Billy wrote:
....
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?

some people talk about it with that gleem in
their eyes which removes all doubt that this
is _The True and Only Way_ to grow things.

alas, science will continue to show that
there will be even better ways of doing
things, given time, evolution is not optimized.



Contemporary, commercial agriculture kills top soil, kills soil
ecology,

have you read anything about no-till practices?

i'm not a contemporary farm practices apologist,
i just don't see how we get out of the current fix
without food riots and mass starvation and many
other turmoils.


pollutes ground water, and creates ocean dead zones around the
mouthes
of rivers.

i think organic farms can also pollute ground water
and certainly do contribute to nutrients in the rivers
thus the dead zones. i think there is a major problem
there but i think it is also contributed to heavily by
many other practices which are not agricultural
(lawns being one of them, massive parking lots/paving,
ditching, drainage not filtered through wetlands,
waste processing plants, etc). i don't think it correct to
put that sort of thing wholly on the plates of the
non-organic farmers.


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.

where are you getting this calorie amount from?
from what i know, organic farming is more
labor intensive, so will require more people
to grow the things consumed. which is good
for employment, but does not help reduce
the pressure on the entire planet's ecosystem.

i do agree that the petrochemical system
currently in place is going to peter out
eventually, it has to, there isn't an infinite
supply of oil. there isn't an infinite supply
of anything on this planet, we really need
to be investing in figuring out how to survive
in smaller systems and what is needed
to thrive there.


Contemporary, commercial agriculture fills your body with
chemicals
that
your liver never saw before, much less has developed any way of
dealing
with.

somewhat true, and these are greatly troubling
to me also. Dioxins being a local trouble (read
about the dioxin contamination of the
Tittabawassee River and the Saginaw River
sometime).

i'm also greatly troubled by the general
neglect of understanding of what happens
to things after we are done with them.
including things like BC meds, all those
plastics (which you speak about below
and i agree with that they are trouble) which
act as long term sources of pollutants,
landfills, etc.


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.

i know, that is horrible and for
certain should require safety studies,
even if done for one item per company
per season it's not that terrible a
thing to ask. and actually if you have
many companies using the compound
in question they could all contribute
to the study based upon how much
they use. seems fair and the cost
gets passed on to consumers anyways
in one form or another eventually...
there's no real way to avoid the
price of ignorance even if most
people do not really want the
slightly higher prices that knowledge
would cost it's a basic science
question that eventually will have to
be addressed, it doesn't matter
what the currency is used to
pay for it, the ultimate currency is
human time and wasted or damaged
lives/ecosystems/other organisms, etc.

i read about current practices
in meat processing and testing and
decide to not eat much ground meat
as a result. there's no way i want
meat that has been treated with
ammonia to kill the microbes put
back into the mix (i thought that
was what pigs were for ). and
actually i try to eat less meat as i
consider it fairly "expensive" when
it comes to the environment. as
an omnivore it's a part of the total
feedbag and i like a good burger
or steak once in a while, but i know
some people who eat that way
every day... um, not for me...


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.

again, not entirely true, before modern
methods came along people died from
malnutrition and food borne diseases or
just didn't make it to old age where such
things as heart disease and diabetes tend
to show up more and more.

when i want to amuse myself i think
that i really wasn't meant to live past
40 and should have been food for a
saber tooth tiger.


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,

heh, a lot of people just died earlier than they
do now, and much that people used to die of
isn't accurately known or reported. there are
still troubles in knowing even now. this is a
continuing issue of privacy vs. community
health and what science needs to know to
advance understanding. not easy things to
resolve.


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?

i'm offline at the moment so i cannot follow links... however,
some of what you write above is simply not true. modern
food science and as a result changes in agricultural
practices has reduced toxicity of certain things and i'm
glad for that (being that peanut butter is something i like
to eat on a regular basis i'm glad to know it's produced
to reduce the toxins that can otherwise accumulate). also
that is true for many grain crops that used to have much
higher fungal troubles and the resulting toxins... not that
this is all right, but i think it has helped in some ways.

i agree that the overprocessing and such is not good,
and i eat myself to avoid some of the things you mention
but not completely as certain tastes, textures and
end products (in baking and candy making) just aren't
right when done with whole grain flours or unrefined
sugars.

moderation being the key there (omnivore means
eat a variety of things, physiology says eat more
plant than animal things, climate and physical exercise
means certain amounts of calories are needed and
sometimes you have to have dense sources of nutrients
just to survive, but most people these days do not
need as much as they are getting which is obvious).


