Zaryi wrote:
Aestu wrote:
"High quality/low quality" vs "processed/unprocessed" can be objectively measured; "organic" can't.
It can be. There are fairly stringent guidelines as to what food can be labeled organic and what can't. And you both look like idiots arguing semantics on this one; it's fairly well known what people mean by organic food nowadays.
I suppose you think cheap Chinese food is really vegetarian because it says so.
In ancient times, people treated mold and fungus with sulfur. They would take a chunk of yellow rock, break it down with mortar and pestle, mix it with water in a basket, and pour it on the plant. Because I am ultraconservative and fearful of anything I don't completely understand, I still do this. Or you can just go to the store and pay ten times the price of a sulfur rock for some brand-labelled sulfur treatment; it's still pretty effective.
So do you say that's "organic" or not "organic"?
The active ingredient in Miracle-Gro and most other fertilizers is ammonium nitrate. Ammonium nitrate is to nitrogen nodules that form on the roots of alfalfa as bananas are to Centrum pills. But of course plants don't have intestines, and you the person eating the apple won't recognize where the tree metabolized its nitrogen from.
So what's the basis to say that one is organic and the other is not when the underlying chemistry is the same? More to the point, how do you the end consumer of the food product really know the certification process is reliable?
Most vaccines and medical products today are still derived directly from animal sources. Therefore, it's not so easy to draw a definable difference between inoculations, antibiotics, hormones, and bone/blood meal. Another example: the pig masturbation video you saw. You notice there are pigs in cages, and there's a reason for that. The pig feels compelled to masturbate on the toy when it smells the sows. Exposure to the sow's hormones is a necessary step in the process. What if those were "synthesized", or simply extracted from the sow then sprayed in the air at leisure (like perfume)? Do we say that would be "organic" or not? Artificial insemination, too, is something we think of as modern, but there's really no reason it couldn't be done with Stone Age technology.
My point being, a lot of these advances are merely streamlining natural processes, or relying on concentration of "the active ingredient".
And then you look at the Sahara Desert, which has been steadily growing for the last three thousand years due to really bad agricultural processes. Modern agriculture didn't do THAT. That's been a big problem in Africa - that they still use pre-modern environmental management techniques that don't work with modern-era populations, and this increases, not decreases, environmental damage.
While I definitely do believe in buying artisanal food and supporting small farmers by buying at farmers markets and such, something I do a great deal, and I do accept that modern agri-industry is seriously and fatally flawed and needs reform, I reject the notion of organic labels and such as unscientific and factually incorrect.
