Organic Food, Conventional Food

[nancylebov]

Over at Less Wrong, I raised the question of whether there's evidence that organic food is better for health than conventional food, and asked for anything from anecdotes to studies.

Less Wrong being Less Wrong, someone raised the question of whether conventional food might be healthier.

In any case, they turned up nothing in the way of evidence, as distinct from heuristics or very vaguely related experiments. (Strange but true: food from plants which have to fight off insects for themselves is more mutagenic than food from plants which are protected with pesticides. Or at least sort of true-- I don't know how many mutations or species of bacteria this was tested on.)

So I'm asking a (mostly?) different bunch of people here. Have you heard or tried anything comparing the health effects of organic vs. conventional on people? Mammals? Multi-cellular organisms of any sort?

Comments

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

To get back to your original question: there are some studies that have shown weak nutritional advantages in specific crops, but they seem to be relatively few and far between, so it may be the green jellybean effect (http://xkcd.com/882/) at work.

On the other hand, it's clear that a lot of industrial crop varieties that have been bred for size and resilience (e.g. "delicious" apples, d'anjou pears) are just terrible and have the flavor of cardboard when compared to heirloom varieties. It wouldn't be surprising if a lot of those varieties lost nutrient value along with flavor components. On the third hand, that's not directly related to whether they're organically farmed or not. I'd rather eat a GMO comice pear than an organic D'anjou..

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

The red delicious and the yellow delicious apples have been unfairly maligned. for one thing, they are rather early modern apples. Most importantly, thoguh, if you can find them grown and distributed in the same conditions as your favorite local apple, they are good out of hand eating apples. Especially the yellow, which when you can find it tre-ripe and not overfed and overwatered, tastes like flowers and beauty.

I had a yellow delicious tree in my yard for a few years, but no more.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

The red and yellow delicious apples were genuinely awful when I was a kid-- late fifties to early sixties in northern Delaware. The only apples I liked were winesaps.

I remember reading a book about the history of food in the seventies, and seeing a list of the apples available in the colonial era (and the wide variety of other vegetables). I sighed.

Then, probably in the eighties, I got old-fashioned Delicious apples at a co-op. They had red and green rough-edged stripes. They weren't symmetrical-- they were slanted relative to their central axis. And they tasted wonderful. I realized that "Delicious" wasn't mere advertising hype, it was an earned name, but then the apples were bred purely for appearance.

More recently, I've had pretty good Delicious apples with less dramatic stripes.

For some reason, it's a lot harder to find winesaps, though.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I think winesaps, like macintosh, don't ship or store well: they have tender skins and tend to bruise. Since cheap apples kind of depend on concentrated farming, long storage and long shipping, a lot of the more delicate apples are pretty hard to find now.

Unless you live twenty miles from the orchards like I do.

A lot of the farmers here are growing old fashioned varieties, but others have switched almost completely over to Fuji and suchlike, which are nice, nice apples, but they degrade when they are overwatered and overfed just like any other apple, and the longer they stay in the market, the more pressure there is to make them big, so. . .

[avram]

When I was a kid, yellow delicious tasted fine, but red delicious tasted like sawdust.

I've had one amazing winesap, at a farmer's market a decade or so ago, and never found another of quite that quality, even when buying from that very same farmer.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

I probably should have specified the Red Delicious. Red Delicious apples are mostly pretty bad (http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/04/us/perfect-apple-pushed-growers-into-debt.html). Golden Delicious apples are OK, they're not closely related.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I think time, place, and person need to be specified for these contentious apple issues.

In the bad old days of my childhood, Golden Delicious apples had a slight but peculiar taste, while Red Delicious apples had no taste.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

I think time, place, and person need to be specified for these contentious apple issues.

Yep. Also the contentious non-apple issues.