The USDA only protects and represents producers: full corporate capture. They run interference for Puppy mills [1], organic food mislabeling [2], misdirected trade aid to large operations instead of family farms [3], and germane to OP, all kinds of lobbying and gigabuck price supports for dairy products which shouldn't even be recommended daily diet. Etc.
"Certain dietary choices that have been linked to heart disease, such as an 8 oz (230 g) serving of hamburger daily, were technically permitted under the pyramid."
Citations needed. I worked on an organic vineyard for a summer and I can tell you it took a lot of work to get that label.
Non-organic vineyards in our area had barren earth or gravel under the stalks as they used weedkillers regularly. In contrast, we practiced “turf flipping” where we would, with clever machine and hard work, turn the soil over to smother weeds. The soil was alive and rich with the longest earthworms I’ve ever seen. This took incomparably more time than spraying chemicals but we believed in the mission. And the extra money from labeling it organic didn’t come close to covering the extra effort.
In some cases at least, the label means something.
I think the question really is about benefit/trade-offs of the work/costs that goes into the organic. Apart from of course outright fraudulent actors.
Case in point is Sri Lanka's current economic meltdown (1) - which is to a significant extent attributed to the government going all in on organic, banning fertilizers resulting in yields plummeting - less food to go around and no longer self sufficient, exports plumetting so less hard cash to buy oil, medicines no way to provide power, transport etc
The question I asked was about cost/benefit trade offs of organic and indeed as the linked article indicates, what are the trade offs with how the math adds up. I am not pre-supposing that a switch to organic is even desirable like this comment above.
For instance, if without inorganic fertilizers, yields plummet 20-30%, does that mean we need more forest land converted to farming tonkeep people fed? Do 20-30% more people have to work in agriculture vs today and stop working in cities? What would that do to urban services? What similarly are the trade offs from using fertilizers for land? What happens over time?
If there are good research papers that explore the total system costs and economic impacts?
From the article linked in the parent comment, the failure was very well predicted by it sounds like basically everyone who knew anything about agriculture. And that prediction was based entirely on basic facts about agriculture rather than any "how to get there" effects like you're saying caused it to not work.
Our vineyard didn’t make as much money as surrounding vineyards but it was still self sustaining. More robust demand for organic wines would have made it even more so.
Organic farming has external benefits as well, or rather the absence of negative externalities like harmful chemical run off and less water usage. These aren’t as easily noticed by just looking at market dynamics currently.
All that being said, my understanding is that organic farming isn’t the right choice in all cases. It’s definitely more labor and sometimes resource or land intensive. It takes a certain wealthy consumer base to support it.
I hope that robots can eventually make organic practices more widespread. Instead of spraying pesticides (some of which are permitted under organic rules in the US and Europe) have robots come by continuously and pluck each weed as it appears. Pluck the pests from The leaves and stems. Water each plant individually per its need, etc. There should be no need to sacrifice a human on backbreaking and fiddly labor.
There is little scientific evidence of benefit or harm to human health from a diet high in organic food, and conducting any sort of rigorous experiment on the subject is very difficult.
In a word, sustainability. It is about the farming.
Many people who buy organic food expect a reduced pesticide load (particularly in secondary products like eggs and dairy), but the main point is to support the organic farms and organic farmers, with the hope that the practice will spread.
It’s (generally, though not always) a proxy for “premium” food; so it’s useful to me as a consumer in that sense. But yeah, the idea that “organic” has any meaningful benefit is flimsy even when the definition is strict.
While the label "organic" may have been hijacked and rendered largely meaningless by government agencies like the FDA and their corporate masters, there is indeed a difference between food produced using chemicals, pesticides, antibiotics and growth hormones (among other things), and food that is produced naturally without these drugs, poisons and other additives. That some people dispute the fact that there is a measurable difference in health outcomes when consuming food produced "naturally" vs food produced with a host of drugs, chemicals and poisons is irrelevant to the fact that the word "organic" actually has a meaning, and people who choose to consume food produced without drugs, chemicals and poisons should be free to do so (even if this is considered silly by those who believe that the drugs, chemicals and poisons used to produce their food have no measurable effects).
You're being pedantic but not actually using a common definition of chemical. Perhaps "chemical substance" might apply.
AOED definition of chemical: a compound or substance that has been purified or prepared, especially artificially: _never mix disinfectant with other chemicals | controversy arose over treatment of apples with this chemical._
His point was they are/were using chemicals regardless of if they understood the chemistry at a low level or not. When ancient people/(or modern) used dung to fertilize crops they are using chemicals. With that being said I think when the power of modern chemistry / genetic engineering and modern economic agricultureraly forces collide caution is warranted.
>His point was they are/were using chemicals regardless of if they understood the chemistry at a low level or not.
Even if that was his point, it is still completely wrong.
>It is impossible to produce food without chemicals.
If you live in the northern hemisphere, it is only June. Go plant a handful of pumpkin and watermelon seeds in a patch of fertile earth. Add no "chemicals" of any kind - man made or otherwise. Return in 4 months and you will very likely see food that has been grown with absolutely no chemicals at all.
I point that out in conversations similar to ours because (in my experience) so many people who make the chemical-free argument do so because they've fallen for the Appeal-To-Nature fallacy, e.g. "naturally grown food must be better for you." The reality is that Nature only finds local maxima for some variables relevant to the organism's survival, and those variables aren't necessarily relevant to what is best for human health.
In this particular thread, my first contribution was too flippant to be constructive, so I deserved the down-vote. But I wasn't being intellectually dishonest.
Discussing individual chemicals by name is inefficient, confusing and almost certainly requires scientific citations to be remotely worthy of discussion.
Going by groups of chemicals is a bit better, but then citations are largely not applicable.
There are no synonyms or near synonyms. The dictionary definition of ”chemical” (noun), however, is explicitly clear:
1 : a substance obtained by a chemical process or producing a chemical effect
2 : a drug
I posit that the person saying ”chemical” is not being lazy, they are being scientifically accurate while enabling rational discussion.
It’s anyone saying ”but EVERYTHING is chemicals” that needs to check the dictionary.
Your definition "1" describes just about anything. Water, for example, produces a chemical effect. So do amino acids. Your entire metabolism is a chemical process, as is the growth of plants. What I think that people mean when they talk about "chemicals" in their food is artificially synthesized chemicals and that's easy enough to say.
Sri-Lanka decided to only produce food "without drugs, chemicals and poisons". Now they're starving. You're lucky 99% of the organic labeled food you consume were in fact produced using the same things all of the vegetables in the world use, but anyways, if you prefer to pay double the price for smaller carrots, who am I to stop you.
What they decided was to ignore every detail of well understood methods to manage transition from one system to another. Their failure is wholly a product of that choice.
1, https://www.aspca.org/news/usda-letting-puppy-mills-operate-...
2. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/15/the-great-orga...
3. https://www.agriculture.senate.gov/newsroom/dem/press/releas...
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_(nutrition)#Contr...