Denmark does many things better than the US ... such as bicycle lanes. But food isn't one of those things.
Plus, much of organic food theory is total pseudoscientific bunk.
Check out this survey of research on organic food in the Gimlet Media podcast: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/5-organic-food/
That podcast guest is shit--food from ecological systems is absolutely better tasting. Ask any decent chef (myself included).
The idea that "organic food theory is bunk" is really hand-wavy. The importance of organic is the emphasis on ecology and soil health. Basically, life is made of carbon. So farms that are rich in life hold onto carbon. Whereas factory farm systems rely on monocrops, pesticides, and fertilizers, which sterilize life. These practices get an initial productivity bump, but end up depleting carrying capacity over several seasons. Subsidies are the crutch that keeps all that going.
Organic food theory is bunk. The double blind taste tests prove, scientifically that your better taste theory is wrong. You know you can grow heirloom varieties and perishable varieties with pesticide and fertilizer too right? Just because people grow perishable and heirloom varieties with organic methods, because rich people like organic, and rich people pay for these lower yielding varieties also, doesn't make these factors inherently confounded. You can separate them if consumer tastes at the top of the market change.
My family grows very delicious fruit and vegetable by using a judicious amount of pesticide and fertilizer, in a sustainable way, in central california. We practice crop rotation in our vegetable gardens (but our primary crop is walnuts which does not allow for crop rotation ... but we are exploring mixed use ... but harvesting constraints and other issues dominate the calculation on whether crop mixing is feasible there).
I am a programmer in San Francisco, and my father would probably have been one in 1970 if such a career was available to him then. He is a really smart guy. You think he is an idiot who doesn't examine all the issues when choosing to use pesticide and fertilizer? Our land has been in our family for almost a century. It is still yielding well. We know very well how to farm sustainably.
Edit: as for subsidies, we don't want them. But we live in a market where prices are determined by them. Subsidies are bad. But, we cannot remove subsidies as individuals. And I disagree that low prices are a result of subsidies in the aggregate. They are certainly for specific crops ... and certainly for meat. But unless you consider water use a subsidy, I don't think food would get 50% more expensive without subsidies. Total US Ag subsidies is around $20 Billion while the size of the Ag sector is like $900Billion. 20 Billion removal will not effect an almost 1 Trillion dollar market in such a drastic way. Specific crops will be more expensive, but on the whole, agriculture will migrate to better, unconventional crops. We will actually meet market demand BETTER once subsidies don't distort our crop choices.
What that study you linked to shows is that people interpret flavor with high suggestibility for the food's origin. They were misrepresenting origin to tasters--not just blindly tasting things. Plus, they were only looking at tomatoes. I guarantee if you run a completely blind experiment (with no suggestion bias) with peaches, gourds, or any meat product--factory system loses.
But the main point is that farmers have to make choices. To the extent that subsidies make factory-model decisions more viable--this leads to more food that is artificially cheap. And unpriced negative externalities are a form of subsidy. You can exploit a farm's ecological endowment or invest in it. If prices were perfect--investing in ecological richness would be more heavily rewarded.
I would argue, that using some pesticide and fertilizer is BETTER than pure organic methods, because you will not only grow delicious crops, you will have the luxury of trying some varieties which, while delicious, are too sensitive to disease to exploit commercially otherwise.
Edit:
There are many methods championed by organic farmers that do produce tastier food. But those methods are not tied to not using fertilizers and pesticides from factories. And while I credit them with introducing those methods. Those methods can be hybridized with the use of fertilizer and pesticide to get both yield and taste up.
In the case of meat, its clear that factory farmed chicken is garbage. Free range chicken tastes much better. We can use some scientific methods to discover what makes the free range chicken taste better, rather than accepting like religion that just putting them in a free roam yard is the reason for the flavor.
"Judiciously used", by the meaning of the words, limits what it describes to cases where it is in fact the right set of decisions. The injudicious cases are the ones I'm interested in picking out.
If you have a pest or pathogen problem that is recurring, applying RoundUp or some other chemical combatant is not as good as introducing a rotation or a biological competitor or predator. If you're soil is consistently deficient in certain elements--the overall better strategy is to introduce organic matter that feeds life in the soil (rotations, compost, etc.), rather than applying a factory-made fertilizer. The factory input just isn't as sustainable season-to-season as feeding biological matter into the soil.
There are also several perspectives from which to measure outcomes, that may have conflicting interpretations--flavor, nutrition, ecological impact, short-term vs long-term economics, etc.
So to the point that Denmark encourages good long-term economics, ecological impact, flavor, and nutrition--it's a good, sustainable project.
Have you done any (double blind) A/B testing to conclude this? Argument from authority (even if they are decent chefs) doesn't count.
But seriously, food being expensive is not the same as not doing food right. The few times I've been in the US, I've always been disappointed about the food available in supermarkets. It's hard to find stuff such as good milk or butter.
But even if you are right, that doesn't mean a good should be so expensive ... just because it CAN be expensive.
Also, its easy for Danes to distort the cultivation practices abroad by encouraging low yield practices to entertain their organic fetish. But that reduced yield forces additional open space to be brought under cultivation ... reducing wild habitat.
