Important law of scienterrific research: If you are careful to frame your questions with sufficient rigor, you can reliably obtain results of maximum benefit to your funders. Mark Bittman, in the NYTimes, on “That Flawed Stanford Study“:
I tried to ignore the month-old “Stanford study.” I really did. It made so little sense that I thought it would have little impact. That was dumb of me, and I’m sorry.
The study, which suggested — incredibly — that there is no “strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods,” caused as great an uproar as anything that has happened, food-wise, this year…
That’s because headlines (and, of course, tweets) matter. The Stanford study was not only an exercise in misdirection, it was a headline generator. By providing “useful” and “counterintuitive” information about organic food, it played right into the hands of the news hungry while conveniently obscuring important features of organic agriculture.
If I may play with metaphor for a moment, the study was like declaring guns no more dangerous than baseball bats when it comes to blunt-object head injuries. It was the equivalent of comparing milk and Elmer’s glue on the basis of whiteness. It did, in short, miss the point…
In fact, the Stanford study — actually a meta-study, an analysis of more than 200 existing studies — does say that “consumption of organic foods may reduce exposure to pesticide residues and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.”
Since that’s largely why people eat organic foods, what’s the big deal? Especially if we refer to common definitions of “nutritious” and point out that, in general, nutritious food promotes health and good condition. How can something that reduces your exposure to pesticides and antibiotic-resistant bacteria not be “more nutritious” than food that doesn’t?
Because the study narrowly defines “nutritious” as containing more vitamins…
Cargo
I saw that report and knew regardless of its content that we’d be in for a vigorous round of hippie-punching, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Cargo
It’s kind of like the studies that come out every few months proclaiming that hybrid/electric cars are “just as bad” for the environment as regular cars, or CFLs are “worse” than incandescents. they always get way more traction on the car blogs than studies showing otherwise. Good thing we never seem to have to do anything differently than what we’re already doing! “Science” proves it!
Violet
Yeah, that report was stupid. And it’s not just about the food itself. Organic food means fewer pesticides in the air and water and ground, meaning a healthier environment for all of us. How convenient they overlooked the larger context.
JPL
Organic is just the same as factory mills if you discount the taste, the use of pesticides and the added antibiotics.
See ..
Thlayli
NFL early game roundup:
Stillers won the Steagle Bowl. Giants had their annual “make a bad team look good” game, but snapped out of it relatively quickly. Wild finish in the Green Bay-Indy game. RG3 got knocked out of the game, Skins lost.
J. Michael Neal
Through four games: Gophers 29, Other Guys 1. Freshman Hannah Brandt has seven goals and eight assists and is strong enough to suggest that there is a moose in her family tree. Freshman Maryanne Menefee has five goals and four assists. Either Amanda Kessel (five goals, eight assists) isn’t as bothered by hip surgery as we were led to believe or she’s padding her stats by playing with the rookies.
I’m not sure how long they can go with Noora Rӓty in goal since she has the lowest career save percentage (.944) and the highest goals against average (1.44) on the team. In fact, the last time a goalie other than Rӓty allowed a goal was October 11, 2010.
srv
The study was important in that it reported organics had 30% less pesticide residue.
That should give anyone thinking organics don’t have pesticides on them pause.
Miki
Here – have some science-based discussion of the report: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/no-health-benefits-from-organic-food/.
JPL
@srv: Less is good…
Has anyone heard from Cole? Normally game day is when he tweets or blogs.
Maude
@JPL:
He has people over. He’s doing the cooking.
Foregone Conclusion
This is a silly post.
One of the many claims made about organic food is that it is somehow ‘more nutritious’. People generally take that to mean ‘includes more nutrients’. This has, in turn, been disproved.
This does not mean that organic food isn’t tastier, or better for the environment, or more sustainable, or whatever. But it was an argument made by some people in favour of eating organic food, so it was a perfectly legitimate thing to investigate.
Honestly, are you going to cry conspiracy when any piece of evidence comes out which criticises any aspect of any piece of your worldview? I thought that liberals were supposed to rely on evidence-based policy.
