We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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He should know better than to tell the truth The man tipped as the Labour Party’s next-leader-but-one has made what could be a career-threatening mistake. He has sided with rational evidence against a popular delusion. David Miliband has said in an interview with The Sunday Times that ‘organic’ food is “a lifestyle choice”, and that there is no evidence it is any better for you than the other stuff.
As agriculture minister he may have been trying to be generous to the farmers he works with who are not on that particular bandwagon: “It’s only 4% of total farm produce, not 40%, and I would not want to say that 96% of our farm produce is inferior because it’s not organic.” But it can not be too long before he has to apologise to the green lobby.
There’s a large chunk of the British middle-class that ‘just knows’ organic is good for you, nutritionally and morally, even if they rarely buy it. And as for the Hampstead elite among whom he grew up… Is he suggesting Poppy is stupid paying £6 a jar for strained bio-dynamic baby vegetables to feed little Rufus?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Or are the focus groups telling them the green band wagon is losing its appeal with the voters?
That is exactly the point: one cannot believe politicians, even if what they are saying is aligned with one’s particular beliefs, because you can never tell if they actually believe in what they are saying, or are just pandering to this or that particular political interest. Even worse, often the same goes not only for politicians, but for scientists as well, because science has also become extremely politicized. My common sense tells me that food that has been exposed to less poisonous substances is better for my health, so I buy organic, regardless of what some politicians (or even some research funded by god knows whom) are saying.
Alisa,
Surely your common sense would also tell you that you shouldn’t be exposing your skin to poisonous substances (so you shouldn’t use soap) or chlorinate water or even take medications (which are poisonous in large doses, just like pesticides).
also…..
The problem is that the people who buy organic are disproportionately influential people in society and are thus filled with a false idea of how high the ‘cost of living’ is. Whenever you hear anyone on Radio 4 complaining about ‘how expensive it is to buy good food’ they are indirectly referring to their own experiences with Waitrose organic produce. They then infer that because you can’t afford to buy huge amounts of Waitrose organics with a welfare cheque, there should be increased state intervention in diet.
Poppy and Rufus – haha! But, do Poppy-and-Rufus-types vote for Labour? I think nice Dave Cameron has their votes sewn up in a stylish little hemp manbag.
“My common sense tells me that food that has been exposed to less poisonous substances is better for my health, so I buy organic”
And my common sense tells me that usually it doesn’t matter what substances the vegetable have been exposed to. Their roots suck in just the chemicals they need. The pesticides kill the pests but have no impact at all on the plants.
No one has ever shown that there is any chemical difference between “organic” and ordinary products. And if there is no objectively observed difference – the belief that there is a difference anyway must be based on something else… faith perhaps.
But if you feel like consuming “organic” products (you see – my vegetables are also organic, not minerals) – welcome.
Jacob: thank you:-) BTW, I agree that the name “organic” is silly, but that is beside the point. As to whether the plants absorb the pesticides or not, I have seen references to studies with conflicting results. Like I said, I don’t have to ability to study every study that is out there, so I rely on my common sense.
Jonny: yes, I do try to minimize my exposure to alll those substances you mention, although it is needless to say that I understand that I cannot minimize it to a zero. As to the supposed political influence of people who buy organic: what does it have to do with me? I am not one of these people. Should I change my consuming habits because of someone else’s politics?
Recently in a Waitrose in Cambridge I found myself in conversation with a couple who appeared to be taking great care over what they would buy, checking carefully the information on packages for example.
“Why the great care?” I asked.
“We’re looking for organic foods,” was the answer.
“There seems to be a lot around there.”
“Yes. Too many.”
“Pardon?”
“I’m a professor of biochemistry,” said the man, “Have you ever seen organic food though a microscope?”
“Uh… no.”
“If you had, you too would go to great lengths to avoid the stuff. Give me nice clean chemicals any time; I’m not into eating shit.”
“Pardon?”
“Anyone who tells you organic food is healthier is talking rubbish. Organic crops are fertilised with animal waste. Which is to say, shit–and you can see it is still there when you look through the microscope at the stuff sold in places like this. And I’m damned if I’m going to pay extra for that, thank you very much.”
