In article ,
"songbird" wrote:
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
Quite a little rant. As far as organic foods are concerned, that is what
humanity has been eating since the Garden of Eden to 1945. If that is
insufficient, then it is a wonder that we are still here. Our liver is
indeed here to protect us from our mistakes, has our entire history been
a mistake?
Organic religion? Shirley, you jest. We are only talking about
traditional food, grown in traditional ways. Does that aspire to the
level of a cult?
Contemporary, commercial agriculture kills top soil, kills soil ecology,
pollutes ground water, and creates ocean dead zones around the mouthes
of rivers. Contemporary, commercial agriculture requires more than a
calorie of fossil fuel for each calorie of food. Organic (traditional)
agriculture produces 2+ calories for each calorie of input.
Contemporary, commercial agriculture fills your body with chemicals that
your liver never saw before, much less has developed any way of dealing
with.
With corporations now funding large segments of our underfunded higher
education, don't be surprised if scientists can't get funding for
nutritional studies that are very expensive to run. Even now, industry
is fighting doing toxicological studies of chemicals that that were
grand fathered into our food delivery system.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chemical-controls
April 2010, Scientific American
p. 30
Chemical Controls
Congress needs to give federal agencies greater authority to test and
regulate chemicals
People seem to thrive on traditional food. It is only when they take up
western food that they get sick. One of the reasons that wheat was
separated from its germ is because with only the starch and none of its
nutrition, white flour attracts fewer pests. Stay away from processed
foods (empty calories of sugar, white flour, and white rice), and you'll
be healthier. The Inuit didn't have diabetes, until they started eating
from trading posts. Colonial doctors reported little i the way of
diabetes, cancer, or high blood pressure, until the introduction of the
"Western" diet. Sugar consumption (IIRC) has gone from 15 lbs/year in
1840 to approximately 170 lbs/year at present in "western" cultures.
But, hey, it's your organism, who am I to tell you not to abuse it?
Especially, when the University of California
http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16717
and
Stanford University
http://academicearth.org/lectures/battle-of-the-diets
can say it much more eloquently and with more authority than I can.
Don't get me wrong, even traditional organic agriculture isn't perfect.
Far from it,
http://www.environnement.ens.fr/pers.../mistake_jared
_diamond.pdf
And as you work on your grapevine, or worrying about uncontrolled
immigration, remember that by 2050, there will be 9 billion people on
this planet with us, and 12 billion by 2067. And we have already
exceeded the Earth's carrying capacity for us.
We can't even figure out what to do with a half-century's total
production of over a 1 billion tons of plastic that is floating around
in the oceans. It includes hundreds of different plastics, with untold
permutations involving added plasticizers, opacifiers, colors, fillers,
strengtheners, and light stabilizers. The longevity of each can vary
enormously. Thus far, none has disappeared.
What did this mean for the ocean, the ecosystem, the future? Would its
chemical constituents or additives ‹ for instance, colorants such as
metallic copper ‹ concentrate as they ascended the food chain, and alter
evolution?
The use of aggressively toxic polychlorinated biphenyls‹PCBs‹to make
plastics more pliable had been banned since 1970; among other hazards,
PCBs were known to promote hor-
monal havoc such as hermaphroditic fish and polar bears. Like
time-release capsules, pre-1970 plastic flotsam will gradually leak PCBs
into the ocean for centuries. But, as Takada also discovered,
free-floating toxins from all kinds of sources‹copy paper, automobile
grease, coolant fluids, old fluorescent tubes, and infamous discharges
by General Electric and Monsanto plants directly into streams and
rivers‹readily stick to the surfaces of free-floating plastic.
One study directly correlated ingested plastics with PCBs in the fat
tissue of puffins. The astonishing part was the amount. Takada aad his
colleagues found that plastic pellets that the birds ate concentrate
poisons to levels as high as 1 million times their normal occurrence in
seawater.
The World Without Us (Paperback)
by Alan Weisman
POLYMERS ARE FOREVER / 151
http://www.amazon.com/World-Without-...2427905/ref=sr
_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274206221&sr=1-1
And we want to build more nuclear reactors ;O)
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg
http://radwisdom.com/essays/this-is-your-brain/