I used to live in Maine. The non-travel-capable lobsters get canned. . . And, other than it already being shelled, I couldn’t tell any difference. “Bar Harbor” was the brand I remembered.
Still didn’t compare with Aussie “bug tails”, but generally you can only get them near Australia, OCCASIONALLY on the west coast, but they make Maine Lobster look like the Wal-Mart Generic version, price-wise. But they’re relatively cheap in Oz, or at least WERE, last time I was down there. . .
Except that people don’t necessarily foresee the long-term consequences of their actions. My grandmother thought Walmart was great, at first. Now she curses them regularly. Even when Walmart isn’t engaging in predatory pricing (which they’ve been frequently caught doing), they can offer lower prices on the sorts of items and services that are the chief sources of revenue for their smaller competitors, leaving those small businesses unable to stay open on just the sorts of things that were low to no profit but were offered as a service to customers. Once Walmart has destroyed the competition, they really don’t have to worry about those sorts of things, nor do they have to maintain the same prices, either.
No, sorry, not you, I should have made that clear.
Only if the competition is not interested in providing food more sustainably or ethically. Some organic growers aren’t but a lot are. The ones actually doing it right would be the ones at a disadvantage which is exactly what’s insidious about it.
Some weirdo ranting about his unsupported opinions apparently.
Yes, he’s a complete unknown. Oh wait, no, the other thing.
http://junkscience.com/about-steve-milloy/
I was surprised to find out that organic food was/is a scam. But it makes perfect sense: it’s a marketing strategy. It’s a way to make people pay a premium and feel good about doing it. Genius!
Not a reliable source. Sorry.
And yes, organic certification is in part a marketing strategy. But to conclude that because the “organic” label is used as a marketing strategy that therefore all organic growers and sellers are simply trying to defraud everyone and not actually interested in more sustainable or less environmentally-destructive growing practices is the fallacy of the excluded middle.
That fallacy is a favorite among…peddlers of junk science. Huh. Who would have thought this guy who likes to throw around the phrase “junk science” might actually be engaging in the practice himself.
If you’re going to use a source’s own bio on their webpage to prove their credentials it’s kind of weird.
Let’s use this bio instead:
Let’s see… he says secondhand smoke is “a joke” and it was later shown he worked for the tobacco industry.
Now he claims that organic food is junk science but registered as a lobbyist for both American Crop Protection Association and Monsanto.
Yeah, he’s a source I’d trust implicitly. I would indeed call him a “weirdo ranting about his unsupported opinions.”
Better links, then.
Is organic food better for you? No.
Is it going to save the planet? It’s complicated. But, no.
The idea of organic food is laughably simplistic. A rigid set of rules that lead to a label that can be stuck on the end product; and if everyone pays more for this then the world is somehow a better place? No … that’s like suggesting that the answer to global warming is to get people to voluntarily pay more for green energy. Yeah, that’ll work!
(They do that here in Switzerland, and it’s the same scam: they charge more for renewable energy than nuclear because it sounds greener. I’m all for saving the planet, so I buy nuclear.)
This is just the fallacy of the excluded middle again.
The rigid set of rules and labeling are the bureaucratic manifestation of “the idea of organic food”. The idea of organic food is not the same as the bureaucratic manifestation of that idea. The regulations and labeling are at best a rough guide to which growers, wholesalers, and retailers are invested in trying to ameliorate the worst environmental effects of modern agriculture. Those more serious about this are better off doing their own research to find out:
In other words, ethically (for lack of a better word) grown and harvested food need not bear the organic label and, similarly, food bearing the organic label was not necessarily ethically grown and harvested. The label is just a first-order heuristic for those who haven’t done their own research but would still like to make more ethical purchases on balance.
It’s a business plan that seems to work quite well for Starbucks. You seem to be of the “free market crusader” archetype of internet commenters. Doesn’t the success of Starbucks automatically validate this sort of practice from a free market point of view?
Nuclear has its own problems but I’m sure ignoring all that is simply the mark of a brave, free-thinking individual.
Exactly: the idea of organic food. Where is the evidence that organic food is more sustainable, or anything else positive? What evidence were the regulations based on in the first place?
Where are the studies showing the benefits of organic food?
Well, the study you cited on nutritional comparisons between organic food and non-organic did not, contrary to your assertions, say that there was no benefit – only that more study was needed. Of course, I had already conceded that organic food wasn’t necessarily more nutritious than non-organic so I’m not sure of the relevance on that argument in the first place.
But you want some studies showing a benefit? Here you go:
They weren’t particularly difficult to find.
You want more, let me know. I can google that for you.
The studies talk about some aspects of organic farming being beneficial. That’s science. Where is the update to the organic regulations in response, to keep the good bits and ditch the rest? Or to fine tune?
Organic regulations are treated as scripture… and technology is treated as the enemy. We should support research, evidence and results. A heavyweight brand plus marketing machine can’t offer that.
