Organic foods
- Thread starter Miggs
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♪alt13
Well-Known Member
The big difference is that teflon is a convenience while food is mandatory. I very much doubt we could feed this many people without pesticides. We should test them for safety but we can't really do without them. I have been growing tomatoes, peppers, strawberries this year. A small pesticide free garden in a vast desert(for insects)of lawns and concrete. It is amazing how many bugs get into it. I could double the number of strawberries I get if I sprayed. I don't, so snails and crickets take about half of them. My peppers haven't been bothered but I have lost maybe a 1/4 of my tomatoes.
I honestly doubt that most of the crap people buy at wholefoods is actually pesticide free. Even if it is there is no way to scale organic up to meet the needs of everyone without eventually having widespread famine. For now pesticides are the lesser of 2 evils.
Can anyone here actually describe what organic is?
I don't know man. Mandatory or not, it is irrational to take the position that if one company used a chemical irresponsibly, we might as well stay away from all chemicals. All modern products involve synthetic chemicals.
♪alt13
Well-Known Member
ummm
1)Pesticides are bad for you.
2) No it's really not. Weighing the potential risks verses the rewards is entirely rational. ie If there is an economically reasonable alternative that we are confident in it's safety it's kind of a no brainer.
Pesticides levels are federally regulated to be within safe limit for human consumption. Additionally, you should always thoroughly wash your produce. The risks are negligible, regardless of the essential nature of food.
Bruh, pesticides affect more than the food you get at your grocery store.
Pesticide and herbicide run-off is a major thing polluting watersheds.
Worst thing about the pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer run-off from farms is that usually the states that do most of the polluting don't end up realizing most of the cost, like the Mississippi River Dead Zone that is largely created by the run-off pollution of the midwestern agriculture into the Mississippi River.
♪alt13
Well-Known Member
Dude no one knows exactly what the safe limit is for most pesticides. It's an educated guess at best but more likely an industry claim. When people start getting sick and it is successfully linked to a specific chemical we ban it. We don't do 30 year studies in advance to protect from long term risks. The EPA and the FDA can only be somewhat confident of short term risks. Beyond that they are just watchdogs.
All human activities have an environmental cost. Organic farming is 25%-35% less efficient (in yield) than conventional farming, and thus have a higher land and resource cost. Nor can organic farming support the world population due to need of more resources and higher cost of products. But that's neither here nor there. I was simply responding to the claim that conventional food is less healthy than organic food because it's sprayed with pesticide. That's not really true. The health risk of pesticides on food is small if handled properly. If not handled properly, then both conventional and organic foods carry a risk, as demonstrated by the e.coli cases that spring up now and again from manure use in organic produce.
But then we use countless chemicals in practically every modern product. How do you know these chemicals in <insert a product that isn't essential for survival here> are safe over decades of use? Since we cannot rely on current knowledge on chemical safety as very few are tested in all concentration over lifetimes, none of it can be considered perfectly safe. The rational stance is to evaluate the information given the evidence at hand, not according to some arbitrary threshold of negative proof.