Comrade Mary
@Maude: But what we need to know is if he survived the house cleaning before he started cooking. Any signs of life? My God, he hasn’t even updated his Twitter account since October 4.
hildebrand
The moment my wing-nut sister mentioned the study I knew it was tainted. Anything that even remotely suggests that our current industrial farm complex practices might be less than beneficial is easily dismissed by the pro-corporation crowd.
It may take some extraordinary measures to get folks to take all of this seriously.
Yutsano
@hildebrand: A famine where food is readily available but only for the right price should do it. Hell we’re heading that way now.
Maude
@Comrade Mary:
You have a point. He said Friday he would be busy.
He must be having a great time.
If John had a run in with a mop, one of the guests would have told us in comments.
BarbCat
“the study narrowly defines “nutritious” as containing more vitamins…”
Odd criteria for that definition. While there are plenty of medical studies that show the health impact/benefits of mineral deficiencies/consumption (and the effect of iron intake to anemia for example), my doctor has never been able to point me to similar evidence about the general intake of ‘vitamins’. As she repeats, ‘while I recommend taking a daily vitamin, that is because we know it does no harm and may be beneficial’. “Vitamins”, at least as supplements, have an elusive relation to general health.
Don’t get me wrong, I take vitamins and I believe we need them. But the evidence, as far as basing a study on our need for them, is scant.
count ulster
Organic PCBs are waaaay more nutritious than the non-organic variety, however.
El Cid
Actually one of the major original appeals to consumers to support organic techniques in agriculture was not that it would provide merely a better quality product for the consumer but that it would make agriculture overall less harmful for the environment.
This is trying to make an appeal to a systemic change into a debate over how to get the most nutritious vegetable into the hands of the most informed consumer.
JPL
@Foregone Conclusion: I agree with that comment. There are several reasons to eat organic but vitamin C might not be one of them.
Maude, Thanks for the update about Cole. Maybe he’ll post pictures later on. His mom might have told him tweeting and drinking don’t mix.
rikyrah
Posted: 10/05/2012 3:42 pm EDT Updated: 10/05/2012 4:32 pm EDT
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/05/paul-ryan-60-percent-of-a_n_1943073.html?utm_hp_ref=tw
Warren Terra
The pesticide residues and the supposed antibiotic-resistant bacteria in your food really aren’t likely to be important, for all sorts of regulatory, dosage, and common sense reasons. Bittman is a bit of an ass to stress them.
But pesticide levels (not residues) in the environment and antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the world (as opposed to the cooked bacteria in your lunch), those are real issues to consider. Critically, the Stanford study found that an apple is an apple, when you eat it, but didn’t ask about the societal costs of producing apples in different ways. Silly marketing to dumb hippies aside, the Organic Food idea has always been about Sustainable Agriculture – about the planet, not the consumer.
Amir Khalid
What bugs me about the study (or meta-study) is that it concentrates on asking whether the resulting produce is significantly more nutritious or safer to eat. I always understood that the benefit was to the environment, from organic farming practices — no more chemical fertilizers and such that seep into the soil and rivers and ground water. That would make organic farming worthwhile, even if the produce were still pretty much the same (and after all, an organic carrot is still a carrot, right?) Campaigners got Adidas and Puma and Nike, among others, to quit using contract manufacturers employing child labor not to improve the quality of sporting goods, but to end an unhealthy practice bordering on slavery. I think one should look at organic farming the same way.
MattF
Bittman ruins his (valid!) point by getting into a dumb semantic argument. I agree that ‘organic’ and ‘nutritious’ are weaselly words– however, in any case, however you define things, and in fact, lower levels of pesticides and antibiotic-resistant bacteria are exactly the reasons I’m likely to buy ‘organic’ food. And, for what it’s worth, I like to buy fruits and vegetables at the local farmer’s market because they generally taste better.
veryslowwriter
I’ve been buying organic food — when it’s available — for years. I don’t buy it because it tastes better (though organic meat does does taste better. I don’t buy it on the grounds that it’s more nutritious, because I suspect the difference is nil.
