Organic food

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Blades, I think the boobs thing has more to do with protein intake and is also related to weight gain. The metabolism shift and weight gain has more to do with entertainment readily available on the couch instead of needing to go out and play for entertainment (that and the propensity of junk food).

I personally don't check out grade school classrooms ... perhaps a call to RPD is in order....

 

On this topic, I prefer to let my wife lead, as she is the experinced one. Listening to her and some of her co-workers, they talk about the pesticides and steroids and how they affect kids, especially girls. Again, I'm no expert by far but when you see the results of purely organic diets of obese people and their weight loss, it's got to have some type of bearing on the situation. I would think the Biggest Loser show is a good example of this.

Shut up Aldeth!

---------- Added 0 hours, 3 minutes and 58 seconds later... ----------

Hey, lookie here funny man....

 

I haven't seen a major price difference in the basic foods when choosing between Organic and non-organic foods in my area. We split a half of cow with another family, the price of that organic meat is right on par with the non-organic cattle raisers. The price between Organic Veggies and Fruit and non-organic is not large at all in our local supermarkets. Strawberries is a good example. Woodman's, a local chain here in Wis/IL area, has a $0.20 difference for the larger size package, that's it. When comparing Salsa's and other specialty items I do see a big price difference. Especially the Gluten-Free items.

I think most of those who are buying organic are NOT doing it as a status. It is an attempt to be healthier in there everyday living. Especially those with children. Most parents want the best for their kids.

 

Just as those who don't believe "organic" means "better". It's just that kind of 'holier-than-thou' attitude that drives me up the wall with the organic movement. My in-laws are farmers, they have been for generations. They raise a variety of crops on a few acres for their own use (and then corn and beans on a few hundred for profit). They use pesticides and fertilizers and it hasn't hurt anyone at all -- seems that farmers actually realize you need to wash your food first.

 

That may be the case for small local farmers selling through their stalls but over here at least it doesn't apply to large suppliers. In my company we've been told it's an absolute no-no to send out non-organic fruit as organic and even leaving the customer short is preferable. The organic certification bodies and the supermarkets carry out spot checks looking for traces of chemicals in the organic fruit being sold. If we were found to be swapping in normal fruit we'd lose our licence to sell organic.

 

For those that don't know, some chemical pesticides and fertilizers are allowed for "organic" foods.

 

Same here. Most of it is on the "honor" system.

 

I agree with Barmy Army. Any food that is picked fresh from your garden or eggs fresh from a neighbour who has chickens or fish freshly caught, taste miles better than anything from a supermarket, regardless of its label. Fresh local fruit, veges, and eggs are by definition organic, but I'm not sure if that's why they taste better.

 

There was an article written by an American farmer arguing against organic farming. His arguments were basically that organic farming is not sustainable, because yields per hectare are so much lower than the traditional (ha!) methods. Thus, if all farming was organic, the food shortage would be even worse than it is at the moment, and people in third world countries would starve. Even if there was sufficient food to go around, production prices would rise up so much that they would be unable to afford it.

He also says that advances in chemicals in recent years have left the river water downstream of his farm cleaner than they would be if he had been using modern organic pesticides and fertilizer. because it is so much more powerful and targeted, he doesnt have to use nearly as much.

Might see if I can find that article.

 

In the UK there is a regulatory body for organic produce, though not sure if America and other countries have similar, I've seen accusations of 'organic' being a purely marketing label before.

There is a lot of wastage of food that doesn't LOOK appealing as well, which is one initiative I support Waitrose doing an "Ugly" range which are the fruit and veg that would normally be discarded for not being uniform or has grown into a peculiar shape considered unappealing to a customer base. Taste is just the same but so much produce is wasted over those ridiculous little rules that all of an apple should be smooth, a certain percent should be red and it should be as round as possible - and that applies to both organic and non organic.

 

That would make sense. I've never owned chickens, nor have had someone live nearby me who did, so I can't comment on them specifically. But I have eaten fresh picked fruit and vegetables, and I have eaten fish that were caught earlier that day, and they do tend to taste better.

