>
> On Sep 19, 2009, at 2:36 PM, Alan Rudy wrote:
>
>> ...health-phobic concerns about the poisons in conventional foods...
>>
>
> Pesticide residues are not poisonous? Is their effect merely a benign
> propensity to spawn multifarious comminatory neologisms, as alien to the
> dictionary as to rational discourse, like "ecoromantic," "agroecological,"
> "physiodynamic," "retrocommunal," and "hyperprocessed?"
>
Well, actually, it depends on the pesticide, which is closely related to where the food's produced. Here in the US, every legal pesticide is acutely toxic but has a very short ecological half-life... very bad for farm workers, much better for consumers and charismatic megafauna at the end of bioaccumulation paths... in short, pesticides used on domestic produce are very unlikely (but not zero likelihood) to have anything like medically significant residues... Of course, the explosion in global agrifood sourcing over the last thirty years has meant that many of the pesticide bans and phytosanitary standards regularly met here in the US are not applied to a good bit of produce generated across the global south.
But, even there, the staggeringly small margins, hypercompetitive state and staggering concentration of grocery chains has generated conditions where large retailers impose private grades, standards and certification regimes on their suppliers, regimes that are far better at "protecting" consumers (I mean, of course, their risk profiles) than the USDA's inspection regimes. There are those who claim that farm-to-school, direct marketed and farmers markets are much more likely locations for health problems than most large supermarket chains - tho I am by no means convinced these folks are right.
...there are folks committed to organic/grass-fed/WF... etc., etc.
>>
>
> There are also folks who still have taste buds.
To my mind and in my experience this varies wildly from commodity to commodity and region to region... organic carrots and tomatoes CAN be infinitely superior to conventional in terms of taste but I'd almost be willing to argue that it is often more important what cultivar is being grown than whether or not it is organic or conventional... In short, this is complex stuff that is regularly simplified out the wazzoo for political and polemical reasons.