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

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Haidt's framework often makes sense to me. But I have my doubts on a couple of points:

* His category of "purity" includes sexual purity, but does not include valuing food purity, or the environment, which tend to be more leftist causes at present, but which seem to grow out of the same underlying mode of thought.

* He added "liberty" to his basic categories, but my experience has been that libertarians very often emphasize property, or even define liberty in terms of property (as when Rothbard bases life and liberty on "self-ownership"). And property is a moral category and a very ancient one, and is of concern even to people who think it has to be balanced against the other moral categories. If I were going to revise his system I would make "property" one of its base categories of moral thought.

Part of the trouble is that we have at least two different terminologies. In a large historical sense, conservatives are those who want the law, the government, or other authorities to compel the preservation of old values and customs; progressives are those who want them to do away with old values and customs and impose something better; liberals are those who want to let people choose for themselves. In the more specific context of European political culture, conservatives are those who favor the monarchy (which we don't have), the landed aristocracy (which we have traces of, especially in the southern states, but land ownership isn't the dominant form of wealth in the United States), the armed forces, and the established church (which we don't have); progressives are socialists of various stripes (which the United States doesn't really quite have); and liberals favor some role for the market, though not necessarily the "free market" that American "conservatives" often refer to and American libertarians actually support—in point of fact, American "progressives" often look a lot like what Europeans think of as "liberals." And neither of those is a good guide to American categories.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia, in the entry on Haidt, says

Sanctity/degradation, avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions. (He also referred to this as Purity.)

That's if you trust Wikipedia, though.

I think he would put property rights under 'fairness'.

[avram]

I know Haidt's revised his categories at least once.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

The trouble with that is that for a lot of people's intuitions, it seems that fairness not only permits but actually requires setting aside property rights. I'm not sure having a conflict between two interpretations of a basic moral value fits into Haidt's ideas; he seems more focused on conflicts between two different basic moral values.

Of course, you can take respecting other people's property rights as avoidance of harm. That might be a better fit. But then you have the opposed view that to retain your property when it could be taken from you and given to someone poorer is to harm the poor person.

I think the categories would really be simpler if "mine and thine" were recognized as a basic category.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

Well, but people also have radically different notions of what is sacred and what is disgusting. Property is part of fairness/justice in some cultural contexts, and an offense against fairness and justice in others. You may think the latter contexts to be objectively wrong (and I'd probably agree) but I'm not sure that's relevant. I think considerations and judgements regarding property probably ought to fall into the 'fairness' category, that's all.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Interesting analysis in regards to the preservation of old customs.

Law-abidingness might be a fundamental value-- it seems to be for some people.

I wonder if there should be a distinction between the values people pursue in their own lives/enforce in their own social circles and the values people support politically.

[inquisitiveravn.livejournal.com]

I think law-abidingness would fall under the authority axis, but the authority of law rather the than the authority of specific individuals.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that law-abidingness can be a basic value. There really wasn't anything properly describable as law before a few thousand years ago, the blink of an eye in Darwinian time. A basic positive valuation of law doesn't seem likely to have been ingrained in us through natural selection. There are situations in very low-tech, small, localized societies where all of the listed basic values come into play. I'd have to suppose that the emotional force of law, insofar as it has an independent force, might be built on top of authority or loyalty or both.

In such a setting, I'd note, "fairness" comes into play in such matters as dividing up the kill after a hunt; "ownership" comes into play in such matters as not taking the other person's basket or rabbit stick. Those seem to be different roots. They remain somewhat different as late as Aristotle, for whom "distributive justice" has to do with dividing up the gain from a common enterprise.