Alisa,
Your common sense makes an excellent point. With only a little additional background information, I’m sure your common sense would go the other way. The question you should be asking is why you’ve never been given the background.
All plants generate as part of their natural metabolism a variety of secondary chemicals that appear to play no part in their own biology. The fact that most of them are highly toxic to insects, fungi, bacteria, and animals hints at their function. Animals can run away or fight back, but a plant that does not want to be eaten is more restricted; one method it can use is to try to poison its predators. Bacteria and fungi pull the same tricks – hence antibiotics and the Bt “natural” pesticide that organic farmers use.
There are an estimated 10,000 such chemicals in use in the plant kingdom (about 10-20 of them typically used by each individual species of plant), virtually none of which have been tested for human safety, but for which roughly half of those that have been tested have been found to be carcinogenic. Many give vegetables their characteristic flavours or odours. A lot of plants are not eaten because they are well-known to be toxic; those that we do eat often have a few nasty surprises. Potatoes and tomatoes are both part of the Belladonna family, containing the neurotoxin alpha-Solanine, which acts in a similar way to nerve gas, and has been associated with Spina Biffida birth defects. Lettuce contains Caffeic acid, at levels which give you an estimated 20 times the carcinogenic effect of DDT before it was banned in 1972. The herb Basil is probably even worse. Plant breeders once bred a variety of potato that turned deadly toxic when grown in dry conditions, and a breed of celery with such high psoralin levels that the pickers got chemical burn on their hands.
So, eating organic will not save you from pesticides. 99.99% of all the pesticides you eat are entirely natural; irremovable elements of the plant’s biology. Organic farmers tend to use more “pest-resistant” strains, which of course means ones with higher levels of nastier natural pesticides. What’s worse, there is some evidence to suggest that when plants are attacked by pests they actually increase the amount of pesticides they generate, so what is in normal circumstances a perfectly edible and harmless vegetable can become toxic when attacked. And of course, organic food is generally more subject to attack.
Further, our experience with antibiotics suggests that the pests can develop widespread immunity in a period of about 50 years, which means that the plants, like people, must continually evolve new poisons in a never-ending arms race. Truly, nature is not about Mr Fwuffy Bunny living at No. 1, The Carrot Patch. It is about no-holds-barred chemical warfare against the evil and voracious predators we know as herbivores.
Now, it seems to me to be common sense that plants do not want to be eaten (if I may anthropomorphise for a moment – perhaps I should say that especially edible plants would have disappeared millions of years ago), and that the chemicals that give them their flavours are probably not intended to do so, but are instead a failed attempt to kill you. Obviously, in the short term, the vegetables we eat are safe and indeed healthy. We wouldn’t eat them otherwise. But what are their long term and marginal effects? Nobody knows, because nobody has been able to test them. Tests involve animal experiments to which there is a great deal of political opposition, and are very expensive to run, and so because there is no legislation forcing manufacturers to test “natural” products, we have been given a horrendously distorted picture of the relative dangers of “natural” versus “artificial” chemicals. Who knows what horrors lurk in the salad bowl?
Seriously, artificial pesticides are probably quite a bit safer than natural, because they have actually been tested and the worst of them eliminated. That said, the natural ones are pretty safe too. By my describing the natural chemicals in the way you have probably only previously seen artificial ones described, you might be getting the impression vegetables are bad for you. This is the wrong impression – the danger associated with natural chemicals is tiny (probably), the danger associated with artificial ones far tinier still.
(If you are interested in further information on natural pesticides, look up Bruce Ames, inventor of the Ames test for carcinogenicity, and one of the world’s foremost cancer experts. Here’s just one of his many articles on the subject.)
The reason for all the hype is not scientific but political; and is essentially an anti-technological, anti-industrial pseudo-religion that has built up over the past half century that is intent on dismantling all of technological civilisation. The core belief is that “natural” means good, and “artificial” means bad. There’s a lot of money in it, nowadays, and a lot of converts. They have already infiltrated the media. And what ever will we do when they start to infiltrate governments?
