You have given me some excellent ammo for my ongoing disagreement with my daughter about organic food. She swears that she can taste a difference, especially in fruits and vegetables. I keep reminding her that she’s just taking the seller’s word for it that something is truly organic. And honestly, how do organic farmers prevent the drift of pesticides or herbicides from neighboring farms that aren’t organic? That’s even a problem for home grown veggies and fruits. I have a home garden, and some of my neighbors spray their lawns with chemicals. There is no way to keep crops perfectly organic.
Definitely thought-provoking. I have bought organic-labelled products, but it is true that when that product comes from a country far away - outside of our own EU /UK regulatory regime - one is taking it at face value. On the question of taste comparison, I cannot say that I have ever tasted a real difference between an organic baked bean and a decent quality non-organic bean. I wouldn't pretend otherwise. And I take on board the fact that organic growing methods are much less efficient and everything comes with a cost, one way or the other. One only needs to look at what happened in Sri Lanka, when the government decided to go completely organic to reach some sort of UN standard, and the result was huge food shortages and economic disaster for a nation whose population would be largely subsistence-based. Maybe the organic thing is in the same bracket as the Fair Trade franchise. It feels very virtuous to wealthy Western consumers, but when you drill into some examples and practices imposed on producers, it can in fact be very punitive and obstructive to the economic betterment of the farmers involved; for example by insisting on some environmental measures which are unachievable for a lot of farmers, meaning that they cannot sell their perfectly good produce, in order to tick an environmental "sustainability" box.....when most Western consumers would regard the Fair Trade label as purely a guarantee of a guaranteed fair price to the producer.
This is a welcome dialogue. Build relationships with farmers and wholesome producers; it eliminates the fraud, which is the real contamination
You have given me some excellent ammo for my ongoing disagreement with my daughter about organic food. She swears that she can taste a difference, especially in fruits and vegetables. I keep reminding her that she’s just taking the seller’s word for it that something is truly organic. And honestly, how do organic farmers prevent the drift of pesticides or herbicides from neighboring farms that aren’t organic? That’s even a problem for home grown veggies and fruits. I have a home garden, and some of my neighbors spray their lawns with chemicals. There is no way to keep crops perfectly organic.
Definitely thought-provoking. I have bought organic-labelled products, but it is true that when that product comes from a country far away - outside of our own EU /UK regulatory regime - one is taking it at face value. On the question of taste comparison, I cannot say that I have ever tasted a real difference between an organic baked bean and a decent quality non-organic bean. I wouldn't pretend otherwise. And I take on board the fact that organic growing methods are much less efficient and everything comes with a cost, one way or the other. One only needs to look at what happened in Sri Lanka, when the government decided to go completely organic to reach some sort of UN standard, and the result was huge food shortages and economic disaster for a nation whose population would be largely subsistence-based. Maybe the organic thing is in the same bracket as the Fair Trade franchise. It feels very virtuous to wealthy Western consumers, but when you drill into some examples and practices imposed on producers, it can in fact be very punitive and obstructive to the economic betterment of the farmers involved; for example by insisting on some environmental measures which are unachievable for a lot of farmers, meaning that they cannot sell their perfectly good produce, in order to tick an environmental "sustainability" box.....when most Western consumers would regard the Fair Trade label as purely a guarantee of a guaranteed fair price to the producer.