Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
...
The better for what? question about my organic meal can of
course be
answered in a much less selfish way: Is it better for the
environment?
Better for the farmers who grew it? Better for the public
health? For
the taxpayer? The answer to all three questions is an
(almost)
unqualified yes. To grow the plants and animals that made up
my
meal,
no pesti- cides found their way into any farmworker's
bloodstream, no
nitrogen runoff or growth hormones seeped into the watershed,
no
soils were poisoned, no antibiotics were squandered, no
subsidy
checks were written. If the high price of my all-organic meal
is
weighed against the comparatively low price it exacted from
the
larger world, as it should be, it begins to look, at least in
karmic
terms, like a real bargain.

i'd be sure that at least one of those farmer's
children were on birth control.

i love science, but we have a long ways to go
before we have the complete picture of this
understood.

i wouldn't be surprised to find out at how
much of what we consider good gardening
now will be proved false in the next 50 years.

i remain a wide-eyed optimist with cynically
rose colored glasses.

True, we understood mega-nutrients: protein, carbohydrates, and
fats,
but that wasn't enough.
Now we understand micronutrients: vitamins, but that isn't
enough.
Will bioflavonoids be it, or will that not be enough as well?

actually, what i am wondering more and more
about is while i'm sure that some of the things
that plants make are ok for us, many other
substances are either going to be somewhat
toxic or neutral and the end result is that the liver
is the primary sorting ground. so any nutritional
studies which do not analyze long term liver
function/toxicity are basically crap.

all these chemicals that plants make to defend
themselves from predators (including herbivores/
omnivores i.e. us) at some level will be doing
some damage and perhaps organic gardening
which increases certain chemicals may be increasing
the burden on the liver. we really are not very far
along in this sort of "entire system" analysis when it
comes to all the chemicals the body can ingest
and the waste products and how they are transported
and etc... some things are stored in fats and thus in
the fatty cells in the body. some things come out of
the fats given certain diets and such, etc. all of this
is not really completely understood either.

take it all in combination and we are many years
from "knowledge" in the sense of completeness, but
at least we are on the way if we don't manage to do
ourselves in first. it's a race IMO. considering what
we knew a hundred years ago we've made a lot of
progress, but much of what we know now is still
likely to be flat out wrong. i trust science to figure
it out eventually, i do not trust "organic religion" any
more than i trusted "atkins diet religion" when that
became a craze.


songbird