I buy it because I want to encourage the bastids to keep growing the stuff. Doing my small part to increase the demand for organic products.
WaterGirl
Does anyone have a good cornbread recipe?
I thought I was buying JIffy corn bread mix, but by the time I got home it had turned into “artificially flavored banana bread mix”. Doesn’t that sound yummy!
I had planned to throw in some corn and cheese to make the corn bread more interesting, but I don’t think that would go well with banana.
slag
@Foregone Conclusion: It never occurred to me that organic foods would contain more vitamins. I’ve never ever heard that argument made. My primary grocer deals primarily in organic foods, and they’ve never ever made that claim.
The Bittman piece is totally right on. When a friend told me about the Stanford study, my immediate response was, “I never thought organic foods were more nutritious.” His response to me was essentially, “Hey-Come to think of it, never have I!”. He had totally fallen for the misdirection of which Bittman speaks, and I have no doubt that he wasn’t alone.
Repubanon
@Foregone Conclusion: You may want to re-read the post, especially the part where your definition of nutritious as having more vitamins differs from Anne Laurie’s and Mark Bittman’s definition: “better for your health.”
On a side note, the definition of “organic” has gone through some controversy. The USDA’s definition of “organic” now includes foods that some people feel should not be so categorized. Without a uniform definition of “organic”, or an examination of whether food qualifying as “organic” under the USDA’s criteria yields different numbers than other definitions of “organic”, or some method of verifying whether the food labelled as organic in the various studies analyzed by Stanford’s researchers weren’t mislabeled, I’d want to see more data.
(Remember the recent news articles showing that considerable numbers of fish dishes in restaurants were actually composed of different, lower-cost fish? I’d want to be sure that someone was checking the organic food used in the studies to make sure it wasn’t mislabeled.)
JPL
@WaterGirl: As long as you have cornmeal and flour you are in good shape. Google is my friend when it comes to recipes.
Neurovore
This is a subject that I have to give my two cents on, being the haggard young biologist that I am. For one thing, it is a common misconception among many people that the “organic” designation on produce means that no pesticides were used during its production. Organic producers can use “organic” pesticides within the guidelines of the label, and many of these such as nicotine sulfate and the fungicide, copper sulfate can be quite dangerous which is why they should be used with care. However, unlike copper sulfate nicotine sulfate does break down rather quickly, but then so do many man-made pesticides like the often vilified organophosphates. Unfortunately, pesticides of some sort are usually a necessary evil with many crops because without them, insects and other pests would leave you nothing at all to eat and you would risk starvation. Famine from pests causing crop failure was quite commonplace all throughout human history.
Keep in mind that man-made pesticides have to meet many guidelines and regulations in order for the FDA to approve their usage as they have to be specifically designed for certain applications. Also, plants are LOADED with potential carcinogens and other toxic substances which they have evolved to defend themselves from attack by insects and other organisms and some of these such as solanine would cause the FDA to raise an eyebrow if it were a man-made substance pending FDA approval. Granted, you would have to eat several pounds of vegetables in the Solanum family on a daily basis before this would be an issue, but many plant substances in common items of produce are poisonous at much lower doses than many of the pesticides that are used in growing them.
Ironically, when fewer pesticides are used to grow many plants, they will step up production of their own pesticides to ward off the increased pressure that they face from organisms that would damage them. To use an example, celery naturally produces a carcinogenic pesticide called psoralen and it can serve as a contact irritant in larger doses. The amount of psoralens present in the roots of organic celery can be several times that of celery grown using conventional methods to the point to where organic celery farmers can develop severe rashes on their hands if they do not wear gloves from picking their crop. Finally, since the “organic” label means that chemical fertilizers cannot be used, this means that organic produce must be fertilized with aged manure, and many e-coli outbreaks such as the recent one in Germany have been the result of organically grown crops that used manure that was improperly aged.
