The Case for Organic Food
Corporations say that the minute amount of pesticide residue on agri-food won’t hurt you, so the whole organic movement is a crock. Even if that were so, there are at least five other reasons to eat organically:
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)
- Especially in foreign countries, workers, accidentally or through ignorance, sometimes use hundreds of times the recommended amount of pesticide. This contamination would not likely happen with organic food.
- Organic agriculture is easier on the environment. It builds rather than depleting soils. It reduces nitrogen runoff into streams. It uses less energy. It does not harm bees. It produces less greenhouse gas. It treats animals more humanely.
- Though sometimes organic food tastes identical to agri-food, the difference in taste between a free range chicken and a factory chicken is like night and day, similarly free range eggs and factory eggs.
- When Monsanto genetically modifies a crop to manufacture its own pesticides, you can’t wash them off. They permeate every cell. Further, the plant continues to manufacture them even after it has been harvested. GM (Genetically Modified) crops are effectively drugs, but they are never tested as thoroughly as drugs since the presumption is, if they are plants, they must be safe. They should be tested even more thoroughly since they are more widely used than drugs and any side effects are not tolerable in things eaten in large quantities. In contrast, with traditional chemical agriculture, pesticide application stops weeks prior to harvest, giving the poisons time to wash off and degrade.
- The main use of GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms) is to make plants Roundup-ready (tolerant to Monsanto’s herbicide to control weeds). The catch is, Roundup causes cancer.