Why would locally produced food be organic by definition? I live in the Baltimore area, but it's a strange metropolitan area in that most of the area surrounding the city is farm land. Big farms. From August-October we'll see locally grown produce at the supermarket all the time. And I do believe it's local as I've seen on more than one occasion "Farmer Bob" pull up with his truck filled with corn. But just because it's local doesn't mean it was grown organically. Heck, even if you get it from your neighbor, you only know if it's organic if he hasn't been using fertilizer and pesticides. It's not like it's hard to get a hold of. Any local garden center sells the stuff.

That is true. It varies by crop, but most organic yields per acre (or hectare if you prefer) were about 60% of what you'd get from traditional farming techniques. That's why organic typically costs significantly more. A farmer needs to make $X per acre to sustain his farm and family. Therefore, the only way it makes sense for him to produce a lower yield per acre crop is if he could sell that crop for a higher price.

Most people don't do that here either. I do know a lot of people that purchase an extra freezer, but for most of those people it's an issue of space because they have a small kitchen. No way is that small extra freezer big enough to hold half a cow.

About a month ago I saw this exact topic on the news. The average family of four in the US spent $206 per week at the supermarket, or about $52 per person if you prefer. (To be fair, you can buy stuff that isn't food at the supermarket - things like soap, various cleaning supplies, paper towels, etc. - don't know if that is included or not in the $206 per week.) The average household income in the US - not per person, per household - was about $58K. So the average American spends about 18% of his/her income at the supermarket - how does that compare to over there?

From what I've seen at local supermarkets, my experience is somewhere between Blades and Tal. I have noticed that the prices for organic are more, but no where near 2-3 times more that Tal reports. Now they aren't just $0.20 more per pack of strawberries that Blades reports either. If that were the case, I'd buy organic all the time. My experience is that they are more, but more like a 50% increase from the non-organic price, not double.

They had a case like that in the US too. There was a company a few years back that tried to name their company "Organic" complete with trademark. By naming the company "Organic" they could sell stuff as "Organic" (insert product name) even though most of the stuff they sold wasn't organic. They were trying to skirt regulations saying that by naming their company "Organic" it wasn't false advertising, as "Organic" referred to the name of the company, not as a descriptor for the product being produced.

 

Do you think you are representative of the average Slovenian? About what percentage of your income do you spend on groceries?

 

I personally don't subscribe to this "organic" bandwagon, its just a method of charging excessive prices for products weve been selling for years. I noticed that someone mentioned that they believed that human bodies are changing due to addtives in our food, our food has been subject to additives since the 50's and pesticides have been used for thousands of years - recent 'boob growth' is a little bit of a shot in the dark for the effects of additives.

8 - regulatory bodies in the UK aren't worth the paper they're printed on, a mate of mine is a dry cleaner, he's had a good rant about government regulation, apparently they recently brought in a 'solvent emmisions directive' to make sure that businesses using solvents are regulated, he said however that they guy working for the council doing the checks doesnt even know how drycleaning works or what solvent actually is - he mocks the system by stating that any workshop which had machines which could actually fail the emissions directive would be full of dead bodies.

 

Same here. They don't even enforce regular graded foods, so who is going to check? And what if they do? The "organic" food industry has a gigantic lobby group. Surprised?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_Trade_Association

 

We split a half, which means we get a Quarter. it easily fits in my freezer in the basement, along with several loaves of bread, frozen blueberries, etc... It's not a large freezer and it's not really that much meat. It's just worth buying that way because it becomes less than $2.00 a lb overall. Our quarter this year was around 280 lbs of meat. I had a chuck roast and a few steaks left in my freezer from last year. The year before it was gone in about 10 months. As for the meat, as it thaws, it cooks up just fine, even the steaks. What does frozen have to do with anything? The difference is so minor, it is by far worth the money savings. I also have them keep about 20 lbs of roast fresh when I pick it up, as we "can" it via our pressure cooker for easy and fast dinners when we are on the fly.

Just through my wife's Phystical Therapy department, 12 of them split up 3 cows from where we purchase our meat. Other's buy from different sources. In the midwest, it is pretty common to buy quarters of cow and pig as this is the hearthland of farmland in the US.