I wish that people would take the time to sit down and critically examine these various sensationalistic claims from media sources on all sides of the issue before coming to a conclusion. I apologize for the bloviation and here is something that might be of interest to many of you…
http://www.pnas.org/content/87/19/7782.full.pdf
WaterGirl
@JPL: Yeah, but there are about a thousand recipes for cornbread out there, I was hoping for something tried and true. My whole life I have only eaten Jiffy corn bread. :-)
I found one that called for an entire stick of butter, and another that calls for 3 T of oil That seemed like an awful lot of butter, but what do I know?
Does this sound reasonable?
Ingredients
1 cup Yellow Corn Meal
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup whole milk
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 cup (4 oz.) shredded Monterey Jack cheese
1 can (11 oz.) whole kernel corn, drained
3 tablespoons chopped pickled jalapeños
slag
@Warren Terra:
This statement is way overgeneralized. You have no way of knowing what is “likely to be important” to anyone but yourself and those you know best, really. And you may not even be good at assessing that very well, if you are an average person.
Organic foods are better for the food cycle overall. Both for the environment and for the people living in the environment and consuming things from it.
Cam
Melissa Harris-Perry (Sunday morning) on the reactions to the debate:
…”Deep breath, let’s pause for a moment and think about what aspects of STRENGTH we value. It takes strength to deal HONESTLY with your opponents, even when THEY DEAL DISHONESTLY with you.” “It takes strength to make the tough calls, even when you are not sure how they will turn out” “It takes strength to have the patience to watch POLICY become progress” [7.8%]…”I just encourage us not to confuse AGGRESSIVENESS with STRENGTH.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46979745/#49320154
Robert Sneddon
@Amir Khalid: Organic farming relies on fertilisers and pesticides just as commercial non-organic farming does, the only criteria is that the fertilisers and pesticides can’t come out of a chemical processing plant as KNO fertiliser or organophosphate pesticides do.
One of the natural pesticides permitted until recently in organic food production was rotenone, a plant extract. Its general toxicity, especially to fish and other aquatic species in runoff has caused it to be removed from the USDA National Organic Program list of permitted pesticides but it can still be bought over-the-counter or mail-order for garden use. Nicotine is another organic pesticide; it’s also a nerve poison of some potency and can be absorbed through the skin.
Ammonium sulphate from organic sources such as volcanic fumaroles is OK but the same simple chemical compound in a much purer form is not permitted in commercial organic farming because it came out of a chemical factory.
Basically there’s a lot of non-scientific woo-woo around organic farming. It’s something that nations with large-scale commercial farming can support at an artisanal hobbyist level, a William Morris store which works as long as there is an IKEA down the street for the poor folks to shop at but turning the US or any other first-world nation over to 100% organic operations would be a disaster.
Nerull
@slag: Requiring more farmland for food produced is better for the environment in not a whole lot of ways.
JPL
@WaterGirl: Sound interesting but I have never put cheese in mind. I’ve used a buttermilk recipe before but that’s because I had frozen buttermilk in my freezer.
JPL
@WaterGirl: The cheese adds the additional oil but I love peppers in mine.
Chris T.
@BarbCat:
A “vitamin” is simply a compound that the body can’t make (or make in sufficient quantity), but still needs. (More generally this is the definition of an “essential” nutrient, including the essential amino acids.) So, vitamin C, for instance, is a vitamin for humans because we lost the ability to make it. Cats and dogs can make the same compound from more basic stuff they eat, so for them, it’s not a “vitamin” at all.
The tricky part with vitamins is that many of them don’t absorb well unless they are in the presence of something in particular (some are fat soluble, some water soluble, some require particular other compounds to be present, some prefer those not be present, and so on). So you’re much more likely to absorb the needed compounds if you eat them in food, rather than in pill form.
Nonetheless, a cheap daily multivitamin is a sort of cheap insurance. It might help, it doesn’t hurt, and as you say, might as well take one.
