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The sad thing is that Monsanto really is evil. Just not evil in the way these people say it is. Beyond that, maybe try the conspiracy theory thread? Because a lot of these people are basically or literally conspiracy theorists and are stuck in this weird intellectual rut where all evidence supports their view, and evidence opposing their viewpoint is really just evidence of a conspiracy (thus supporting their views). Personally, I mostly give up if someone sends me more than one link to that one site Natural News after I try to convince them that it's a bullshit pageview troll site run by idiot.s OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Jun 27, 2013 |
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Jun 27, 2013 03:50
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Slanderer posted:This is exactly right. I'd be more than willing to engage with people citing Monsanto as a failure of capitalism, but no it's always people who don't understand what Roundup Ready crops are, or who paid for the research into "terminator seeds". (ie, the USDA and a company that wasn't even Monsanto). However, I'm not sure if I'd lump them in with traditional conspiracy theorists, if only because they don't seem to run with the same circles, or propogate the same memes. I don't here these people talking about government coverups, false flags, or murder-drones slaughtering those who know The Truth. Instead, they seem to worry more about Big Pharma, "superfoods" that they don't want you to know about, and the secret wisdom of the ancients/the noble savage/the mysterious chinaman. I mean the key is people aren't dumb and they can tell that Monsanto is probably not a bunch of good guys, and biotech does have some scary possibilities and risks we might not fully understand. They grasp that on a gut level. But beyond that, a lot of people just don't have the background in science or corporate misconduct to understand the risks. And then there's the telephone game that always runs where people hear a scary possibility and then by the third person it's not a possibility but a reality and then after another two people it ends up attributed to the only firm most people have even heard of: Monsanto. And it's all vaguely plausible so long as you don't know the actual facts of the case. The same goes for all the superfood crap - a single preliminary study or even just a purported expert finds that, hey, maybe almonds and fiber might be good for you because a single 20 person study showed results or a single chemical that can be extracted from it made mice live another two weeks when injected directly into their scrotums, and before long between distorted transmission and greedy people trying to cash in on the latest health craze, it's almond milk colonics and ancient Chinese secret fiber pills. It's a sell based on ignorance and appealing to peoples' (often correct) gut perceptions. People don't know anything about Chinese medicine either (hell the Chinese don't even know Chinese medicine that well - a lot of it was basically made up like 60 years ago) but there's a whole lot of mystery about it so they'll believe that it has some sort of undiscovered secrets that westerners just haven't gotten around to yet because of cultural chauvinism or something. I think the key is that scientists, like many other academics, have done a pretty poor job of engaging with the greater culture and nobody has any real understanding of what's going on anymore, leaving them to be blindsided by persuasive garbage. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Jun 27, 2013 |
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Jun 27, 2013 04:23
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Divine Disclaimer posted:No, my problem with Monsanto is that farmers should be able to re-sow their own seed, for practical reasons I consider more important than Monsanto's corporate profits. Except in the real world, farmers basically never re-sow their own seed for the crops Monsanto has patents on. You buy your seed from a seed company and get a seed company hat. If you really care that much about doing so, then you buy the non-patented seed from the exact same companies that sell the patented stuff. Also, the "Monsanto will sue you for violating copyright" is totally wrong and is the most common misconception I see. You can't copyright seeds. You patent them. And we haven't seen a single patent infringement case where the guy wasn't actually trying to infringe on a patent - like selectively breeding his own crops to try and not pay for Monsanto licensed products. A more recent case basically affirms this, that Monsanto will not sure over inadvertent infringement of their patents, and only substantial, willful infringement will do. I mean I hate the current patent and IP system in the US too, but so far we haven't actually seen any abuse in this arena beyond the normal uses of the system (and honestly far less compared to things like software patents) and there are some pretty clear legal limitations on what you can do with them. I've yet to see a single case brought against someone whose actions didn't look really suspicious and guilty, and the eventual court rulings in those cases seem to support this intuition. I'm not saying to completely ignore the issue, because it's possible that their reluctance right now is due to the fear of bad PR, but at the same time I think the legal risks are totally overstated right now.
