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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, th

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.

dagw 17y ago
Exactly. I don't care too much about organic vs non organic vegetables per se. What I do care a lot about is that I get the tastiest vegetables I can get. It just so happens that this means buying organic most of the time. 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.
fburnaby 17y ago
I can second that. I took up buying my vegetables from a few hippies around town last year. They deliver to my door for the same price the (non-organic) vegetables would have cost at the grocery store. Though, I think a lot of this improved taste could be freshness as well; most of the goods are local and were picked much more recently. Another detractor is the fact that the food at the store has (typically) travelled much longer distances. 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.
- evgen 17y ago
  Your CDs/farmers market food may have trvelled fewer miles, but it travelled in a far less efficient manner. So calked "food miles" are also around 4-5% of the energy cost in the food. Time from harvest to table and varitals selected may differ between your veggie selection and your neighbors, but odds are that their food used less energy to get to their table than yours did.
  - fburnaby 17y ago
    Interesting - how? Isn't the means of production also much higher for mechanized farming? I'm hardly an expert so I'd love an explanation if I'm wrong, but I figured that the extra services involved in the larger-scale operations would also require extra transport of goods before and during harvest. 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.
    - evgen 17y ago
      It is mostly a matter of scale when it comes to the actual farm operations. Larger operations have the available capital to invest in pricy equipment that decreases their operational expenses (favorable tax advantages make this a win for most businesses, bug operations just have the cash/credit to actually act upon the available options.) For a farm a lot of that expense is fuel, fertilizer, and herbicide/pesticide; larger, more efficient equipment is usually the quickest route to being fuel efficient on the farm and there are a variety of options ranging from GMO crops to smarter tilling and cover crops to try to reduce the usage of fertilizer and other chemicals. A lot of these techniques were pioneered or "re-discovered" by modern organic farming but the make sense for any farm. 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.
amelim 17y ago
I would be willing to bet that in a double-blinded study the difference would be a lot less clear cut then you propose.
- encoderer 17y ago
  To be fair, I think you'd have to distinguish between Industrial Organic and true farmers-market / moms-backyard organic. 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.
  - amelim 17y ago
    So you want to compare a piece of produce that has probably traveled for several days and sat around waiting to be selected against one from a farmers market where it was probably picked the day or two before? It seems like you are arguing against distribution methods, not organic/non-organic.
    - encoderer 17y ago
      The trouble is that there often isn't a choice of "non-industrial non-organic." The 2 farmers markets in my area are stocked full of organic produce. Probably because a farmer can sell it for a few dollars more to people just like me if he produces organic. 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.
      - azanar 17y ago
        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.
nkurz 17y ago
I disagree. I think you are confusing two issues: 'certified organic' and 'local artisan'. I'm in a business right now where I buy a LOT of locally grown fruits and vegetables --- often 1000 lbs a week. I'm in the Bay Area, and I buy at the farmers' markets direct from the growers. 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'.

dagw 17y ago

Exactly. I don't care too much about organic vs non organic vegetables per se. What I do care a lot about is that I get the tastiest vegetables I can get. It just so happens that this means buying organic most of the time. 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.

fburnaby 17y ago

I can second that. I took up buying my vegetables from a few hippies around town last year. They deliver to my door for the same price the (non-organic) vegetables would have cost at the grocery store. Though, I think a lot of this improved taste could be freshness as well; most of the goods are local and were picked much more recently. Another detractor is the fact that the food at the store has (typically) travelled much longer distances. 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.

evgen 17y ago
Your CDs/farmers market food may have trvelled fewer miles, but it travelled in a far less efficient manner. So calked "food miles" are also around 4-5% of the energy cost in the food. Time from harvest to table and varitals selected may differ between your veggie selection and your neighbors, but odds are that their food used less energy to get to their table than yours did.
- fburnaby 17y ago
  Interesting - how? Isn't the means of production also much higher for mechanized farming? I'm hardly an expert so I'd love an explanation if I'm wrong, but I figured that the extra services involved in the larger-scale operations would also require extra transport of goods before and during harvest. 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.
  - evgen 17y ago
    It is mostly a matter of scale when it comes to the actual farm operations. Larger operations have the available capital to invest in pricy equipment that decreases their operational expenses (favorable tax advantages make this a win for most businesses, bug operations just have the cash/credit to actually act upon the available options.) For a farm a lot of that expense is fuel, fertilizer, and herbicide/pesticide; larger, more efficient equipment is usually the quickest route to being fuel efficient on the farm and there are a variety of options ranging from GMO crops to smarter tilling and cover crops to try to reduce the usage of fertilizer and other chemicals. A lot of these techniques were pioneered or "re-discovered" by modern organic farming but the make sense for any farm. 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.

amelim 17y ago

I would be willing to bet that in a double-blinded study the difference would be a lot less clear cut then you propose.

encoderer 17y ago
To be fair, I think you'd have to distinguish between Industrial Organic and true farmers-market / moms-backyard organic. 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.
- amelim 17y ago
  So you want to compare a piece of produce that has probably traveled for several days and sat around waiting to be selected against one from a farmers market where it was probably picked the day or two before? It seems like you are arguing against distribution methods, not organic/non-organic.
  - encoderer 17y ago
    The trouble is that there often isn't a choice of "non-industrial non-organic." The 2 farmers markets in my area are stocked full of organic produce. Probably because a farmer can sell it for a few dollars more to people just like me if he produces organic. 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.
    - azanar 17y ago
      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.

nkurz 17y ago

I disagree. I think you are confusing two issues: 'certified organic' and 'local artisan'. I'm in a business right now where I buy a LOT of locally grown fruits and vegetables --- often 1000 lbs a week. I'm in the Bay Area, and I buy at the farmers' markets direct from the growers. 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'.