Dave
Um, because that is what the word nutritious means…. When you get into science land, precision of language matters. They were not studying amount of nitrogen run off into streams. They were not studying exposure to antibiotic resistant pathogens. They were studying content of food. And guess what? Amino acids,.nucleic acids, fats, and carbohydrates do not care where they come from, they are molecules made from atoms. Bitmann is on a tear because a sacred cow of his was put down. The purpose of the study was the quality of the food, e.g. does it work the same in our bodies. It looks like the answer is yes. Doesn’t invalidate one’s food choice but put your outrage in neutral. Their is enough in this country to get worked over about and I don’t need Bitmann being a little bitch. Would be nice if he ever complained about how hard it can be for inner city people to buy fresh produce, organic or conventional.
Violet
@WaterGirl: Wouldn’t put cheese in it either, but that’s the beauty of cornbread–you can do various things and it’s still good.
slag
@Nerull: Here. Read something: https://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/261_Farming-Inside-Cities. This isn’t an either-or situation.
WaterGirl
@JPL: Thanks! It’s in the oven now. I used serrano peppers from my garden instead of pickeled jalapeños, about one tablespoon instead of three, since serranos are more potent.
The only reason I even had cornmeal was for my homemade pizzas, so I’m lucky I had that. I HATE going to the store in the middle of cooking dinner.
I just love cooking with stuff from my garden!
Violet
@WaterGirl:
It’s the best thing in the world! I just picked a bunch of eggplants and now have to figure out what to do with them. I’m going to put some on the bbq tonight, along with peppers and onion and a chicken breast and do a pasta dish, but after that I’m out of ideas. Wouldn’t mind doing eggplant parm, but am trying to cut down on fat, and it’s so heavy.
hildebrand
My sister sent a mass email about Obama carrying Zakaria’s book (‘the Post American World’) today – so I sent the following email to the entire list of folks receiving her email.
I feel bad, well, not really, for replying to everyone, but I am tired of my sister sending these foolish emails, and wanted to get at least one email list to think about what they were doing.
Hal
@Cam:
+1000. I love MHP and really enjoy her show. The thing that’s more and more pissed me off is the reaction from Dems to Obama’s performance. I love that progressives aren’t yes people and do think there is strength and legitimacy in criticizing “your” side, but Christ on crutches, when you’re worse than your candidates sides, it’s self defeating.
I just wonder how much of Romney’s bounce can be attributed to the reaction from Dems/Liberals/Progressives.
gogol's wife
@WaterGirl:
I see I’m too late, but I wouldn’t put that much sugar into it. But I assume the cheese and peppers will counteract that.
slag
@hildebrand: Good on you!
sparrow
@srv: The 30% number was not “30% less pesticides”, but rather the difference in percentage with residues. I’m too lazy to look up the exact numbers, but basically this meant that if 1 in 100 organic samples had pesticides, 31/100 non-organic did. In other words, their metric was stupid.
Robert Sneddon
@Dave: Another shibboleth of the purists was found to be not true a long time back, that is packaged and frozen food is nearly as nutritious as fresh and/or organic. I don’t include processed foods here (breakfast cereals etc.) but dried peas or canned tomatoes are nearly as good for you as fresh-from-the-soil produce. Taste and texture is another matter but the basic healthy eating aspects of organic or garden foodstuffs over the products of commercial “factory” farming is somewhat overrated.
jeffreyw
@WaterGirl: Me, too!
shecky
Thing about Bittman is that he has an axe to grind all his own. A recent Metafilter thread did a takedown of his editorial by a couple of members.
What I do find dishonest is how many folks have insisted that organic isn’t more nutritious, and that it hasn’t been billed as such, so the Stanford study is bullshit. I’m sure there are folks here who never claimed anything about nutritive value of organics. But to claim that (unsubstantiated) qualities regarding nutrition of organics haven’t been made seems a bit like trying to erase history here. Organics have routinely been marketed as nutritionally superior, among other things, for decades, and retain a good deal of traction among the woo prone still.
gogol's wife
@Hal:
I agree with you completely. Of course the other side was going to crow and celebrate how great Romney was. But what has been so defeating is how quick everyone on our side was to dump on Obama. Today’s Times is really depressing. It’s full of supposed “progressives” dumping on Obama. I hate Maureen Dowd, by the way.
jeffreyw
@WaterGirl: Me, too!
