I think this is missing the point. The point isn't whether th8is bite or that bite of broccoli is delivering more nutrients or less toxins to you at this very minute.
The point is that the methods used to produce conventional food are bad for everybody and everything. Soil is also a living thing, and when you kill everything in it, you kill the soil, and what you have left is not a growing environment for plants but a neutral medium with nothing much to hold it together when you run unregulated irritaing sprinklers on it: so it washes away, taking with it a load of toxic chemicals and isolated nutrients, when then proceed to befoul everything downstream of the original place. Methyl bromide and other toxins sprayed on the fields don't stay there, they are wafted over the landscape, collecting wherever the wind patterns take them (in one dramatic case, right on top of the middle school I used to teach at, down by the strawberry fields). Pollinators die. The predators of creatures who like to eat what we eat, and creatures that can impart disease to plants and to us, die. The children of communities in agricultural areas die of cancer and respiratory diseases. Agricultural workers die young.
And, as I said, the soil dies, a lingering death, in which its prouctivity drops year by year and more and more expensive additives are thrown at it to try to overcome the destruction. Remember the blooming California desert? It's fading, and nobody wants to talk about it.
That's why we push for organic farming practices. Not so you can feel good about your diet.
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zvi and
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Date: 2012-06-15 03:16 pm (UTC)The point is that the methods used to produce conventional food are bad for everybody and everything. Soil is also a living thing, and when you kill everything in it, you kill the soil, and what you have left is not a growing environment for plants but a neutral medium with nothing much to hold it together when you run unregulated irritaing sprinklers on it: so it washes away, taking with it a load of toxic chemicals and isolated nutrients, when then proceed to befoul everything downstream of the original place. Methyl bromide and other toxins sprayed on the fields don't stay there, they are wafted over the landscape, collecting wherever the wind patterns take them (in one dramatic case, right on top of the middle school I used to teach at, down by the strawberry fields). Pollinators die. The predators of creatures who like to eat what we eat, and creatures that can impart disease to plants and to us, die. The children of communities in agricultural areas die of cancer and respiratory diseases. Agricultural workers die young.
And, as I said, the soil dies, a lingering death, in which its prouctivity drops year by year and more and more expensive additives are thrown at it to try to overcome the destruction. Remember the blooming California desert? It's fading, and nobody wants to talk about it.
That's why we push for organic farming practices. Not so you can feel good about your diet.