N80
Super Member
D7E said:Absoluteley ...I'm not against it at all but until consumers change buying habits and are willing to pay for organic food it will not work , But even then it will be the stores or processors taking the profit , Farm prices don't increase when store prices do , And some-times the opposite happens?
That's my outlook on this as well. I see it as a fad. Which is not to say you can't get rich on a fad, but you have to be right there to ride that wave. And then its gone.
The problem, as I see it, is that very few of the "inorganic" techniques have been proven to be any sort of real health risk. With that being the case, the "organic" fad has to be sustained by people's belief that they are getting something truly risk free and avoiding something truly dangerous. People will believe a lot of things, the supplement industry is plenty of proof of that. But the 'organic' fad is going to depend on keeping people scared and willing to pay extra to feel like they are making a healthy choice. If that good feeling is not worth the extra money, being 'organic' loses its shine.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against organic. I'm even talking with my B-I-L about potential benefits of organic beef farming, but that has more to do with getting out from under the thumb of an oppressive beef market than any notions about what is healthy and what is not. But the truth of the matter is that the 'organic' market depends more on a feeling than any evidence that it is somehow better for you.
And you can also rely on the fact that even if it does take off in a sustainable way, when people hear that you can put something called 'rotenone' on your organic crops, someone is going to capitalize on that fear factor and introduce 'natural organic' crops as opposed to plain old 'organic'...with no rotenone, or any other 'approved' chemicals or poisons...especially if any of those have scary sounding names? I mean how long before someone decides that deisel smoke residue on crops makes them 'inorganic' (even though diesel smoke is technically an organic compound)? Or even residue from the rubber tires or the synthetic soles of your boots?
And don't forget this folks. People are living longer and healthier than people did when everything was 'organic'. Sure it is multifactorial, but there is nothing to indicate that anything in the current farming practices is shortening our lives or endangering our health. (I'm not saying that will always be true, genetic engineering does concern me some). But seriously, buy and eat all the organic food you can, I'm all for it and my wife likes to buy it, but if on any given day you eat one twinky, drink one Doctor Pepper, eat one Big Mac or delivery pizza, you're increasing your risk for diet related medical problems, primarily in the form of coronary artery disease and cererbrovascular disease, in such a way that far exceeds any benefit that you got from eating an organic vs an inorganic tomato at lunch that same day.
But, you can't expect Americans to analyze risk in a rational way. Tobacco is still profitable. And besides, we're still buying Hoola-Hoops. As long as you can keep the feeling alive, 'organic' may be sustainable.
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