Personally, I can’t stick David Millipede. Talk of him being Labour’s next leader but one is evading the obvious because I suspect Tone will do anything in his power to prevent Gord ever getting the keys to no. 10. I think Tone (& even more so Cherie) are so bloody minded they’d rather see Cameron win the election than Gord.
So, the Millibland almost talks sense on one thing. I suppose that was almost inevitable eventually. But lets not get carried away because didn’t one of his underlings at the Department of the Environment recently engage in an inchoate rant contra Ryanair? Perhaps that was just to balance the DoE’s sense/nonsense balance. “Smithers, you are the calming yin to my raging yang”.
I avoid organic whenever possible. I do this for the same reason I’ve got a fully locked, loaded and overclocked Athlon Barton with 1.5Gb and a striped set of WD Raptors (I shall make the jump to water-cooled 64-bit soon) and my old Speccy is in the attic. Organic is atavistic bollocks. I think Viz really nailed it in their “Top Tips” section a few years ago: “Greengrocers – don’t throw out those manky old carrots – just label them organic and triple the price”. 160 years ago there was a famine in the British Isles and these days the underclass are comfortably padded. Is this perhaps, at least in part, due to chemical fertilizers and pesticides? Might a guy called Fritz Haber have played a smidgen of a role in ensuring that nobody starves to death in Western Europe anymore? Yeah I know folks on the continent were starving at the end of WWII, umpty years after Haber unveiled his process but that was WWII which must qualify as a force majeure par excellence.
I actually go out of my way to buy GM food. Partly that’s because I’m an unabashed techno-fetishist but there are other reasons as well*. I disagree vehemently with the Prince Charles view that food isn’t expensive enough. It was bloody well expensive enough the last time I filled a trolley in ASDA. I’m rather a good cook and somewhat catholic in my tastes so the whole idea of just buying locally produced stuff fills me with horror. If I want tomatoes in December I’ll buy them from anywhere. If I want a tuna carpaccio I don’t give a toss whether the fish was airfreighted from India or not. Actually I do care. I love the fact that I can eat a fish that a couple of days before was blithely swimming around in the Indian Ocean. That really wouldn’t have happened a hundred years ago. Not that long ago someone posted here about Ecuadorian flowers and that post summed up exactly how I feel about globalized capitalism. Fish from India, software from America and magic out of China (or as the missus puts it boxes full of “bugger all” – she was outraged the last time I paid 80 notes for a CPU – 80 quid for that, it’s tiny! And made of sand!) I am not a rich man but I feel richer than any of the potentates of yore because I can do things they can’t. I can post on Samizdata and (in principle) I could meet up with James Waterton in Perth, Australia, tomorrow. Wow! Cool! And the greenies have a problem with that? Fuck ’em!
Don’t worry James, if I ever go down-under I’m honour-bound to stay with the rellies in Melbourne.
*Such as my sixth-form work-experience in the genetics lab of Newcastle University. The prof I was working under was responsible for re-jigging Sacchoromyces Carlsbergi (I wonder where the money came from for that?) but was currently working on cassava. Cassava grows in loads of places other stuff won’t and is therefore an important source of calories for much of the third world. Unfortunately it takes 48 hours to prepare. The preparation involves a lot of pounding and steeping to leech out poisions. The Newcastle team were trying to GM the poisons out in the first place. It was a poorly funded (and therefore long-term) project but just imagine the enormous freeing-up of human-power that poison-free cassava would result in…
Sorry Alisia, but the whole concept of organic was knocked into a cocked hat when productivity and pest problems got so bad that they had to invent the concept of “organic pesticides” and “organic fertilisers” in order to deal with them. Pesticides are deadly poisons, who cares whether they are “organic” or not. Strychnine and heroin are “natural” and can be organic. Doesn’t make them safe tho.
Fertilisers? An atom of potassium is an atom of potassium. Whether it comes from a processing plant or a manure pile is irrelevant. To claim otherwise is to advocate “vitalism”, which by any rational argument was disproved over 150 years ago.