WaterGirl
@Violet: Now you tell me. :-) (about the cheese) Hopefully it will be good enough.
raven
@jeffreyw: Just finished navy bean soup with kale and cornbread!
Kyle
@hildebrand:
I don’t get the reflexive corporate-fanboy attitude of some rightards. It’s like they have to worship and cheer for wealthy and powerful institutions as an ideology, regardless of their merit, and shout down any challenge from the unworthy non-wealthy and non-powerful.
It’s the mentality of a peasant cheering lustily for their lord to conceal their real fear. Strange from people always asserting their yeoman “freedom” and individualism.
WaterGirl
@jeffreyw: Okay, I want the cornbread you made. Mine looks good, but it’s pretty boring. The cheese is okay, but I definitely should have used more peppers. And maybe roasted the peppers or something, they are pretty much still raw.
Edit: but my black kitty is sitting by me and sniffing the air, so he thinks they smell pretty good.
jeffreyw
@raven: Mmm… hambeans!
raven
@jeffreyw: No ham, smoked turkey necks.
jeffreyw
@WaterGirl: Cornbread doesn’t have to be boring.
raven
Has anyone watched “Call the Midwife” on PBS? Great show.
? Martin
@Dave:
But were they only studying a particular content of food? Saying carrot A and carrot B both contain the same quantity of vitamins X, Y, Z is helpful, but so is knowing that carrot A contains arsenic and carrot B does not.
I know everyone is all over the map on this issue, but here in Cali, the organic seekers are less concerned about vitamins and more concerned about pesticides. I know that pesticides aren’t nutrition, but doing a nutrition study of organics vs non organics is a bit like doing a respiratory study of sex and proclaiming that abstinence combined with jogging is just as good for your respiratory system as sex and using that as a defense of abstinence programs.
People should also keep in mind that CA is in the middle of a moderate campaign over GMO labeling which is on the ballot in Nov. There’s plenty of money being dumped into studies to try and influence these initiatives.
jeffreyw
@raven: Smoked ham!
JPL
@raven: I have only seen a few episodes and you are correct that it’s a great show.
raven
@WaterGirl: I was at a “commitment” ceremony yesterday and one of the commitee’s (sp) was from the Chicago area. A large group of his family came and we were seated with his uncles, a Nam vet and a retired Chicago detective. It was really nice to spend time with folks in their 70’s who had nothing but unconditional love and respect for their nephew and his partner. They quizzed me quite a bit on what it was like to live in the South and the best I could come up with was, “well, look what we are doing here today”.
raven
@JPL: There has been more than one?
SiubhanDuinne
@WaterGirl:
Did you know there’s a Cornbread Festival, held annually (I want to say April or May) in Sotuh Pittsburg, TN? I went to it a few years ago. You wouldn’t believe how many different ways there are to prepare cornbread. I don’t specifically remember any that included bananas, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
SiubhanDuinne
@SiubhanDuinne: Automatic spell-check is forever changing things when I don’t want it to. Why in the world wouldn’t it catch my typo and change Sotuh to South?
JPL
@raven: Well I thought there was two but maybe not.. I did see the first one twice though.
It was replayed in the middle of the night.
Tonal Crow
@rikyrah: Lyin’ Ryan, the grift that keeps on griftin’. Now the 47% is 60%?
JPL
@raven: I thought I had missed the first episode but apparently not. The second is tonight.
SiubhanDuinne
@hildebrand:
I’m curious why your sister, or anyone, would send an email today about Obama reading the Zakaria book. Wasn’t that a big Thing back during the 2008 primaries or so? Or has something just happened that I’m unaware of (not unlikely)?
WaterGirl
@raven: That’s pretty cool. Especially at that age. I wonder what my dad would have thought. He died 15 years ago, and we weren’t sure he even knew what being gay was.
That said, he absolutely adored the one woman I had a relationship with (for 3 years) and after she moved out he never said a word, but started to call me twice a week instead of the usual once a week he had been calling me since my mom died.