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.

oh believe me i'm already knowing of
that. it's only the petrochemicals which
are feeding a lot of people now, when
they start becoming scarce the food riots
are going to be "interesting". my personal
choice to not have children and to drive
as little as possible a very fuel efficient
car is what i could do to make a difference.
i try to make other differences in not
using a lot of fertilizers, in trying to
soak up or filter runoff before it hits the
ditches. i'm a big fan of river restorations
and letting the rivers flood again where
they used to go, restoring wetlands,
stopping the spraying of nerve poisons
for insect controls, etc.

i like organic farming, i like working
with the world around me instead of
having to fight it, but at the moment i'm
also having to live in a world with values
almost 180 degrees from my own so
somethings i must bend around as i
can.


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.

some of it has been incorporated in reefs.
(one of my interests has been coral reef
oceanography/biology/nutrient cycling).


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?

raw copper is really tough on marine
critters. most of it gets bound in one
way or another before it gets to the
oceans.


The use of aggressively toxic polychlorinated biphenyls
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 grease,
coolant
fluids, old fluorescent tubes, and infamous discharges
by General Electric and Monsanto plants directly into streams
and
rivers
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.

yep, it's going to take it's toll one
way or another. i'm glad we
recycle plastics here. until we
did i was not buying certain
products because i objected
to the packaging.

mercury loading is troublesome
too from coal burning (among other
things). ok, this we must skip for
now. my toxic metal knowledge is
limited to lead, murkery, copper
and some of the radioactives.


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)

designed right and run right i'll take
them over coal/oil any time, but my
preference is more towards solar and
wind and conservation measures.
the big trouble with the wastes is a
farce, they could be disposed in a
way which the earth would normally
cycle them (reprocess, what's left
could be encased in heavy glass,
steel, lead, etc. then dropped into a
continental subduction zone which
would take it back into the mantle).

in the end we gotta get a move on
learning how to live in space and
that has a certain time frame that it
has to happen by or we're just another
fossil in the record...

a few good blasts from a bunch
of volcanoes and we're seriously
in trouble worldwide within two
years... in my other moments
of wondering what kind of
people i live among it amazes
me how many really just don't
care about the long term future
of the planet and the means
by which we can get moving towards
other planets... optimally i would
like to have that happen when we
know what it takes to live in a
relatively closed system without
damaging ourselves in the process...
but if push comes to shove i know
what bit of the cosmic ark i'd
want to be on.

it is going to take a large
and organised system of
production to get that to happen
which means corporations or
government agencies and all
the foibles of human nature
that come along with such
groupings. at least science
has ways of understanding and
helping all around. i think
organic means of production will
be a part of that too, but there
will also be industrial processes
too. we're just too far past the
carrying capacity (as you say and
i agree with) to go back short of
cataclysm or a real serious long
range effort to gradually reduce
populations... i don't see that
happening. people want to have
babies, they want children to
take care of them when they
grow older, they want workers
to pay taxes so they can fund their
pet projects (safety studies,
nutritional studies, health studies,
space science and exploration ) hee

oh, i feel bad that i didn't
speak about ocean acidification.
as that is a basic change that
will have long range effects and
we're basically ignoring it by
pumping all the carbon dioxide
into the air... organic gardening
is not going to fix that because
organic gardening aims to recycle
nutrients not sequester carbon
dioxide. somehow that has to
be addressed and fairly immediately
and unfortunately it's not. people
are still driving SUVs even after
the oil platform spill and all the
havoc that is going to cause... *sigh*

if only i were king... i think that is
why your .sig is always amusing to me.

consider this:

humans are an ecological system's
response to limited and finite resources...
we are the great innoculators, the
means of dispersal and of course
destruction if we screw up. oops.

ok, good night, it's been fun...


songbird