Another issue tho, all out fruit and veg are cleaned up all nice and tidy, all spic and span. All sorts of spores, fungus and bacteria, which until very recently we consumed all the time, are now washed away. What quantities of metabolically or physiologically useful (necessary?) microdose pharmaceuticals are we now missing out on?
How very odd JEM. I have always thought that ah, shit was essential to growing vegetables.
The house I was born in in Caerphilly, had a really huge garden. What I thought of as the vegetable patch had in fact been a grass tennis court that the previous owners, during WW2, had “Dug for Victory”.
Consequently we grew all our own vegetables, potatoes, peas, onions cabbage, beans the lot.
To assist in the growing process we used to get a lorryload of manure from one of our farmer relatives. Twice a year Jack Pantaskowan’s lorry would arrive, filled with manure, and deposit this great mountain of steaming shit in our driveway. It took about three days for my father and grandfather to shift it in wheelbarrows down to the vegetable patch. Needless to say, all doors and windows in the neighbourhood remained firmly shut for the duration of the operation!
This was duely dug in.
Now being a small child at the time, I have no idea how “Organic” this was. I’m pretty sure that my Gramp used pesticides and slug pellets and stuff like that. Just as uncle Jacks cows had been inoculated with drugs against this and that likely disease of cattle.
The great thing about this “Garden of Eden” as I fondly think about it now, was that all our food was fresh.
The only two criteria I have for food is Taste and Freshness.
Now my common sense tells me that the less distance and time something takes to get from the ground to my plate, the better it will taste. This is especially true of meat. My father was a master butcher, who also had his own Slaughterhouse . The meat on my plate as a child, had never been more than 40 miles in its life. It was well fed, well treated and unstressed at the point of death. Then it was properly hung to let the flavour mature. This frankly is not done by our supermarket chains.
So for meat that tastes like it is supposed to (and indeed cheese), I go to a traditional butchers or a farmers market. I care not about chemicals- Just taste and freshness.
Now as to GM food, I am more suspicious. The agricultural revolution used selective breeding to build bigger sheep, cattle, more resilient crops etc, but when they start putting artic fish genes in the tomatos to help them survive the refrigeration process then I say
Hang on a minute!
But then again, if they tasted good I’d eat them.
Taste and freshness folks, taste and freshness!
Microdose pharmaceuticals? Oh, you mean poisons more deadly to our pathogens than to us. The enemy of my enemy is my friend…
I was interested by the GM Cassava story. Tell me, do they know what particular pests Cassava evolved the poisons for, and whether they could still be a problem? Or are they engineering in an alternative natural pesticide more compatible with human biochemistry to replace them?
The whole organic farm fantasy is pretty annoying with it’s lower yields, poorer quality produce and increased enviromental damage. What’s important to me with food is taste and what makes veggies taste good is freshness and being in season. The only easy way to get fresh seasonal veggies here in Scotland is to either grow them yourself or buy organic directly from local producers, so I buy organic. It’s frustrating.
When we’re staying in our second home in France, we can buy fresh seasonal veggies in the local market or the local supermarket. Noone in France seems to have heard of organic but the French do care about food so tasty food is easy to find.
And what ever will we do when they start to infiltrate governments?
They already have.
Pa: thank you for an informed comment. I am not yet convinced, but you have given me some new points to consider.
On ‘organic pesticides’ – if we already eat produce with its own internally created pesticides, then long term, intergenerational health issues are more likely to be known to us or mitigated by our own metabolism than from pesticides new to science and our bodies.
Although I am not sold on the total organic world, I am also not siezed by blind faith in GM and agrochem either. Pumping chickens full of antibiotics is mainly a result of their confined conditions – I suspect barn and/or free range is likely to indirectly yield most or all the benefits of organic.
I’m pretty much with Nick M on this one, and I loved Pa Annoyed’s essay on natural poisons.
But I view organic food as a kind of luxury product. If people (are stupid enough to) want to pay more for it, it’s their choice. In fact, I’d rather see British farmers switching to high cost luxury food production than being subsidised to compensate for the low prices of food they’re over-producing.
