Things are very interconnected when it comes to food, agriculture, health, and the environment. It isn’t just about cost, it’s also about impact.

As for whether organics can feed the world – no. Not the way we eat now. But if we reduced meat consumption and focused more on native and local foods, we stand a very good chance. People in Africa grow crops that the 1st world has exported to them – crops that weren’t meant to be grown on African soil. Hence the huge amount of synthetic input. If they went back to native crops (which right now are cheaper because we export our cheap subsidized grain), they’d see significant improvements in yields.

I think instead of organic vs nonorganic, it’s better to think about local and minimal impact. If it takes a huge amount of fertilizer to grow something… that’s the earth saying something. Pay attention.

The greatest advantage of purchasing organic foods has been how much easier it is to know what I am consuming. There are less ingredients, usually, and if I have a question as to what the farmer is feeding their livestock I can simply ask them

That being said, the article as written does point to a big ugly revolving door.

Not sure where you live, but in California milk is labled “not from cows treated with rBST.” What more do you want? Monsanto’s push back against misleading lables like “hormone free” or “rBST free” is understandable because such lables are so misleading. “Hormone free” or “rBST free” lables suggest that the milk without this lable has a bunch of hormones in it that the milk with the lable does not have, and that’s not true. A more honest and accurate lable would say “This milk is not from cows not treated with rBST, but in laboratory tests this milk was shown have no significant differences from the less expensive milk without this lable.” That would be full disclosure. At least then consumers wouldn’t be deceived into spending more on milk from untreated cows based on a vague and misleading lable. But of course, the milk producers who use the lables aren’t interested in full disclosure like this because they wouldn’t sell as much milk. They like the vague lable because it bolsters the idea, unsupported by evidence as far as I know, that their milk is better for your health.

I don’t have the time to respond to all the misinformation in these posts, but would like to point out that many are arguing apples and oranges. Start by deciding if you want to make your food-buying choices based on personal health, environmental health, local economy, or something else. Or decide how you will weigh each to come to your conclusion. I point this out because the conclusion will change based on your criteria.

The big money $cience $tudies have obviously gotten through to many. I can’t believe no one tried to say that atrazine in my drinking water is actually healthy since it is an estrogen mimic and a little bit will reduce my chances of getting breast cancer.

-
Former Kansas farm girl with graduate degrees in environmental sciences & decades in a career dealing with pesticides in the environment (for the federal government).

An organic herd is more likely to be grassfed, with the manure staying on the land and recycling into the soil. In contrast look at a large farm, such as a hog farm, which is an enviromental mess. Not only are they being fed grain trucked in from somewhere else (grain that could have been used to directly feed people) there are so many livestock stuffed in one area they cannot deal with the amount of waste being produced. Rather than being used in a productive manner it is simply stored in “lagoons” which are environmental time bombs.

I guess if one wants to get to the nitty gritty, there are too many people on this planet, and Americans eat too much food, too much meat in particular.

I would never buy organic milk for two reasons. One is that cows on an organic dairy farm are not allowed to be given antibiotics if they have an infection. I think that’s cruel–if I required antibiotics, I would take them, why would I require the cows my milk comes from to not get the same treatment? By law, on any dairy farm (even hormone pumping, non-organic ones), a cow that is on antibiotics must have her milk dumped, not sold. So antibiotics in the milk supply isn’t something you need to worry about.

The other reason I’ll never buy organic milk is that organic dairy cows produce less milk and more methane gas per cow than a “typical” dairy farm. So organic dairy farms produce more greenhouse gases per gallon of milk than non-organic dairy farms.

Cows that are not treated with rBST produce less milk per cow, but they produce less methane gas than an organic dairy cow. So pick your poison: (1) get warm fuzies from you “higher level” of milk and help destroy the environment (the “higher” the level, the more damage) or (2) drink milk that may or may not be worse for you and do less damage to the environment.

If scientific analysis of milk from “hormone-treated” or “antibiotic-treated” cows and the non-treated cows can discern no appreciable difference, then spending more money for the former is a value-driven choice only if superstition is a value. If 99.8% of pesticides in fruits and vegetables are naturally produced by the plant itself, then shaving the man-made .1% of pesticides out of your food supply can’t really be about the pesticides at all.

It’s nobody’s business if some people choose to act in their own lives on the basis of superstitious beliefs, but they make it everybody’s business when they start talking about passing laws based on those beliefs, especially laws of potentially catastrophic effect.

For those who are paying extra money to buy organics and are willing to look at the issues with an open mind, an article that summarizes them well is:
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1567/full

Mitch, thanks for your efforts to inject a little reality into the discussion. Reading those efforts and the “talking point” responses to them makes me despair. And lwanda’s approach – “I think *most* people could make do with eating less food and paying more for it” – is downright scary. Didn’t we learn anything from Stalinist-style agriculture?