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Jun 27, 2013 14:24
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Amarkov posted:Glyphosate (Roundup) is one of the safest herbicides available. It's relatively nontoxic, breaks down quickly, and does not bioaccumulate. Studies have consistently shown that its use poses no health risks to consumers, minimal environmental risks, and even seems to be less dangerous for farmers to apply. My big beef with organic farming has been that it still allows for the use of various pesticides and other chemicals, and often ones that are less effective and worse for the environment. Kind of makes the whole thing meaningless in every way. So you use more of organic-approved pesticides like rotenone or pyrethrum that are still plenty toxic and can cause environmental problems if used poorly versus evil synthetic pesticides that are often less harmful and more effective. And it's a shame because organic has gotten conflated with lots of other things like heirloom plant varietals that often really do offer superior or different flavor, or home gardening, which is rewarding and often will give you fresher and better produce.
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Jun 27, 2013 21:31
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Okay, I'm really confused here. You keep saying "objectivism". That's Ayn Rand's thing, right? Where does Monsanto come into that? I'm assuming he's trying to talk about positivism or empiricism or something and doesn't know the right term for it. Ignoring this lapse, his discussion is similar to most of his other points in that none of them are particularly wrong, but they're all made kind of vaguely, assume the reader is an idiot and add in background most people already know about, and tend to dance around the real issues we're discussing by being related but never directly relevant. Also, I don't think he gets that "anti-capitalist" isn't really an insult here at all.
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Jul 1, 2013 04:37
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Also that response is basically confirmation that he doesn't actually have any direct scientific knowledge of the topic being discussed, which means he falls back on the standard rhetorical strategy for specialists stepping out of their area of expertise by throwing anything vaguely related to the topic that he does know into the reply, inevitably (and sometimes even unintentionally) swamping people in irrelevant factoids and jargon. Then you can pull the whole "but I'm taking the big picture and giving context you small-minded fools" thing when people complain. Also ask lots of rhetorical questions and never answer them, that helps too. The same goes for credential dickwaving that conveniently leaves out the formal training part, which based on a pure guess is probably one of the less rigorous systems areas like project management or something. Or maybe a greybeard systems engineer from the 70s who never actually did any engineering work, though I don't smell engineer in the diction.
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Jul 1, 2013 05:13
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Forever_Peace posted:Amen. Dennet's rigorous materialist viewpoint is pretty refreshing after all the woolly mealymouthed stuff I've just had to wade through here.
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Jul 1, 2013 06:30
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Sogol posted:Yes, the rice has been mentioned too. I think there are several strains being developed in China, specifically for water conservation. I still wish i understood why China has almost no GMO acreage. I have spoken with people in China about it, and beyond a concern about the proprietary nature of the model and someone else owning the food source I have not yet found much of an answer. There have been some largish philanthropic efforts to develop protein enriched corn for human consumption, meant to be cultivated in Africa. I am probably just cynical in a way that prevents me from fully seeing what is emerging. This would not surprise me at all. China's biggest macro problem agriculturally is first that they don't have a lot of arable land relative to their population, and second that they've already depleted most of their major aquifers, which is why they currently import heavily from the US (and don't care if it's GMO or not) and are working to acquire large amounts of land in Africa in exchange for cash, arms, and development projects. This is also why their domestic GMO efforts are focused on water conservation instead of reduced pesticide usage or reduced labor costs, both of which they don't really care about. Again, you ask a question about something you don't know much about, but instead of doing the research or just leaving it at the question, you go off on another tangent and expound on something vaguely related but not at all relevant. This is not contributing. It's pompous and irritating, and comes off as you wanting to show off and ramble. Being a "thinker" and coming up with possibilities is useless without the knowledge necessary to distinguish between what is relevant and useful and what is a waste of time. I can make up uneducated guesses based on first impressions, too. I just don't subject other people to them without the courtesy of developing my thoughts and making them directly relevant to the topic, or at the very least keeping the length of the guess in proportion to how strong the connection really is. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Jul 1, 2013 |
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Jul 1, 2013 17:34
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Buller posted:Why don't you tell us about those non-herbicide resistant crops Monsanto makes that go well with round up then? Uh Bt crops are totally different from Roundup Ready crops in every way beyond both being GMOs so good job impressing us with your knowledge there, champ. I understand people saying that they feel wary of GMOs and worried about systemic issues or whatever, but don't make concrete claims for things you know nothing about because that's really dumb and kills whatever credibility you think you're bringing with your abrasive know it all attitude.