This is all well and good until, as Guy and Pa Annoyed point out, the local mafia starts having an opinion on the matter…
PS — my girlfriend only eats organic meat because the soil association apparently enforce strict animal welfare standards. I’m just grateful she’s not a vegetarian.
When everything was natural, not so long ago, and we weren’t afflicted with artificial fertilizers, pesticides, antibiotics, chemical additives, preservatives, and all the other poisonous trappings of a technological society like internal combustion engines or electrical power or microwaves, the average human life span was less than 50 in the “civilized” world, and even less in the vaster, even more primitive, undeveloped cultures of the earth.
Every extra second of life enjoyed by every human being since the beginnings of the scientific and industrial revolutions a few centuries ago are the direct result of the “poisonous” effects of a technological approach to farming, manufacturing, transportation, medicine, and living in general.
Look around you. Unless you are sitting in a secluded village somewhere in the Amazon or some such place, which you learned of and reached by technology, btw, everything around you is technology.
Fire is technology, a shaped rock is technology, a sharpened stick, a cured animal skin, a wooden plow or hoe, everything humans have ever crafted, invented, or conceived of, is technology.
Technology, invention, all are ideas miraculously frozen into matter and available for human use, for good or ill.
Yes, there are significant moral issues to be dealt with when dealing with technology, as there are with any product of the human mind and will. Confront them honestly, and choose your own path through the forests of life.
We are all still hunter-gatherers of truth and wisdom, searching for the correct path.
But to demonize technology indescriminately is to condemn the human mind and its most significant products, and to wish the human race’s return to an age of ignorance, fear, and all too early death.
Knowledge, painfully uncovered and applied, is all that stands between you in your warm house with electricity, computers, medicines, clothing, nutritious food, and all the other artifacts of modern culture, and a life of deprivation, cold, and constant fear in some smoky cave somewhere, struggling on a daily basis to avoid hunger, predatory attack, and untreatable injury or disease.
If you wish to eat “natural” foods, or wear only “natural” clothes, or engage in any other idiosyncratic choices for your life and work, more power to you. As a free man, I wish you godspeed to enjoy your own freely chosen paths.
I only caution that you maintain your focus as to why you have those choices, how much effort went into providing all that sustains you, and enables you to pick and choose from column A or column B.
Millions of hours of mental and physical energy, expended by a myriad of people for reasons noble and ignoble, built a social structure which cushions and protects you from that cave, provides you with so much more than a shaped rock or sharpened stick, feeds and clothes and educates you, and treats you when you are sick or injured.
All these things are technology, as is everything in your life, even the ideas that you form in your mind.
The anti-mind is the anti-life. Do not allow trendy intellectual fashions to obscure this single, elemental truth.
Alisa, you’re welcome. I don’t have a problem with people eating organic for whatever reason – taste and animal welfare are good ones – only with the anti-technology, anti-science attitude that comes with it.
Science unfortunately is politicised, but if you care enough about the topic to spend extra money on it, then isn’t it also worth a little time to learn about it? The practice of government is politicised too, but it would be dangerous not to take an interest on those grounds. The only antidote to lying politicians is people who care about the issues checking up on them.
TimC, the question of whether we have adapted to the toxins in our food is addressed in more detail in some of Ames’ essays. In short, we don’t have any better adaptations to natural than artificial, and for effects on the edge of statistical detectability, multi-generational anecdote won’t work. It took them decades to prove tobacco was harmful, and you still get the “My grandad lived to 102 and smoked like a chimney” stories. And if you don’t care about stuff on the edge of statistical detectability (and I’d call that the rational approach) then the same goes double for artificial pesticides and many other technological risks, too.
I’m in favour of addressing this problem by quantifying the risk – “OK, so it’s dangerous, but how dangerous?” Only when you know can you make a rational decision. But when you read a health-scare story in the press, how often do you see them give you the numbers? Do you even know what your probability of dying per year is, anyway, to compare against? Most people have no idea.