There are ways of doing agriculture sustainably, with a mix of traditional practices and a measured and scientific use of fertilizer and pesticide. Just because pesticide and fertilizer can be abused, does not mean they are abusive by nature.
So, the cost comparison may be apt although this page, which compare cost of living between San Francisco and Denmark suggests that groceries in San Francisco are way more expensive (nearly 60%), although restaurants are cheaper (16%).
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
Not sure how reliable a source this is though.
I've travelled around Europe, food is very cheap in Central, Southern and Eastern Europe. It's basically Scandinavia that's expensive.
> Danes spend more than twice the percentage of their annual income on food than the their fellow Americans. Also the purchasing power of a US citizen is about 25% higher than that of a Danish citizen.
Source? I'm actually really curious.
In Scandinavia it's actually relatively "cheaper" to locals compared to central/eastern Europe, while Danes spend ~12% of their annual income on food Poles spend over 20%. That's because the price of many food products is actually relatively similar in most countries within the EU including local production but there is a pretty high disparity as far as annual income goes.
>Source? I'm actually really curious.
http://www.imf.org/external/ns/cs.aspx?id=28
Generate a report with the PPP rating.
US PPP is 55K Denmark is 45K, if you care about take home wage then the US is also higher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_take-... Overall the US has cheaper housing, transportation, food and local services combined with considerably lower tax burden than Europe.
Ex: http://www.hrsa.gov/ruralhealth/ yes these things are not intended as a food subsidy but low population areas have higher costs for many things which would otherwise raise food prices. Economically only a fraction of rural aid lowers food prices, but the net effect is significant.
The US spends about 20 bln $....
Still nobody tops Japan per capita in direct subsides as they have USD$46.5 billion in subsidies, and a population of ~126 million.
PS: It's really hard to get a single subsidy number as laws are designed so things can be presented in many different ways. AKA, US calls something specific an income tax while excluding social security.
Purchasing power is more evenly distributed, though, i.e. the poorest have better purchasing power.
By OECD purchasing power comparison, Denmark is 26 % more expensive than U.S. And workers have, on average, 15 % lower wages in Denmark.
http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=CPL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w...
This is a common misconception, the poor in the US are as rich or richer than the middle class in the EU.
https://mises.org/blog/poor-us-are-richer-middle-class-much-...
Also, while you sort of mention it, I think using averages when the distribution is clearly skewed is a really bad practice. It doesn't help us develop intuition on how things are for most people.
There tends to be more than one angle on organic food
1. It's more nutritious than non-organic cultivation
2. It's more flavourful
3. It's less damaging to the environment
I can't speak for the veracity of reasons 2 or 3 (although, anecdotally, supermarket organic produce seems just as bland and tasteless than the non-organic variety), but reason 1 was challenged some years ago (2008) by an independent study. The study was commissioned by the UK's Food Standards Agency. An overview:
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20120206100416/htt...
The final report: Systematic review of differences in nutrient content of organically and conventionally produced food
http://tna.europarchive.org/20100929190231/http://www.food.g...
I agree that the idea of Frankenfood is hysteria. My fear of GMO's is due to my distrust of Monsanto, their near monopoly position in the global food supply, the legal tactics they use to bankrupt farmers for having the unmitigated gall to unwittingly use Monsanto seeds that blew onto their farm, and their regulatory capture of the FDA. There is a revolving door of former politicians they employ.
It's also unconscionable how they're able to ram through legislation that removes labeling of foods that are GMO's. Even if someone has an irrational fear of GMO's, they should still have the right to know the origin of their foods. Logic clearly dictates that the rights of the many outweigh the avarice of the few. God forbid they should try to educate the public on their safety or be open and transparent about their products.
Monsanto revenues are 15 billion USD, global food supply market is 7800 billion USD. Monsanto, including all its non-food-related businesses, is about 0.2 % of global food supply business.
"Organic" food business revenue, also just a niche globally, is about 5 times as big as Monsanto's revenue.
>legal tactics they use to bankrupt farmers for having the unmitigated gall to unwittingly use Monsanto seeds that blew onto their farm
That is a claim widely spread by Monsanto's adversaries, but it is simply not true. The case usually referred to is Monsanto Canada vs. Schmeiser, and it very clearly wasn't about "unwittingly" using Monsanto seeds. Schmeiser didn't even make such a claim in court, it's just a fabrication by anti-GMO activists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeise...
I just have a marked distrust of any organization that employs regulatory capture as evident as Monsanto.
The point about food labeling still stands though. It's true that a little information in the hands of the ignorant can be dangerous, but that is the cost of living in a free and democratic society and individual choice. Putting corporate interests over the freedom of information rarely, if ever, works out well. Monsanto has the resources and the former politicians to do effective public outreach and education. That they would rather use legislation makes them seem, at best, not worthy of trust.
I live in Austria where food is also expensive and most is organic but that's mainly because there is a 20% VAT tax on it, not because production is that much more expensive.
I do think that our vegetables are tastier than in the US but I doubt it has anything to do with organic.