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Jul 3, 2013 16:00
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archangelwar posted:How is this article, in any way, an indictment of Bt crops? I guess the article is against Bt crops in the sense that they might not offer as much improvement vs. non-Bt crops long-term as initially seen since it looks like the targeted organism may be developing a resistance to the Bt endotoxin, thus cutting into the effectiveness of Bt crops if the resistant population keeps growing. Which isn't good, I guess, but this isn't really a concern exclusive to GMOs at all and really applies to any pesticide, especially since Bt toxin has been used since the 60s. And we also don't know how much the mutation for Bt resistance effects the viability of the pests overall, since oftentimes resistance mutations come at the cost of reduced survival fitness in other areas, and this might still mean that there's an overall benefit to Bt crops in terms of reducing pesticide and fertilizer usage (depending on a lot of factors, obviously). And I don't know about a whole lot about the specific mechanism of Bt, but since it's a single protein that only works on a handful of related species at certain stages of development, I doubt Bt resistance is going to create unstoppable "superbugs" that are super in any way beyond being able to survive eating Bt endotoxin better than other bugs. So I also don't see that article as an example of "unforeseen consequences" since what's being reported is a pretty foreseeable consequence that's not really unexpected. And the species involved isn't an unrelated species, it's the pest that was specifically targeted by Bt corn, which is marketed as being rootworm resistant. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Jul 3, 2013 |
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Jul 3, 2013 16:34
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spikenigma posted:I think you need to work on it though, because you're asking me if I know the answer to your stupid questions when you don't know what a pesticide resistent crop is? No, you're completely wrong. Let me make this as simple as possible: Bt crops have been engineered to create pesticides within their own cells, so that the vulnerable parts of plants contain Bt proteins that are toxic to certain insects. You make them because then the poison is inside the plant so when insects start eating the plants, they get a mouthful of poison and die. That way you don't have to use as many pesticides and the plants are healthier, which increase yields and reduces fertilizer usage.
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Jul 3, 2013 17:01
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I mean, it's right there in the name!
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spikenigma posted:In what context did I post that link? No that's absolutely not the claim that was made. You directly quoted the guy you're responding to so we can see that already. Is English not your first language or something? You also really need to cool it with the huge amounts of white space for no reason, because that's just annoying.
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Jul 3, 2013 17:38
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spikenigma posted:...which would all be fantastic, if at any point I'd said: Yes it's the hivemind making everyone disagree with you instead of you not knowing what the hell you're talking about and making statements that show a clear lack of understanding. Nobody said bt crops can't also be pesticide resistant. But the two are not the same and are unrelated properties, so you can't just use one to refer to the other. Finding an example of a crop that has both properties doesn't cover for the fact that you confused the two because you don't actually have a real understanding of the subject. Seriously, there's nothing shameful about not knowing the specifics of how GMOs work. It just means you can't go off making strong statements when you're completely ignorant of the topic.
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Jul 3, 2013 18:18
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Well, anti-GMO predates anti-vaccine, at least in terms of the modern anti-vacc movement I'd say. Obviously vaccines are older than GMOs but anti-vacc became basically a non-entity for a long time. Also, Huff Po isn't really liberal at all. It's purely mercenary in its political stance and Huffington herself was a pretty arch conservative and anti-feminist in the 90s.
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Jul 4, 2013 17:35
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Scientism is a thing, but I'm not convinced that it's particularly applicable here considering that the topic falls pretty squarely in the domain of science, disagreements seem primarily fact-driven, and the actual scientific subject matter is pretty mainstream and well within the grasp of a non-specialist. I don't see the part of the argument where it's established why scientism is a particular danger in this specific situation or what a non-empirical perspective could even bring to the subject. It's just been dropped here because somebody saw the word science and thought this would be a great time to try and derail into something else.
