Open Thread: The One About Organic Food vs. Conventionally Produced Food
September 8th, 2012I saw the headline come up in a few places in my feed reader, but I didn’t bother to click through. I’m sure you know the one I’m talking about.
Readers are submitting it now.
Feel free to discuss, agree or disagree with it, but this one is like debates about Republicans and Democrats to me now. It’s below my threshold of interest.
Some of you, however, are wild over this, so let it rip if you like.
As context, I’d recommend, Trust Us We’re Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber:
The authors of Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! unmask the sneaky and widespread methods industry uses to influence opinion through bogus experts, doctored data, and manufactured facts.
We count on the experts. We count on them to tell us who to vote for, what to eat, how to raise our children. We watch them on TV, listen to them on the radio, read their opinions in magazine and newspaper articles and letters to the editor. We trust them to tell us what to think, because there’s too much information out there and not enough hours in a day to sort it all out.
We should stop trusting them right this second.
In their new book Trust Us, We’re Experts!: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future, Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, authors of Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, offer a chilling exposé on the manufacturing of “independent experts.”
Public relations firms and corporations know well how to exploit your trust to get you to buy what they have to sell: Let you hear it from a neutral third party, like a professor or a pediatrician or a soccer mom or a watchdog group. The problem is, these third parties are usually anything but neutral. They have been handpicked, cultivated, and meticulously packaged in order to make you believe what they have to say—preferably in an “objective” format like a news show or a letter to the editor. And in some cases, they have been paid handsomely for their “opinions.”
And now…
Via: NPR:
Yes, organics is a $29 billion industry and still growing. Something is pulling us toward those organic veggies that are grown without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers.
But if you’re thinking that organic produce will help you stay healthier, a new finding may come as a surprise. A new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine finds scant evidence of health benefits from organic foods.
Related:
California: The Companies Trying to Stop Mandatory Labeling of Products Containing GM Ingredients
Monsanto’s GM Corn Damages Organs
Research Credit: Eileen
I’m in about the same place seeing it about as interesting as a demo/repub debate. I also agree that you can’t trust industry.
But what’s often missing from the discussion is the health of the agriculture workers, the soil and contamination of other crops. If there weren’t a supply of cheap (disposable) labor many of the “conventional” crops would not even be possible.
I think the reason a lot of us are unusually pissed off about this is because it’s such a frontal assault — big ag in collusion with academia to propagandize the sheeple on a subject has much to do with the future of the planet, the people’s health, the environment, and ultimately our survival. It may be old hat on sites like Cryptogon, but how many neighbors do you have who visit sites like this, or who question big media?
Here’s a link to a page over at RI where I posted some articles and commentary — too long to repeat here, but hopefully useful:
Corruption of Food Production Thread