Organic uses pesticides

> So foreign food producers just say their stuff is "organically grown", even if it was smothered in pesticides

Organically grown products are usually smothered in pesticides, since “organic” doesn't prohibit pesticides, just the more targeted and effective ones, forcing quantity to make up for quality.

They are now growing potatoes in the Egyptian desert, to fill demand for organic potatoes in Germany. Organic is not automatically better for the environment.

> In my own experience, organic fruits and vegetables at least taste much better.

Have you done blind taste testing? We already know that e.g. more expensive things taste better.

Comparing best case scenario organic farming as it might be done in the future with worst case scenario conventional farming methods is not particularly fair.

Imho the problem with GMO is patents on gene sequences.

I don't see how altering plants to produce chemicals is more dangerous than introducing new chemicals produced in a lab. We do the latter all the time, most chemicals we use in industrial processes are basically untested for safety (e.g. look at all the additives in plastics or textiles). GMOs can help reduce the need to pesticides and fertilizers so their use can help the environment. But due to overblown fears even completely harmless modifications like introducing new colors of flowers are treated as if they were literally the devil [1].

As with all new techniques it's probably good to be careful and test things for long term adverse effects, but the kneejerk reaction of GMO=dangerous does more harm than good.

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/how-transgenic-petun...

> The problem with GMOs is that you can skip to dangerous islands of viability that would be impossible with standard breeding.

I don't think that's true. GMO only provides an average of 5% more production in the developed world, and that's what I've read from the studies cited on the Monsanto website, so presumably the studies which put them on the best light possible. It's a clear increase of revenue and production but it's not a game changer revolution either.

> "At least that's my understanding of Taleb's argument against GMOs."

I'm interested in reading more about this perspective. Is this in one of his books? Or does he have articles about this somewhere?

Yeah there's a weird logical disconnect amongs the people that Taleb would call IYI "Intellectual Yet Idiots", many of which subscribe to mainstream left-progressive politics.

X is bad for natural diversity. X has the potential to make it much easier to produce enough food to feed people. X might result in all insects, in particular bees, dying. The biggest danger of X is that it could trigger a positive feedback loop, a runaway process that ruins the world. Although X also happens naturally albeit at a much slower rate, we don't have enough understanding of X to ensure it's safe.

If X == "global warming", then X is bad. If X == "GMOs", then X is good. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I work for a company that has sibling companies that do GMO work.

I myself feel like there are plenty of legit discussions to have about GMOs, yet we cant have those discussions because of the startlingly large number of people that think GMOs will mutate YOU.

It is refreshing to see a comment on the topic that doesn't trigger a reflex laugh/sob.

Habitat loss is probably the leading cause of decline and extinction right now. I'd wager habitat loss due to agriculture is killing more than glyphosate runoff by a significant margin. Whether the degree to which habitat loss is averted with space-efficient GMOs is sufficient to offset glyphosate runoff, I cannot say. I suspect the most ethical option is to stop consuming food grown in particularly threatened environments, particularly imported tropical fruits, whether or not they're organic.

Regardless, it seems clear to me the matter of organic vs non-organic is not as clear cut as the organic industry and their prolific passionate proponents would have us believe.