So he clearly understood something about it at some level, and was okay with it because he adored Jill. My dad was a quiet man, a man of few words, unless Jill was in the room, and then they would talk and talk and talk. They just clicked somehow.
So maybe people are a lot better with it than they think they are, especially when it involves someone they love. I think most people are generally better than they think they are, and often rise to the occasion, unexpectedly sometimes, when they are presented with a new world view.
Chet
@El Cid: Actually one of the major original appeals to consumers to support organic techniques in agriculture was not that it would provide merely a better quality product for the consumer but that it would make agriculture overall less harmful for the environment.
Well, that’s disproven simply by the smaller average yields under organic agriculture. Smaller yields mean more land surface given over to farming in order to produce the same amount of food, and short of nuclear irradiation there’s nothing more destructive you can do to the environment than turn it into farmland.
Also organic practice tends to contribute more to surface water eutropification than conventional no-till, due to soil run-off.
raven
@WaterGirl: Yea, I’ve seen a similar situation with my redneck biker BIL who now has a gay daughter and half-filipino granddaughter.
Heliopause
Do I get any brownie points for having pointed this out weeks ago?
SiubhanDuinne
@hildebrand:
By the way, that was a really good answer. In my family, it’s one brother who forwards all the wing nutty (and sometimes non-political, just stupid) stuff. I keep him in my email contacts and Facebook page, partly because I love him and partly because just as often he’ll forward really REALLY cool things. But I’ve taken to doing the “reply all” with Snopes links whenever possible. Have been doing this for over a year, and he’s just recently beginning to say that maybe Snopes has a liberal bias :-)
SiubhanDuinne
@Anne Laurie (top):
“Scienterrific” is a wonderful word, and I intend to steal it and use it frequently.
I grew up near Chicago. When we were kids, one of our favorite things was to spend the day at the Museum of Science and Industry, which we always called the “Museum of Science and Interesting.” And do to this day.
WaterGirl
@raven: I had it set as a “season pass” on Tivo, so it would record all episodes, then saw the first 2 minutes last week and it was nothing like I expected. So I ditched that show and the season pass.
I just set it up again based on your recommendation, and I see that the first episode will be on again on 10/15. So I will wait to watch that one first and then give the series a shot.
I had read somewhere that it was a top show in England. Right?
hildebrand
@SiubhanDuinne: I send these emails regularly – I am hoping that I can reach just one person on her list – someone to say to themselves, ‘hmm…maybe I should actually think about this…”
lacp
@Dave: Actually he has brought that up.
http://www.uwishunu.com/2011/04/in-a-piece-called-go-philly-the-new-york-times-mark-bittman-calls-philadelphia-one-of-the-most-progressive-food-cities-in-the-country/
Hal
@SiubhanDuinne:
Weeks and weeks ago a facebook friend of mine posted something about this. Apparently Zakaria’s book is proof that Obama has colonial socialist kenyan muslim communist anti-christ feelings. Something like that.
JPL
@WaterGirl: The acting is excellent but the stories are sometimes difficult. Since you haven’t watched yet, I don’t want to spoil anything.
Robert Waldmann
the study was weird as were write ups which casually mentioned the pesticide and antibody resistant bacteria facts. However, I don’t see anything about funders in the quoted passage. How do you know how the study was funded ?
I think the antibiotic resistant bacteria relate to meat. For vegetables, fruits, and grains, I think the issue is pesticide residues. On that topic, at least, I reject the analogy. Guns are quite dangerous. I am aware of no evidence that pesticide residues in concentrations found in non organically grown food are dangerous at all (I wouldn’t know about it if there were a lot, because I haven’t studied the issue).
Does organic also imply no use of synthetic fertilizers ? I think it does. In that case there is no hint of a suggestion of evidence related to the consumer’s health. It could be argued that since we have natural fertilizer in any case, making artificial fertilizer contributes to global warming based on N20 production plus making it must produce C02.
geg6
@Robert Waldmann:
I buy and grow organic in the hope that I am helping the planet and limiting my own exposure to fertilizers and pesticides that may or may not harm me. I do enough things that may harm me that I try to limit them to less than half a dozen.