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Jul 4, 2013 20:01
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Sogol posted:I don't understand this argument. Perhaps you could say more about how you imagine the dialectics promotes some sort of ignorance? You're not the only one here with a philosophy of science background. I have read all of these works and I don't think they're really that relevant to this situation. Again, you name-drop academics and general concepts but either you don't have a solid grasp of the subject or else you're just too lazy to actually fit your knowledge to the specifics of the topic. I'm not saying you're stupid, but there's a real lack of effort in how you bring things up and expect other people to make connections and make your arguments for you. I can't tell if it's that you're expecting some hyper-collaborative setting where you throw out ideas for other people to flesh out, or if you're being insulting and trying to impress people by throwing out random vaguely relevant crap. It's not good enough just to mention that these things exist considering that many of us were already aware of their existence. DACK FAYDEN posted:I just skip his posts when I hit the third polysyllabic word I don't know... so about three sentences in, usually. Is this common, that people jump into an argument about the physical impacts of GMOs by bringing in the moral element and then throwing around philosophical terms half the audience doesn't understand? No, it's a pretty novel approach. And I'm not impressed because I'm used to this stuff from my day job and I haven't yet been impressed by the quality of the actual thought going on behind the dressing. Academics get lazy too. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Jul 4, 2013 |
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Jul 4, 2013 20:18
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Sogol posted:You have actually been very generous with me in terms of taking the time to give me very direct feedback. I am not being ironic or facetious in saying that. I am attempting (and failing) to have a conversation. I am attemtping to have it as I actually am. In some threads this seems to work well, in others it seems to simply offend people. The way I attempt to say things is apparently so offensive to some people that they cannot seem to interact with what i might be trying (and failing) to say. I take the position that this is on me, not on them. I also struggle to actually consider some of the things being considered, which occur for me as quite complex, without resorting to convenience and reductionism. This is probably an irredeemable character flaw on my part. I do not yet know if it will prevent me from being able to function as a contributing member of this community or not. I do assume a radical context of collaboration. I do in fact assume that people are familiar with many of the sources and will make their own choices about whether to read the types of things I am writing. This is why I subscribed in fact. In the short time I have been here I have been introduced to a bunch of great sources, arguments and materials. I already use what I imagine I am learning in my work, practice and writing. If you are assuming that we're already familiar with the sources you refer to, why do you spend time and space giving general summaries of them when you reference them instead of pointing out the interesting part, which is the connections you see and the relevant points and new material you can draw from them? I'm sure some people reacting poorly to you is just because they've mistaken you for taking a side, or else because they're intimidated by your references and vocabulary, but other people I think react negatively because you spend so little time on the interesting parts of the stuff you bring up, which instantly makes people suspicious because it makes it seem like you're trying to obfuscate instead of clarify. I understand that this might be a stylistic thing, or an attempt at being socratic or illustrative by showing how you came to this connection, or simply because it's an idea that you haven't fully developed yet, but the problem is that there's a certain level of development before which you're pretty much imposing on the reader and that's not going work if you haven't built up some base level of trust which may exist in person but probably not on the internet, at least not in an already pretty adversarial thread like this. I can see that you're used to being very collaborative and throwing out things like this is a brainstorm session or research meeting or something, but I just don't think that works in (at the very least) these more polarized threads, which tend to be based on a much more adversarial format. It's more assumed that you will go through these possibilities and pick out what you think are the most relevant or strongest points that other people have missed so far. If people don't get it, you'll see this lack of understanding in their responses and then you can launch into a more general summary of the terms you've used or the works you're referencing. You've also definitely not been the worst part of the thread, by the way. That medal definitely goes to the people who are so angry that they can't even think straight anymore and often mix good points with bad but nobody's going to go after them for it because they're just going to explode if you say a word to them at all. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Jul 4, 2013 |
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Jul 4, 2013 21:17
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Amarkov posted:This is actually more reasonable than you're thinking. The problem here isn't the toxicity, which all available evidence indicates nobody knew about. The problem is that the US specifically used Agent Orange to target food crops, in the hopes of driving Vietnamese citizens to the slums where they could be more easily policed. This wasn't widely publicized, but it was a matter of public record. So Monsanto definitely either knew or should have known about this, and should have refused to produce it. How on earth would they have known? The nominal purpose of Agent Orange was as a defoliant to remove air cover from the jungle. That's what the government said when they were purchasing it. Expecting Monsanto to independently figure out if the government ever covertly misused their products in a warzone where the military controls all information and classifies everything, then expecting them to stop sales or somehow confiscate the huge amounts of stuff already sold is kind of ridiculous. Monsanto's pretty evil, but this is just not a very good example of them being evil. At worst, it makes them amoral, which is bad but not exactly uniquely bad.