First of all, you’re shifting the goalposts. First it’s all a scam. Then there just aren’t any studies. But there are studies so now those studies aren’t the right studies. If you’re going to keep changing your argument then you should at least, for the sake of intellectual honesty, acknowledge that you’re doing so and acknowledge when you’re caught out in ignorance.
But in response to this new line of argument, I’ve already said I don’t really care about the regulations. As I said before, the regulations represent the political compromise of incorporating what was known about organic farming at the time they were drafted into a bureaucratic machine. If the political machines responsible for the organic regulations were agile enough to incorporate more up-to-date knowledge that would be great from my perspective but it’s not essential because, again, the regulations are distinct from the practices and I’m happy to do my own research on where my food comes from.
For those not willing to do that research the organic regulations and labeling are, again, a heuristic to help point them in the right direction. This heuristic can be gamed like pretty much any other heuristic. But again, I’m arguing for the viability of organic farming practices rather than regulations.
Throughout this discussion, I’ve emphasized that the organic regulations are at the very best a first-order heuristic pointing in the general direction of sustainability. That’s the very opposite of treating it as “scripture”. You should acknowledge the position of the person you’re actually arguing against instead of engaging in this form of straw man argumentation. The very existence of the studies we’ve linked to shows that research, evidence, and results are all happening so this complaint seems rather empty to me.
Thanks for going into detail. As you say, a discussion works better with a position to argue about.
I don’t think I moved the goalposts; a study showing that part of X is beneficial is not the same as a study showing that X is beneficial. But, it sounds like we agree that the question of whether “organic” is the right way of doing things is too simplistic.
The topic seems to be, rather, is “organic” a positive institution overall? Here there are some concrete things I don’t like:
What are the goalposts for not being called a “scam”? Don’t start selling with claimed health and ethical benefits before you’ve shown they exist! And don’t poison the public against the competition by scaremongering.
Sustainability is profitable. Governments have all the power they need to regulate farming. The way this should work is simple: the people who know what they’re talking about should figure it out, the politicians should legislate, and consumers should get on with their lives. Is there a reason to believe that this isn’t happening? And if so, is there a reason to believe that organic food will fix it?
Whatever the organic food label stands for, I find it hard to believe that it delivers. All I see is some great marketing which started out without scientific backing and is even built partly on rejecting technology. That’s without even going into questions of enforcement effectiveness and general corruption.
Well, yes, it does. Literally. If some aspect of X is beneficial then X is beneficial in at least (but not necessarily only) that one way.
What does the pronoun “it” stand in for in each of your three bullet points? Presumably, the noun “organic certification” cannot “make claims”, “reinforce”, or “ask people” to do anything because it is an abstract and non-corporeal noun. I don’t think the USDA has made any of these claims either, but feel free to provide citations to the contrary.
My next best guess as to what you can mean by “it” is “profit-motivated corporations which abide by the organic regulations while still trying to turn a profit”. Well, yes, an organization like that is going to use marketing to try to sell as much of their product as possible. But that’s a result of market-based resource allocation, not organic farming practices.
Sustainability doesn’t actually seem to be very profitable. It only has a 4% market share which really limits the amount of profits that can be made even if there are high margins (which I doubt there are since there’s a lot of competition in that market as well; I don’t have any data on this to hand though).
As it is, though, organic certification isn’t really a regulation since it’s entirely optional. What happens is that any particular grower can decide whether or not they’d like to comply with the requirements for certification, they get their food on the shelves with or without the USDA organic label, and consumers get on with their lives just like you say. It is happening. People have an option to pay a premium for food that’s more sustainably grown and harvested whether or not it’s USDA certified as organic. Are you saying the world would be a better place if people didn’t have that option? I tend to think consumer choice is usually a good thing.
One more point here: industrial farmers might know a lot about growing food without knowing much about sustainably growing food. If you leave the regulations up to people who don’t care about sustainability than the regulations (and the market) will tend not to favor sustainability. That approach certainly won’t do anything to improve the environmental impact of farming methods. Creating an organic certification at least creates some incentive for doing so even if the specifics of the regulation can be gamed and if specific aspects are compromised and if, after all that, there are still some small problems with the regulations.
USDA organic certification doesn’t have to be perfect to have a positive impact over all.
It depends on what you expect it to deliver. As I’ve said many times now, the label provides a first-order heuristic to help people decide which foods are probably more ethically grown and harvested. It delivers that much just fine.
Whatever your thoughts are about scientific backing and technology, it’s fairly obvious in a common-sense sort of way that a lot of industrial farming practices are bad for the consumer and for the environment. If the organic label can at least create a space within the market to experiment with more sustainable practices then that can provide a way for the market to innovate more sustainable practices without forcing the innovators to directly compete with the industrial farms that show no sign of reforming their practices.
As far as enforcement and general corruption, I think those are pretty prevalent in any market at any time. Without organic labels there would still be corruption in the industrial food system. I’d bet that over all there’s less corruption in the organic market because at least some of the players in that market actually do care.
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