If anyone is interested in a comprehensive demolition of the organic case, read this. Its by a Lib Dem too
http://www.amazon.co.uk/March-Unreason-Science-Democracy-Fundamentalism/dp/0199205620/sr=8-1/qid=1168250712/ref=pd_ka_1/202-5716701-4051812?ie=UTF8&s=books
Pa Annoyed, I am not talking absolutes here, but I think it goes against reason to suggest that our bodies are no more or less able to cope with already naturally occuring previously encountered pesticides in our diet than new, never-before-encountered synthetic chemicals (as opposed to the synthetically created but naturally occuring).
I think it is right that people should be able to get hold of information on additives, pesticides and the risks thereof then make a choice. Right now, it is not generally available so people retreat into the organic bubble on a tide of fear and ignorance whipped up, possibly, by those who would also see us living in a wattle-and-dawb hut and wearing hemp sandals.
As for smoking I have no desire to smoke a cigarette base upon the stench as much as the additives they contain. I prefer cigars. I cannot afford to be addicted unless you call once every other month an addiction. That might explain why cigarettes are such a killer – people can afford to kill themselves.
veryretired,
You’re on fire! Great post!
Pa Annoyed,
You embarrass me. I don’t know why cassava in it’s native state is poisonous. I never thought to ask. Perhaps that’s why I ended up junking the biology for physics.
Rob Fisher,
I agree with you. I said I avoid organic but sometimes I have no choice. Sometimes (annoyingly) organic products are better for the simple reason that they are more expensive, higher value products which has nothing to do with their “organic” status per-se. I’m a carnivore and can sympathise with your girlfriend because I hate animal cruelty. I also can’t stick bad meat and cruel meat is frequently bad meat. It’s just a shame that too often the only way to get the good stuff is to buy into the whole “organic” crap. Given RAB’s comments, possibly quite literally.
RAB,
GM is no less “natural” than selective breeding. Both are technical solutions to problems. I remember a few years ago The Sun going ape-shit because a lesbian couple got some sperm from a gay friend and conceived a child with a turkey baster. This was apparently the collapse of Western Civilisation As We Know It. Except it wasn’t because haven’t farmers done the same thing for centuries? I’d much rather eat a cabbage with fish DNA added (this does happen) than beef from a Belgian Blue. The former is a cute concept which makes the cabbage less prone to pests and the later is a travesty produced by the “natural” process of selective breeding (specifically a chance mutation which some farmer hit on and exploited). The Belgian Blue is double muscled – more beef per cow but the calves are so large they have to be born by C-section – and that’s natural?
This is going to be my final comment on organic food. I recently saw some sea-salt on sale in my local Sainsburys which claimed to be “Organic”. How odd? I may only have an A-level in Chemistry (and was that a dull slog) but it’s enough to know that salts are strictly in the regime of the inorganic compounds.
You wanna know what keeps this member of the commentariat awake at night? The absolutely abysmal level of education our schools provide in science and math. It’s deeper than the schools, I have met any number of the allegedly “educated” who wear their complete lack of comprehension of science as a badge of honour.
As for smoking ….
I know a person who smokes two packs a day, but drinks only bottled water, because he believes tap water is impure.
Nick: It’s just a shame that too often the only way to get the good stuff is to buy into the whole “organic” crap. Isn’t there a contradiction somewhere in that sentence?:-) And are you one of those people who still don’t eat brussels sprouts just because their mom told them they are good for them? I don’t think it is wise being fanatic about anything, pro or con. (Please don’t take this personally, I am responding to your comment as I understand it). I don’t live in the UK, but it sounds like organic food is being over-hyped over there. This must be very annoying, as any kind of over-hype, but it still says nothing whatsoever about the merits of organic food (or lack thereof).
TimC more or less sums up how I feel about the subject, although it does not necessarily follow that his eating preferences are the same as mine.
Also, strange as it may seem, I feel very little suspicion towards GM foods. I’d rather eat a plant that was genetically modified to resist pests, than eat a plant with pesticide residue in it (maybe I’m just chemophobic:-)). This does not mean that I think GM plants are not dangerous to the environment – I just don’t know, and I don’t think anyone really knows yet.