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Jul 4, 2013 21:25
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Amarkov posted:Is this actually a fact? I've never actually been given an example of such a contract. Uh that's absolutely the excuse used when procuring Agent Orange. It's not like defoliant is nerve gas or something where there's a particularly special capacity for harm that creates some distinct moral burden on the seller, either. I'm all for higher standards in regards to corporate behavior, but I think your standards are unrealistically high. I'd reserve the moral culpability for not having better quality assurance or concerns about possible contamination and the way they handled the subsequent scandals for people exposed to that stuff, as well as later bullshit showing a pattern of behavior where they were literally getting crooked laboratories to lie about research and lab results to avoid paying out in lawsuits for other harmful chemical shenanigans. See: http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/lnn13c00/pdf http://planetwaves.net/contents/faking_it.html OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Jul 4, 2013 |
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Jul 4, 2013 21:35
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Mr. Self Destruct posted:Which in and of itself is highly criminal and unnecesarily destructive, and done to enable to said virtual genocide. I don't think you stopped to think what kind of impact destroying enormous swathes of jungle has on the ecosystem even ignoring the presence of human life. The government had been devastating the region for some time by this point and you can safely assume that such contracts are going to at best passively contribute to enormous loss of human life. Please don't abuse serious terms like genocide. It only cheapens them for when they're actually needed. Killing people is not always "virtual genocide," sometimes it's just killing people. It's bad enough just to say killing people or murdering civilians or whatever, you don't have to exaggerate and sound like a hysterical extremist. Boiled Water posted:You don't need to change peoples minds just look at different people. Like the ones in Asia who aren't dying from malnutrition due to GM foods. To be fair, this isn't really happening either. Golden rice hasn't actually left the test phase, and there's not that many GMOs that are even commercially available let alone successful or influential. The few that exist right now offer incremental benefits, but nothing revolutionary yet. FRINGE posted:Then you should start studying permaculture and intensive rotations, because those are the higher yielding methods that are most successful. Your blathering about "advanced food" is a mix of fantasy and marketing mis-information. The relevant work is in-lab. There is no scifi food that exists at this time. There is nothing that needs to be on the market at this time. There is no reason to defend the legal jockeying of dishonest companies like Monsanto at all. Permaculture is interesting but it's not really any more honest for you to tout it as "higher yielding" clearly superior magic because it's just as speculative and unavailable as dreams of golden rice advanced superfoods. Also, the GMO foods that are currently on the market are pretty low-key and benign, so I seriously doubt it's somehow breeding enemies on its own merits (or lack of them) considering that they're pretty uniformly harmless, undetectable, and uninteresting to end-users. GMOs have become symbolic of peoples' alienation from the current petrochem-driven food system and fear of giant corporations and new technologies, but they're not actually that big a deal and there are honestly bigger, scarier things to be worried about if you actually wanted to worry about food and/or giant corporations. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Jul 5, 2013 |
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Jul 5, 2013 02:02
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FRINGE posted:Uhh... I didn't say it's pure fantasy, but it's not at all scientifically well accepted and there is a lot more work before it's well supported, well understood, mainstream, or large-scale/long-term viable. To call it anything more than interesting preliminary work in need of more formal study is inaccurate.
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Jul 5, 2013 04:00
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You know that thing meth-heads get where they think there's invisible bugs under their skin and they pick the hell out of it trying to get them out? Basically like that without the meth.
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Jul 6, 2013 04:48
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Mr. Self Destruct posted:Glutamate is an important excitatory neurotransmitter with many functions throughout the body, introducing large amounts of it in high concentration to the body could have very easily explainable effects. Granted, its present in non-MSG form in a lot of other foods like cheese soy sauce etc, but its not like a biologically inert substance or something. It turns into sodium and glutamate ions when you ingest it, possibly more readily and in a different way than how its present in foods naturally. Add to that a large influx of additional sodium both in the form of MSG and the probably large amount of NaCl already present in the foods its being added to, affecting electrolyte balance etc, and you have a recipe for mild discomfort or headaches or whatever those people suffer from. Glutamate is a basic amino acid, so it's found in basically everything. It's present in most foods in exactly the same free form as MSG dissolved in water. Consuming MSG doesn't create any effect in experimental trials, which probably means MSG sensitivity is not due to MSG but something associated with MSG, like the cheap greasy food that MSG is usually added to, amplified by psychosomatic effects. And honestly there's probably a racial angle here, too. Foreign Chinese food made by untrustworthy foreigners is not nutritious or good for you, and any feelings you have after eating it are cause for suspicion, but good old processed American food with exactly the same stuff in it is perfectly fine and if you feel sick afterwards it's obviously because you ate too much. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Jul 25, 2013 |
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Jul 25, 2013 20:32
