AMAZING blueberries at 7th Ave. Key Foods

the opposite of "organic" when used to describe how produce is grown is "conventional"

Does sustainably raised vs conventionaly raised work better as a distinction?

I'm with Ms Tea when it comes to pesticide-free being a labor issue...

sweet tea wrote: <-- often eats non-organic food. but still knows that buying food raised without pesticides is less about the health of the person eating the food than that of the people who worked on the farms where it was raised. yes, they do end up in the hospital, though most likely not one local to you.

i would still eat cheap, tasty blueberries, but i wouldn't say 8thandPrez is wrong, here.

sweet tea wrote:

i'm interested to know what specifically you find worrisome about organic pesticides. it's not something i know very much about.

The pesticides allowed for organic are not necessarily known to be safe, they are just not synthetic (ie, organic), among other issues.

I found summary of some good points:

Clearly, the less we impact our environment, the better off we all are. Organic farming practices have greatly advanced the use of non-chemical means to control pests, as mentioned earlier.
Unfortunately, these non-chemical methods do not always provide enough protection, and it's necessary to use chemical pesticides. How do organic pesticides compare with conventional pesticides?

A recent study compared the effectiveness of a rotenone-pyrethrin mixture versus a synthetic pesticide, imidan. Rotenone and pyrethrin are two common organic pesticides; imidan is considered a "soft" synthetic pesticide (i.e., designed to have a brief lifetime after application, and other traits that minimize unwanted effects). It was found that up to 7 applications of the rotenone- pyrethrin mixture were required to obtain the level of protection provided by 2 applications of imidan.

It seems unlikely that 7 applications of rotenone and pyrethrin are really better for the environment than 2 applications of imidan, especially when rotenone is extremely toxic to fish and other aquatic life.

It should be noted, however, that we don't know for certain which system is more harmful. This is because we do not look at organic pesticides the same way that we look at conventional pesticides. We don't know how long these organic pesticides persist in the environment, or the full extent of their effects.

When you look at lists of pesticides allowed in organic agriculture, you find warnings such as, "Use with caution. The toxicological effects of [organic pesticide X] are largely unknown," or "Its persistence in the soil is unknown." Again, researchers haven't bothered to study the effects of organic pesticides because it is assumed that "natural" chemicals are automatically safe.

from http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~lhom/organictext.html

A couple of notes:
1) Whynot often eats organic and locally grown food as I go to the farmer's market.
2) spoiling food at our house is not a problem as he eats it before it goes bad.
3) spoiled vegetables not really a problem.
4) the tomatoes he bought that were pinkish when purchased and inedible in my opinion have spoiled because he wanted them to ripen.

On more serious notes:
Using pesticides and fertilizers costs a lot of money. Loosing crops to pests costs a lot of money. But over time (you need more pesticides and fertilizers with each passing year whereas the average loss to pests is pretty constant) the costs are the same. As the costs (and food production is a business) is pretty similar between the two techniques, productivity between organic and non-organic would be roughly the same.

If we (and by this I mean the big collective we, not the we of the board) were actually worried about feeding the world's human population, we'd all eat lower on the food chain so that there would be more space to grow basic crops.

(/high fives mrs whynot)

btw, Steve's C-town's hass avocado's are currently perfectly ripe and ready for home-made guacamole instead of their usual rock-hard ones.