BTW, Nick, if you don’t have kids yet, just wait, their math and science “education” is going to give you real nightmares.
Well Nick M those Belgian Blues sound pretty disgusting, rather like many thoroughbred breeds of dog that are so screwed up that they cant breathe or walk properly. I loathe animal cruelty and inspite of being a butcher so did my father.
I have said before that back in the 50s 60s there was only Kosher meat in this country, due the lack of Muslims at that time. A Rabbi had to come to my dad’s Slaughterhouse and do his single slit thing. Course they generally proved pretty useless with a knife, so dad would whip them into another room and treat them to a large Whiskey whilst the staff quickly dispatched the poor animal properly.
Incidentally did anyone else pick up on the story over Christmas that they are sneeking Halal meat into schools without telling anyone?
Now I may only have O level Biology but there is nothing natural about putting fish genes in vegetables.
Selective breeding will never accomplish that. It takes a laboratory. My distrust of scientists has grown almost to the level of my distrust of politicians.Especially now they have a New Religion in Global warming.
But like I said above – Taste and freshness are my criteria.
Also completely agree about the Education thing.
But then it isn’t just science. They appear to be able to teach nothing properly anymore.
Actually, Chris, heroin is a modified (acetylated) natural extract. With opiates, the further one moves from nature, the more addictive they are and the less interesting the high. Extracted morphine is harder to kick than opium, heroin is harder to kick than morphine, synthetic methadone, promoted in the US as a “treatment” for addiction only just controls the yen without yielding much pleasure and is harder yet to kick.
Incidently, the popular practice of growing vegetables in shit produced a major outbreak of E.Coli in the US last fall. Much of the nation’s spinach supply had to be destroyed.
Like Pa Annoyed sez, as long as it tastes good, I don’t care. There was once when my mom used rice from Thailand that was supposedly grown with less artifical pesticides, and I commented that the rice tasted better without knowing its origin.
So maybe there’s something to the organic movement, but I would think the gastronomic factor is still the most important one.
I can’t help it. I live to eat.
Alisa,
I don’t think there was a contradiction in my sentence. It is simply a matter of my observation of the antics of ASDA, Tesco and Sainsburys that they have been increasingly replacing their “premium” lines of goods with even more expensive “premium organic” lines. I don’t have to wait until my putative sprogs turn-up* to see the way science education has been thoroughly crapulated in the UK.
It makes me want to weep tears of blood every time I hear that yet another British University is closing it’s Physics department. Reading, Exeter, Newcastle… Not exactly naff institutions are they but no Physics department… About 5 years ago I heard that the UK produced 5 times as many graduates in media studies (I met one once – he’d specialised in Aussie Soap Operas and got a sodding first for a dissertation on Neighbours) as in Physics. Can you hear that? Yup, it’s Sir Isaac Newton developing high angular momentum in the grave. Who he? Well, he only invented the modern world and, possibly, the cat-flap.
The are times when I want to eat my own teeth. And if my Alma Mater (Nottingham) ever closes it’s Physics Department I think I’ll be forced to do something absolutely non-linear.
*And seeing as the missus has a contraceptive implant which is claimed to be 100% there will be one hell of a court case.
TWG,
That’s about the weakest piece of anecdotal evidence I have ever heard.
OT: Nick M, Aaaaargh! Media Studies.
Are we as taxpayers forced to subsidise these courses? I am sure we are. How did we get to this point? Consumer demand when no apparent cost is borne. Media Studies provokes me into thinking that some courses should be funded and others not, but then you get into interventionist goverment which I would not trust in the hands of the present kraptocracy.
It might be we go to the root of the mindset hinted by Louw and not be arbitrary such that all tertiary education has to be funded by the student or they get a bond from their future employer (as they often do in places like Singapore).