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TheFuglyStik posted:It applies to both equally. If we're selecting seed normally to increase yield at the expense of all else it's a problem long-term. The same principal can come into play with GMOs if we have the same priorities, just a different method for selecting genes in the crop. Except natural selection doesn't care about soil depletion or water requirements either. What happens is that those plants will undergo boom/bust cycles or just a boom until displaced by something else or until they completely exhaust the area and die off permanently. If they're good at moving around and can outcompete existing competitors, they'll end up spreading to some other area that's not so depleted until they reach the limits of their mobility and have wrecked the whole area, then go extinct (unless they have enough room that the areas they've already wrecked can rebuild to a habitable state and can be recolonized again). Though "wreck" is a human-level judgment, since all that's really happened is a change in the environment and nature doesn't give a poo poo and is undergoing constant change. Over a long enough period of time, the various organisms in the area will probably reach some sort of equilibrium either through a mutual deadlock of evenly matched competition and predation or else by massive die-offs and replacement by other organisms. But whether that equilibrium ends up being an actually desirable state for people is entirely unpredictable but probably rather unlikely. Usually, of course, especially if it's a domesticated plant, there's already so many much, much better competitors in the environment that they'll just be crowded out and die first. Giant edible seeds and tender parts that aren't tiny or filled with unpalatable toxins and/or giant sugary fruits are all huge, vulnerable energy sinks that represent massive competitive disadvantages compared to wild plants, which spend a lot more of their energy budget on killing or otherwise out-competing their neighbors and defending against predators instead of growing bloated, easily harvested blobs of food energy. The "purpose" of a wild organism is to survive and reproduce, not be useful to people, and even then I put purpose in quotes because nothing has any purpose at all without a human viewpoint to assign it one - things that are good at existing tend to exist and that is all. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Jul 26, 2013 |
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Jul 26, 2013 16:08
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Greenpeace had a purpose once upon a time but their historical brand of environmentalism is now entirely mainstream (since the science panned out and people have realized that making GBS threads where you eat is a bad idea). So they've started to radicalize a bit because they want to maintain their radical roots instead of doing something smart, like switching to attacking climate change deniers or some similar cause that needs aggressive activism.
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Aug 27, 2013 15:56
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KomradeX posted:Good enough for you is not good enough for everyone or truly sustainable, and that again assumes demand does not increase. I'm sure at one point someone said there'd be enough oil/coal to last well beyond mine or my children's lifetime. Anything that relies on a limited stock of fuel is going to eventually run out. I'm sure the supply can be stretched out if one uses geothermal, wind, solar or hell I've heard they're working on harnessing tidal powers. But whenever these issues come up there seems to be no small number of people that insist that nuclear power is the only option. Yeah, wind energy is bullshit as anything other than a gap-filler and a distraction for people to greenwash themselves with. Even if we filled the entire country with wind turbines it still wouldn't generate enough power to run even a fraction of the nation. It's very silly to tout it as any sort of long-term solution independent of nuclear or some other dependable, large-scale, and high-output power source. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 23:14 on Aug 29, 2013 |
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Aug 29, 2013 23:12
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Cheekio posted:Because GMO crops already thrive under organic farming conditions, they grow like weeds. The line of thinking isn't that you'd get more corn per square foot with organic crops, the intent is to use sustainable practices growing healthy foods with what you already have: heritage seeds. The auxiliary benefits of biodiversity like not wiping out all the bees is just a plus. Heritage seeds have nothing to do with organic farming. You have no idea what you're talking about. A lot of the chemicals used in organic farming are actually far more harmful to insects and the environment than the chemicals that don't qualify as organic.
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Oct 10, 2013 03:12
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The whole "organic = premium" thing for fruits and produce has always annoyed me because while it's true that a lot of mass-market stuff in the US is bred more for yield and shippability rather than flavor, so is almost all organic food as well. If it's going to be expensive, I'd rather see expensive food that has been grown for things like flavor and nutritional quality, starting with the choice of cultivars and going on to using the best growing techniques regardless of arbitrary poo poo like organic classifications, and that accepts any resultant higher costs for specialized shipping and losses due to damage. In other words, premium produce that actually lives up to the hype usually attached to organic produce. I know this is a thing that happens sometimes, it's certainly more common in some countries like Japan (with very different markets of course), and you see it sort of happening too with the new wave of branded cultivars like Honeycrisp. Apparently now people have caught on and are working it out so with future such brands there's licensing agreements and stuff to try and preserve the quality attached to the name. OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Oct 11, 2013 |
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Oct 11, 2013 16:16
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