Modern agriculture feeds more people more healthily with less back-breaking labor/child labor/slave labor than ever before in human history. Yet there are seemingly lots of people who would be willing to destroy the whole enterprise and start over.

Another item of interest in that article is: “Codex Alimentarius, the U.N. Body that sets food safety standards, has twice refused to approve the safety of rBGH”

Read “Food Politics” by Marion Nestle. It’s very enlightening on this topic.

Safety and health issues aside, what if I would just like the choice, as a consumer, to avoid products from cows treated with rBGH? Why not let the market decide whether rBGH should be used or not? Monsanto pushes back very hard against consumer choice in this area. You have to wonder why.

@Stephanie: There is evidence to suggest that the people who take factory jobs in underdeveloped countries are in fact better off than they would have been otherwise. Many of the young women who work in factories in China comes from really backwards provinces where there is not much else besides subsistence farming. Obviously, I wish that they received more benefits than they do. But I have to buy clothes from somewhere. (By the way, I don’t actually buy clothes from WalMart, since they are not accessible by transit from where I live; I was just giving the most extreme example I could think of.)

@Joanna: Thank you for your comment. I take your point about laws. I guess my statements about people buying cheap food and people voting for legislation that makes food more expensive seem at odds. But many people, even common people, will vote for candidates and laws that are against their economic self-interest, even though they will pick the cheaper product when presented with a choice at the grocery store. And there’s nothing wrong with that, because people are not mere economic machines, and those laws and candidates fulfill our other, less quantifiable interests.

Also, the United States is technically not a democracy but a republic. I’m sure our “governmental elites” are passing all sorts of bills and policies that the “common man” would oppose. Whether or not this is a good thing is outside the scope of this post.

Sorry, Consumer Reports has verified for me that to be certified organic, “No animals, except dairy cows prior to being moved to organic farms, can be given antibiotics, growth hormones, or feed made from animal byproducts, which can transmit mad cow disease.”

Maybe your farm was breaking the rules?

Beware of what you eat just because its ‘hormone free’ or ‘organic’ where is the actual scientific evidence that these things are better for you?… there isn’t any

Increases height, causes fat loss and increases muscle mass, and at high levels correlates with increase in cancer rate.

To be fair here, though, was there not growth hormone in the milk when we were raised? (I’m an Xer as well.) Is the supposed addition of “growth hormone” a new development since you and I were children? Because if it isn’t then logically, we’d have to rule that out.

Trent: Thanks for the very interesting debate. I am inspired to further my research so that I can make an educated decision for myself. Or at least more educated than my previous purchasing decisions have been.

Now when I stared this “boycott” my food bill doubled. However, in 2008 it has cost me 30% less every month to feed my family than it did in 2007. That means it is really costing me 40% more than the “cheap” grocery store in my area and to my surpise about the same as the “expensive” grocery store.

My new theory is that in 2010, two years after my family and I started eating only grass-fed beef, my food bill will be about the same as the “cheap” grocery store due to simply eating less.

Oh I almost forgot, everyone in my family has seen a decrease in their BMI, belly fat, and sickness.

I cannot figure out why, but growth hormones in our food sounds like a possible culprit.

Good to know. I found all your statements in a wikipedia article on Posilac . . . haha. . . maybe you wrote it.

Clearly, I was too ambitious in my previous statements. The FDA has found no “significant” difference, not no difference at all between milk from treated and untreated cows. And yes, rBST is not naturally occuring, but BST is, and BST is found in milk from treated cows and milk from untreated cows. So, again, good luck finding hormone free milk.

According to my extensive (not really) google research, the insulin growth hormone you mention is produced by the human body, and the amounts in mink from untreated and treated cows are said to be insignificant in comparison to amounts already present in the body, so I don’t see any problem there.

Yes, I have heard claims of a “revolving door” between the FDA, “big Ag” and big drug companies. But I don’t know of any people that have actually gone from big ag, to drug companies to the FDA, do you? I’ve seen it between the federal government and defense contractors, but not in the ag/drug/FDA context. Maybe you have some examples. Otherwise it’s just a convenient conspiracy theory.

My main concern with the food industry is the costs (energy, resources, and monetary) that are required to produce and transport each food product from pasture to plate. Knowing that the bulk of the organic food industry is just another branch of the large food conglomerates doesn’t comfort me into thinking that these foods are produced in the greenest way possible.

Instead I will do my best to shop locally and choose the freshest options with the least amount of packaging.