and ignorance. When people think of science touching nature, we don’t think of the fact that we’ve been doing it forever, that our current crop yields (even amongst the organic farmers) are the result of scientific progress. They think of thalidomide (1961) and DDT (1972). This is because these are thrown around every time a conversation about science starts. Both of these events were managed as well as possible, and led to sweeping changes in safety screening.
And of course, there are the raw foods people. I could say a bunch about them, but c0nc0rdance has yet another fantastic video up about the topic, so I’ll leave it with him.
Facts is facts, folks. We need to be smart about how we use our farmland just as we need to be smart about what we expose our food to. Organic farming is not sustainable, is not practical, and is a ridiculous luxury of life in the wealthy west. And it ain’t enough.
Eat healthy. Exercise. Try not to stress about things. Make sure a good amount of veggies are in the diet, but equally make sure you’re getting all of the building blocks you need. When you’re not hungry, don’t eat. Do these things in remembrance of me and you shall live, my children.
Jim
As a child, I ate many, many carrots pulled straight out of the garden. But we washed them off with the garden hose first. I was a picky eater, and carrots just looked so pretty orange when they were clean.
Oh, and my dad used fertilizer. Next time he makes a comment about me being screwed up, I’ll tell him it’s all his fault, because of his hearty garden.
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OK you know that porn picture with the lady who has stalks of celery in her bum? Well does it matter if she washed the celery dookie off, since she is putting it in a dookie maker? OH god what if both dookie particles mixed and created a super dookie?
It’s pretty sweet that we in the Western world are now at the point where we can not only be individually picky about what we eat, but can also start social movements based on not eating some things and hating on those that do. Every time I eat something vegan-friendly I secretly think, “Fuck you Somalia.” It’s true.
I agree with Big Ugly on the organic hoax. All countries have various regulations that will help qualify foods (lets just look at veggies for the purpose of this post) to be labeled “organic”. Two qualifications that are part of the list are that you can’t use any type of synthetic pesticide and the land has to have been “free” of synthetic chemicals for x number of years usually three. Well when you look at the half life of a lot of the chemicals that go into a pesticide, three years isn’t going to do a GD thing. Plus with all the chemicals/toxins/pollution that is in the ground water or even irrigation water, just because you aren’t directly putting the chemicals on the plants doesn’t mean they aren’t taking them in via other sources.I think a lot of people tend to forget how much pollution is really in this world and thinking that eating “organic” is going to help them live longer. In actuality, it’s not going to do a whole hell of a lot for you. But if you want to spend the majority of your food bill buying six things are Whole Foods or Community Natural Foods, go nuts just don’t tell me that I should follow suit. I am more then happy buying “poisoned” food at Superstore which leaves me more money for important things, like blow.