Do you buy organic? - Page 3

This is close to my approach as well. I always buy organic dairy and eggs however.

Ignorance is bliss. Poop is a nitrogen based fertilizer and one of the major complaints about crops grown with petrochemical based fertilizers is that they require far more water per acre.

I usually buy organic, but my doing so is somewhat incidental. My favorite produce vendors and the farms I buy meat and eggs from put out organic products. I don't go out of my way to buy crap stamped with the word "organic" as certified by either the USDA or CCOF. Some things I buy such as wild mushrooms or wild caught fish cannot, I believe be certified as such.

this is a definition i'm not familiar with. in my experience (and i've done a bit of reporting on it for the last 10 years or so), all meat is grass fed until the last 6 months or so. Then the difference is whether or not it is "grain-finished". most meat is ... that is the classic, well-marbled American steakhouse flavor (see colicchio v. irena or whatever her name is). grass-fed beef tends to be much leaner and to have a different flavor ... to me, it's almost like lamb. this is not a value judgment. just different (but boy do i like a well-marbled prime rib). there are also issues of animal husbandry involved as feedlots, where the cattle are grain-finished, tend to be pretty nasty places, both for the cattle and for the surrounding environment.

organics is a really complicated question. in the first place, you have to differentiate between whether you're talking about organic principles or the "organic" label as it is administered by the USDA. the differences are too great to get into in a single post, but a few stray thoughts from someone who has been involved in this issue for a long time: 1) "organic" in either context does not mean chemical free. it just means grown using approved chemicals. and sometimes products that are chemically identical can be organic-approved or not depending on how they were produced. like i said, it's complicated. 2) there is no evidence of any consumer difficulties--either long-term or short-term-- from eating non-organic produce. there are studies that indicate that some of the chemicals (sigh: both organically approved and not) can be harmful if you are exposed in large enough doses (another sigh: almost anything is harmful enough in large enough doses ... there's a saying in epidemiology that it's the dose that makes the poison). 3) this is not to say that organic is a scam. There have been and continue to be clusters of reported health problems among farm workers from exposure to agricultural chemicals (note that these tend to be in cases where they were used in non-licensed ways). 4) IF YOU STILL PREFER TO BUY ORGANIC, to complain about the price is hypocritical. Organic crop yields tend to be anywhere from 15% to 30% lower than conventional. The difference has to be made up somewhere since farmers don't get a break on land prices just because they're growing organic. so what do I do? in most cases, i buy on flavor. great flavor in produce only comes from careful farming and careful farmers do not overuse agricultural chemicals. in some cases, this means buying from organic farmers or the organic section, but most often not.

i buy organic celery....thats about it.

sorry, i don't think that's accurate. quoting from grass-fed beef 101:

agree absolutely. more than 25% by weight of all of the pesticides used in california last year were organically approved (copper sulfate). and if you think "organic" means small ... Earthbound Farms is up to something like 40,000 acres.

the part that says all cattle have been fed grass at a certain point. the distinction they're making between grass-fed and grass-finished is based on the fact that there is no official definition for grass-fed, so some grain-finished beef is sold as "grass-fed" since, for most of its life, it was. grass-finished more accurately describes the difference.

I never really used to care until my parents started getting one of those baskets of organic vegetables delivered to the door by a local farmer. They had it delivered once a week, it would last the entire week and I believe they paid somewhere in the region of $20 for it. The most remarkable thing I remember was the taste of the potatoes. They were unlike anything I'd had before - nutty, earthy and packed full of flavor. I now buy produce at a farmers market in NYC where it actually seems to be pretty comparable (if not cheaper) to buying from a crappy supermarket.

I don't go out of my way to go organic. If it is competitively priced, maybe. My cousin and his father died of cancer and brain tumors respectively. They both were to manly to wear masks whilst spraying pesticides on fruit crops/orchids. The son died before his father - probably due to harsher/more chemicals being used now-days.