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]

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.