Opponents of organic food never bring one of the main reasons why people buy organic - it tastes freaking awesome. While it may not be true for all products, there is a pretty clear difference between a lot of organic and non-organic products.
Probably 2/3 of what we buy is certified organic, 1/3 'conventional'. Everything is local, and I'm pretty sure that everything we buy is better than anything flown in to the organic section at Whole Foods. And I'm definitely sure that the certified organic produce is not uniformly better than the non-certified. The differences farm-to-farm, variety-to-variety, and season-to-season are certainly stronger effects.
Perhaps you point instead is that there is a difference between a mass produced tomato flown in from afar and ripened in a chamber and a home-grown tomato picked at the peak of ripeness? And that the tomatoes on the vine at $3.99/lb are often a better facsimile of the latter than the pinkish tennis ball at 99 cents/lb? In which case I'd agree with you. But I'd hesitate to say that this is because it is 'organic'.
There really are two very different problems. One is how to we feed lots and lots of people in poor parts of the world and the other is how can rich spoiled people like myself get the best tasting vegetables. The solution to these two problems probably isn't the same.
You give somebody a tomato, an apple, a pear from Kroger or Safeway or Publix, and another from an organic farmers market... I'd be just as willing as you to bet on that random consumer selecting the organic produce.
And you can't separate the distribution method from its production method. They're part and parcel of each other. I would much rather buy locally-grown, non-organic produce than organic produce grown in an industrial operation a thousand miles away.
Why? Outside of the arguments of freshness, which could be dealt with by a more efficient distribution mechanism, I don't see any net benefit.
I'll admit that the argument toward supporting local farmers carries little weight with me. Outside of the freshness argument, it strikes me as little more than small-town sentimentalism. There are a number of other industries where we did far better when we dispatched that argument; I'm not yet convinced that food production is any different. I can imagine all sorts of economies of scale that could be exploited, but we have to let the economy scale first.
The American industrial food chain consumes more oil than American automobiles. The industrial food chain enforces a farm mono culture where a plot of land sees only one crop, year on year, for decades. Or maybe two: Maybe soybeans get thrown in the mix. Local polyculture farms raise animals and a number of different crops in a little dance that mimics the natural cycle of life. Cows eat grass, and they and horses are the only animals that can. Birds clean up after the cows. What's left when the birds are done grows more grass. Goto 1.
The industrial farm leaves over-tilled dead soil in desperate need of artificial fertility, and ridding these farms of animals leaves them all on gigantic feed lots with manure ponds.
If you don't see the problems with this, you've buried your head in the sand. And that doesn't even touch the surface of the massive amount of fossil fuel we use to truck produce and meat 2000+ miles to a supermarket that itself is filled with thousands up thousands of food-like substances.
Huge agribusiness has proven you can indeed industrialize food. And to anybody that's ever looked closely at it, it's also proven that you shouldn't.
- Organic vegetables aren't chemically ripened, non-organic vegetables usually are.
- Organic snacks use sugar or cane juice, most non-organic snacks use corn syrup.
- Organic snacks use non-hydrogenated oils and real butter. Quite a few non-organic snacks use partially hydrogenated oils.
There's nothing that says corn syrup can't be organic, but 'organic' foods almost invariably use better, alternative, and often more expensive ingredients.
Given this, I don't think anyone would have difficulty identifying the foods.
ALL vegetables without exception ripen because of chemical reactions. I presume you mean that the chemicals that cause ripening in some vegetables weren't put in the vegetables by human agency, but that may not make a difference if they are the same chemicals in either case.
Organic snacks use sugar or cane juice, most non-organic snacks use corn syrup
What is the evidence that this difference has any significance for human health or any other important issue?
Your point is uselessly pedantic. Most conventional tomatoes are picked from the vine early and are then ripened through the application of ethylene. This produces a less flavorful tomato.
And yes, I'm also aware that arsenic is "all natural".
What is the evidence that this difference has any significance for human health or any other important issue?
Sugar is less sweet, and foods made with it tend to have a more balanced taste. This is something I consider to be an important issue when it comes to food.
My opinion is of course subjective, though popular. The fact is that corn syrup was never added for the flavor. It was substituted for sugar because it's cheaper than sugar.
As my own main food preparer, though, the main issue I have with organic is that it's less convenient. It takes me about the same time to chop up an onion or tomato no matter if it has a four inch diameter (non-organic, from Walmart) or a two inch diameter (from the organic bin at Shoppers Food or where ever), but I have to use a lot more of the organic ones to get the same amount of veggie. Also, organic veggies are far more often misshapen or have bad spots that have to be cut out, which I assume is because tomatoes that aren't being speed-ripen have more time for spots to go bad.
All in all, I'll keep buying food that looks good over food that might taste a little better (assuming I'm just unobservant).
I agree with the thesis of the article, though. With the coming (actually, possibly already-existing) overpopulation crisis, high-tech food is going to be important. Unfortunately, the hardcore food-hippies will have to get over that fact.
Also, regarding the lack of efficiency in transportation - where can I learn more? Of course high-volume shipping is more efficient per unit, but does this include incidental transit overhead for those people managing this process? I guess what I'm trying to say is that what matters is the total environmental costs incurred by the entire production/distribution "ecosystem", not the per unit shipment cost reported an invoice somewhere in the process.
As for the efficiencies in transportation, a recent book to take on that subject was "Just Food: Where Locovores Got It Wrong". The basic idea, which makes a lot of sense when you think about it, is that modern logistics systems have spent a lot of time and research on getting very good at what they do. Companies in this business track every penny involved in getting goods from point A to a lot of different point Bs. One big truck going from the farm to a regional distribution center and then twenty smaller trucks going shorter distances from that center to customers ends up being a lot more efficient than a small army of trucks going from the farms to those twenty customer sites.
There are some externalities that do not show up on the bottom line, but I can't see it being more than a drop in the bucket compared to the total cost of the entire effort.