“I think it goes against reason to suggest that our bodies are no more or less able to cope with already naturally occuring previously encountered pesticides in our diet than new, never-before-encountered synthetic chemicals”
Yes, except that firstly, most of the vegetables we eat today are in fact relatively new in the human diet – you cannot evolve resistance in a few hundred or even a few thousand years. Secondly, even when it’s the same vegetable, the chemicals are very likely to be different and new. New pesticides evolve as the bugs become resistant to the old ones, and selective breeding since the dawn of agriculture has wrought many changes, not just to the yield, but also the chemistry. And thirdly, a lot of the nasty carcinogenic effects only show up later in life – and anything that happens after the age of reproduction has virtually no evolutionary impact whatsoever. (And if you’re still not convinced, I could give you some more reasons, but I think I’ll give up after this post too.)
As an interesting bit of trivia, how many of you think that the natural colour for a carrot is orange?
And those of you who go for organic because of the taste, what exactly do you think it is you are tasting? What causes flavour, and what do you think the cause of a stronger flavour would be?
(And when GM makes a plant more pest resistant, how do you think that works?)
Can there possibly be anyone here unaware that food does not simply contain chemicals, but in fact consists entirely of chemicals? I reckon that if they actually started listing all the chemical ingredients on stuff like apples or coffee like they have to for artificial additives – acetaldehyde, estragole, quercetin glycosides, benzopyrenes, benzaldehyde, 1,2,5,6-dibenzanthracene, etc. – people might start to get the idea. Although it would require it be sold in much larger boxes in order to get the label on…
🙂
The secret is out. The Soil Association is an islamic front organisation using natural selection. Organic food contains high levels of bacterial pathogens thus eliminating rich stupid people from the gene pool. This is excellent news for the rest of us. Though you may see a dip in the performance of premier football teams as a result.
Excellent news indeed. How are we going to get rid of the poor stupid people, though?
Carrots are purple in their original form.
Pesticides are much the same as they were 20 years ago.
Glyphosate and GM bred resistant crops have changed the game as their genes have escaped into the world and other plants from the same families have polluted ( yes, polluted) their gene pool. These other plants are now glyphosate resistant and when you don’t want them they are called weeds. Oops, didn’t see that one coming. How do we deal with these dang weeds now we don’t have any weedkiller that’ll kill the weeds and leave the crop?
Technology is great but only when used in a clever manner.
Presumably, something is only a lifestyle choice if its an irrational whim, rather than, pray forbid, being better for you. I suppose that’s why, for example, homsexuality, which carries the immediate risk of AIDS and is genetic suicide, is referred to as one of those, but heterosexuality never is.
It aslo gives us an interesting insightt into the minds of the left who go on about protectring lifestyle choices being the greatest triumph of Western democracy. What they’re saying is: we must make sure people can do personally destructive things, while someone else picks up the tab.
TimC,
I was an UG at Nottingham. Nottingham has a very large number of Malaysian students. The current King of Malaysia was in the first cohort of law grads from Nottingham when it got it’s royal charter. Me and my homies at Lenton Hall got quite friendly with a Malaysian girl called Zuliana. She’d got a scholarship which sent her to Rhodean (sp?) and then Notts U. She had to work for the state oil company for 10 years after her graduation. Various sage heads were nodded and had almost concluded that this was a 1990s version of slavery until one of us (I forget who, it wasn’t me though) piped up with, “So if she gets at least a 2:2 she’s guaranteed at least ten years graduate employment”. The rest of us shut up after that.
Zuliana was doing a degree in economics. I somehow suspect the Malaysian government didn’t feel that their country suffered from a critical lack of media studies graduates.
lurker mk3,
We can argue the toss potentially indefinitely as to whether homosexuality is a “lifestyle choice” or intrinsic or whatever.
I’m straight as a die but I have nothing against homosexuals. Why should I? It’s not like they are competing for the same hot totty as I am are they? European heterosexuals are merely fortunate that HIV in our countries is largely confined within the male gay community (BTW: I’ve never much heard of it being much of a problem amongst dykes). Go to Africa and you’ll discover that most of the world’s transmission of HIV is between heterosexuals.
Neither me, nor my wife want children. So, by your definition we are committing genetic suicide just as surely as the queers.
You Sir, and I just know you’re male, are nought but a homophobe.