Carbonfiberboy 

As athletes (or at least athletically inclined) we know we should eat lots of fruit and vegetables. Some say we should eat organic produce, and some say it doesn't matter. So have a look at this:

https://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/...ml?source=mypi

"The peer-reviewed study found that the urine and saliva of children eating a variety of conventional foods from area groceries contained biological markers of organophosphates, the family of pesticides spawned by the creation of nerve gas agents in World War II.

"When the same children ate organic fruits, vegetables and juices, signs of pesticides were not found.

"'The transformation is extremely rapid,' said Chensheng Lu, the principal author of the study published online in the current issue of Environmental Health Perspectives."

Besides giving you pesticides in your urine, never a good thing, conventional agriculture contributes to climate change with its reliance on fossil-fuel created fertilizers and other chemicals.

So I say, read the label, and figure the extra you are paying for organic produce really is going for very cheap health care! Plus I think it tastes better and you can feel good all day about your choice. Or maybe I'm just another nutcase, huh?

Machka 

And on the other side of the coin, I have my reasons for avoiding organic food whenever possible.

valygrl

What might those reasons be?

Nickel

I end up buying local, which usually ends up being organic. I am also happy because these farms have started freezing their produce so I can get organic, local blueberries in January that are not from Chile.

I'm being really general here which will get me in trouble, but it seems that some big farms that use pesticides don't train (or care about? )their workers safely handling the pesticides and there are lots of health issues.

Hobartlemagne 

contaminating yourself with e-coli from the manure fertilizer used in organic farming.

Carbonfiberboy 

Though organic foods have a better safety record than non-organic. If you've ever been around non-organic farms, you've seen raw manure being sprayed directly on the fields, whereas organic farming forbids this practice. The FDA traced the e. coli spinach contamination to a neighboring non-organic cattle feed operation, whose runoff water then infected the spinach fields. That they happened to be organic was not a factor.

Most of this misinformation can be traced back to a Mr. Avery of the Hudson Institute.

https://postharvest.ucdavis.edu/datas...es/234-208.pdf
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php..._organic_foods
https://www.organicconsumers.org/arti...ticle_2407.cfm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Un..._coli_outbreak
https://ngin.tripod.com/fao-org.htm

Machka 

Some of my reasons include:

1) I've seen organic fields. They are the ones that look diseased and half dead. I have a lot of trouble believing that tastes better.

2) Even organic farms use pesticides ... they are allowed to use up to a certain limit and if they didn't their diseased and half dead plants would be completely dead.

3) If there's an organic field next to a regular field, you'd better believe that when the farmer who does crop dusting gets busy with that, the organic field is benefitting from the chemicals too. The crop dusters are quite accurate but no one is 100% perfect.

msincredible

Keep in mind that standards for what can be labeled "organic" differ by country.

urodacus

'organic' just means one extra sticker per piece of fruit, doesn't it? anyody can do that. anyway, all food's organic. if it wasn't, we could eat rocks.

Demit

Even the study in the OP states that it couldn't find any harm in eating non-"organic" produce. Billions of people in the world eat produce with several times the amount of contaminates on them than what was found in this study with no measurable harm so far.

CdCf

Not sure what you're thinking here.

Over here, organic produce is regularly tested, and most organic products are found to be virtually pesticide free. For bananas in particular, the difference is huge. I only buy organic bananas.

ModoVincere

Best solution is to grow as much of your own veggies as possible.
Even tomatoes can be grown in pots if you don't have a back yard.

Personally, I grow Asparagus, tomatoes, peppers (bell peppers, jalepenos,and habeneros), onions, beans, cucumbers, watermelons, strawberries, and grapes in my back yard. This way I know what goes on them and have fresher food than even the organic section at the local grocery store.

CdCf

I'd love to be able to do that, and I definitely plan on doing it in the future. But for now, I don't have the space, nor the back yard to grow any. And I'd need a greenhouse anyway.

Holyspokes

Of course organic food is not going to look as "perfect" as food sprayed with pesticide... that's the point of the damn stuff, to preserve it. That doesn't mean organic food isn't as good tasting or good for you. Of course there are studies that show everything, but there have been ones that showed organic foods retaining more of their nutritional value, so your not eating empty calories.

I don't know how you can say people all over are eating non-organic food and there is no measureable harm done... There are more health problems now then ever before, i'm not saying it's just pesticides, but you HAVE to consider that i could be a possibility.

I'd rather pay the extra money to know that i'm eating something the way nature intended, instead of sprayed with chemicals that kill things. Plus, i find organic food to taste much better, non organic bannanas are tasteless compared to organic, imo.

TheKingFiphtin

Even if organic f&v don't taste better or have any health benefits, reducing the amount of excess nitrogen and phosphates in the soil is a good thing. I grew up drinking well water, and I want that water to be as pure as possible. Ever check out a body of water near a big farm? Crazy algae blooms not only look gross and make swimming undesirable, they also play hell with the waters ecosystem. When those rapid algae blooms die, their decay sucks up huge amounts of o2, resulting in lots of dead fish on shore.

