How do you feel about it?

Wirelessly posted (Nokia N97 / Palm TX: Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.4; Series60/5.0 NokiaN97-3/10.2.012; Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1; en-us) AppleWebKit/525 (KHTML, like Gecko) WicKed/7.1.12344)

I will pay more for organics... Gladly so.

It depends on the product.

It's also rather confusing over here in the UK, in that there's a number of different accreditations, particularly for animal products, and the Soil Association's organic mark is only one of them (and not necessarily what enables a supermarket to label it as organic).

Milk, I'll always get organic.

Meat, I don't buy that much, but tend to go for, at a minimum, 'Freedom Food' standard, particularly for beef and chicken (ditto for egg-based products). Pigs and sheep are harder to rear intensively anyway, so I'll usually base my decision on the quality of the end product - it's incredibly easy to tell the different between the kind of water-filled bacon that will shrink to half its size during cooking and leave a nasty residue, and the proper stuff.

Fresh fruit & veg, I'll judge based on the product and where I'm buying it from. If organic is better, I'll gladly stump up the extra cash.

UK: Organic food is just a tax on the gullible
09.aug.09
Sunday Times
Dominic Lawson

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/com...cle6788644.ece
There are two reliable ways of telling if you have won an argument. The first is if your disputants switch from discussion of the facts to accusations about motives; the second, more obviously, is if they descend to mere abuse.


Alan Dangour, a nutritionist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, should therefore feel he has had an encouragingly uncomfortable week. He is the author of a peer-reviewed meta-study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that concluded, from 50 years of scientific evidence, that so-called "organic" food was no healthier than conventionally farmed products. By the end of last week Dangour felt as if he had been covered with the brown stuff the organic lobby holds most sacred. He revealed that he had received "hate mail" and was "taken aback" by the "abusive" language used.





Nutritional benefit seems an odd thing to dwell on, though. What about how the food tastes or what the impact of particular intensive farming practices is?

at least once a year, there is a new study reaffirming that organic food has no greater nutritional content than conventional. but honestly, these studies are akin to studies confirming there are no apples in oranges. the primary value in eating organic is avoiding pesticides and other chemicals.

sure, there are some people who insist that organic food is more nutritious. but then again, there are people who believe obama was born in kenya, that intelligent design is a valid theory, or that humans don't cause global warming.

nail, you just got hit on the head. ^

...but that doesn't stop pigs in the US from being for the most part factory-farmed in conditions not far off from what they do for chickens.

Sow stalls? They've been made illegal here. It's a difficult choice to make, from a regulatory point of view. Few here disagree that it's the morally correct thing to do, but it's put British pig farmers at a huge disadvantage (and 2/3 of all pork consumed in the UK is reared in conditions that would be illegal here).

It also doesn't help that shoulder and belly cuts aren't at all popular here (back bacon is the most common form), so the value of these to farmers is minimal.

I suppose that one positive outcome of the various animal diseases that have hit the UK in the last couple of decades is that there is greater awareness of how intensive farming can exacerbate these problems - and some recent, high-profile publicity campaigns by celebrity chefs for better animal conditions. These have been incredibly successful, with sales of free-range chicken products rocketing - and some huge processed poultry and egg-based product concerns moving away from battery-farmed animals.

(A lot of it is education. A free range chicken is more expensive, of course, but if you know how to carve it properly, use all the meat, make stock from it, etc, you can get an awful lot more use and value for money from it.)

But again, it's often difficult to know what you're buying. I know that, for certain animals, being UK-reared is a guarantee of a certain standard of animal welfare, and that there are various marks that will demonstrate this (but the array of marks can get really confusing). Some distributors even deliberately try to fool you into thinking this, by labelling meat as 'UK packed', which, at a glance in a rushed whirl round the supermarket, would be enough.

Maybe part of it is just training yourself into how to recognise good quality meat. Maybe getting into the habit of using a proper butcher, or local farm shop (if available, and you have time). Maybe using an online shop which makes these clearly labelled (ocado.com is good for this). I don't know. But for me, it's not as simple as saying organic/non-organic, far from it.

Wirelessly posted (Nokia N97 / Palm TX: Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.4; Series60/5.0 NokiaN97-3/10.2.012; Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1; en-us) AppleWebKit/525 (KHTML, like Gecko) WicKed/7.1.12344)

Thanks for posting this...

I generally don't seek out organic. I will buy it if it looks like it will be better tasting than the non-organic equivalent. However, I usually avoid buying certain organic products that often come with bugs: broccoli and any leafy vegetables.

Wirelessly posted (Nokia N97 / Palm TX: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; PalmSource/Palm-D050; Blazer/4.3) 16;320x448)

bugs can be washed out.....

I have mixed feelings on the issue. A lot of me wants to believe it taste better and is better for me (avoids chemicals), but I also have a lot of trust in modern science and appreciate the benefits that provides. As a whole, I will pay more for a few items every grocery run, but don't go out of my way to purchase them

Pasteurization doesn't kill the prions that are believed to cause BSE; only incineration will. Pasteurization does kill the tuberculosis bacterium and hoof-and-mouth (wrongfully called foot and mouth) virus among other things.

And the counter to that: (this si a snippet from the middle. much more in the link)

http://civileats.com/2009/08/27/desp...uce/#more-4799