I also am of the opinion that organic farming is less often large industrial farms and more often family farms. I only have this opinion due to the fact that it has been my own experience with finding and buying produce and meats that are organic. You generally can’t find a lot of fresh, organic foods unless you have local farmers who produce it. I suppose there are organic corporate farmers, but I just don’t encounter them very often.
Lastly, organic foods just taste better. Because the farmers don’t use as many manmade additives as corporate farms do, they retain their actual taste. The same is true of the produce we grow at home. We don’t use pesticides or chemical fertilizers and I’ll take anything from my garden over anything you can buy in any store in America and put it against ours and I guarantee that 9 out of 10 people would prefer our peaches, raspberries, pears, apples, tomatoes, peppers, asparagus, beans, summer and zucchini squash, cucumbers, beets, carrots, onions, garlic, and cabbage over anything anywhere. Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but I have no doubt that my beautiful, naturally red tomatoes are more healthful for you than any of the golfball-hard pink tomatoes you buy in your average grocery store.
J R in WVa
Ah, so, now I understand. Stanford is willing to misrepresent their scientific objectivity for money.
Very interesting. More vitamins is what counts, as opposed to bacterial contamination? Equal vitamin content as opposed to pesticide contamination, right!
Living in a farming area, with neighbors expert in organic gardening it is obvious to us that organic food tastes better, is safer, and is altogether preferable to industrial food.
We even go to a pizza place that uses organic meats and greens, and the price is worth it.
I used to respect Stanford, no more. I hope the grant was worth it to them.
Joaozinho
@Violet:
Violet and JPL are telling lies that are just as nasty as Mitt Rmoney’s.
“Organic” does NOT mean “fewer pesticides.” “Organic” only means that organic pesticides are used instead. It says nothing whatsoever about the quantity used.
If you hold some idiotic magical belief that synthetic pesticides (mostly derivatives of organic ones) are less toxic or more labile than the natural ones selected for toxicity by evolution over millions of years, you’re not accepting the power of evolutionary mechanisms and you’ve got a whole lot in common with rightwing evolution denialists.
Bittman and via regurgitation, Anne are engaging in deceptive hackery without telling blatant lies like the tired one told by Violet and JPL.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Robert Sneddon: I’m not sure what the means used to package the food (canning tomatoes, drying peas) has to do with the conditions they were grown in.
polyorchnid octopunch
@SiubhanDuinne: chain letters have weird lifecycles.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Chet: Are you sure that’s true, Chet? Can you show me that organic farming practices produce less food per hectare than mechanized farming does?
Brachiator
@? Martin:
Why is that? Any arsenic in the carrots would be too minuscule to cause any harm. You would have to eat a ton of carrots at one sitting before there would be any effect, and even here you would be more at risk of Vitamin A toxicity than arsenic poisoning.
Organic food may taste better, but even this is not consistently true. Tomatoes and bananas have been modified to travel better, and their taste has changed as a result.
Apart from this, any other claim about the superiority of organic over conventional food, whatever that means, has never stood up to scrutiny. Never. People who keep asserting this are as nutty as creationists.
I am also willing to bet that most people who grow food in their small gardens are wasting more resources than food grown on a well run farm (organic or conventional).
Also, when you get down to it farms are not natural. If you really wanted to be environmentally friendly, you would have to abandon farming altogether and go back to foraging.
Robert Sneddon
@polyorchnid octopunch: The other thread of this discussion was that farm-fresh or garden-picked food was also better in terms of nutrition than commercial supermarket or store-bought food and that turns out to be mostly wrong too. Taste, texture and the whole elevated eating experience may well depend on freshness of ingredients but in terms of protein, vitamins, minerals etc., the basic stuff of life, canned and frozen foods when done right are not far off a farmer’s market’s picked-that-day selection at three times the price.
For a lot of folks, myself included, cheap “factory farm” carrots or frozen meat is eminently affordable on a small budget and is of a quality and nutritional value that outweighs its blandness and lesser taste.