Also, I'm pretty freaked out about my food being covered in chemicals designed to kill stuff. You can only wash off so much.

There are sure to be many effects related to fertilizers, pesticides, and preservatives that we know nothing about yet, because we haven't actively studied long term effects on each of the different chemicals used. It's still only speculated about what's causing such high cancer rates in the US, and well as early onset puberty.

Why not play it safe? Eating local, organic foods is great for your local economy and you can be pretty sure your money is going to help a neighbor, not some giant agribusiness. You do lose out on the novelty of eating an apple shipped all the way from New Zealand, though.

"I don't care about spots on my apples, leave me the birds and the bees"

4cmd3

Off the fruit and veg track but...

You can take my organic peanut butter when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.
It actually tastes... like peanuts!

And real maple syrup or bust... I'm looking at you Aunt Jemima.

+1 organic and +1 locally grown (when possible)

Roody

Organic tastes a lot better and it's better for the environment. Many studies show organic produce to have higher levels of micronutrients.

Machka's living in bizarro world. Every organic farm I've seen--and that's a great many--was beautiful, green, obviously healthy. (Unless it was wintertime, of course.)

Hobartlemagne 

Cheap mass-marketed peanut butter has the peanut oil removed and replaced with other oil. They sell
the peanut oil.

Good peanut butter leaves in the peanut oil.

Just check the ingredients- you'll see.

sounddevisor

We try to buy locally-grown, organic produce whenever possible. Organic almost always tastes much better, aside from the health benefits of less chemical contamination. Locally-grown supports the local economy, tends to be fresher and better tasting than shipped-in produce, and is environmentally friendly since there are fewer transportation costs and emissions associated with it. Think about the emissions cost of shipping, flying, or trucking produce from Chile or New Zealand to New York!

Carbonfiberboy 

There is something to what Machka says. The organic market is the fastest growing agricultural market. New organic farms are created, not just called organic. These organic farms-to-be are called "transitional."

In changing a field from non-organic to organic agriculture, the organic farmer must repopulate the soil with microorganisms and create the humus that the new organic plants will feed on. During this transition period, the plants have neither the old chemicals nor the not-yet-created organic matter on which to feed. So they do look pretty bad. But neither are they salable as organic produce, because it takes time for the chemicals to leach out of the fields or otherwise disappear.

I understand it takes 5 to 7 years to convert a field from non-organic to organic farming methods. That's a huge investment for the farmer and one reason that organic produce is more expensive at this time. But once that's done, organic produce is competitive with non-organic in appearance and taste. It will still be more expensive, because organic yields are typically 90% of non-organic yields. As we all know, being 90% as fast doesn't win many bike races. That's why organic produce will continue to be slightly more expensive.

Roody

Competetive in taste and appearance? No, usually much superior on both counts, IME. As for price, locally grown organic produce purchased at a farmer's market is usually cheaper than the supermarket crap. And if you really want to save money, you can join a CSA. That's typically 40 to 50 per cent less than you would pay at the market or supermarket, and the quality is phenomenal--it's the same stuff the snooty restaurants buy, direct from the farm.

You are right that organic produce sold at Walmart or Krogers is usually equivalent in quality to their nonorganic crap, and usually more expensive. One exception is organic lettuce in supermarkets, which is usually better and sometimes cheaper than nonorganic lettuce.

ModoVincere

There's a classification, I think its something like "Organic Methods Used" or something like that under which the crops can be sold during the transition period. I believe a farm has to have used organic methods for 5 yrs to be certified as an organic producer.

Roody

A lot of farmers don't want to confine themselves strictly to organic methods, but their crops might be better than certified organic. One reason to buy locally is that you can ask the farmer how the stuff was grown.

A lot of times I ride my bike out to the farm to buy direct. That food is twice as good-- good when you take a great ride to buy it, and good a second time when you come home tired and hungry to cook it.

Doctor Who

In order to be certified organic, food grown by organic means must have a buffer zone between it and fields producing conventionally-grown food. Farmers who grow organic food usually don't even want to grow near conventional fields, because if their food is ever tested for chemical residues, they could lose certification, which would of course present them with a huge problem.

As for organic fields looking half-dead – most large fields that I've seen have been just as vibrant as their conventional counterparts. Of course, most of those are industrial concerns over thousands of acres. I'm just as familiar, as I guess you to be, with organic food from small farms, that looks ugly or nasty. It happens, but nowadays, most organic food looks just as nice and tastes just as good as conventionally-grown food. If it didn't, the market wouldn't be clamoring for it as it currently does.

Garfield Cat

I heard that the big corporate farms are buying up organic farms and producing their own version of organic. The word "organic" is now under the control of the same corporations that grow the non-organic plants. It comes down to the power to control by legislation.