Organic food fraud

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Is Organic food better for you or the environment? It depends. Usually it replaces controlled chemical dosages (medicines for plant, soil and pests) with organic herbal remedies. Some work, some don't. For some crops it doesn't matter, for some it does. Generally, it takes more land to get the same yield, which means worse for the environment and you have to ship it further (or it costs more, so people shift to worse alternatives). So while it's a win on a few things, it's a loss on others, and not a clear win overall. The biggest champions of are suffering from Dunning-Kruger (aka self-delusion, Progressivism / Cultural Marxism, and so on).


Locally grown and eliminating packaging (or plastic bags) is similarly self-deluded:

  1. Packaging reduces spoilage. The reason packaging is economical, is because it saves spoilage. Spoilage creates methane which is a bigger greenhouse gas that CO2. So you're actually greener by smartly packaging and getting the food to market less damaged (and more eaten) than not.
  2. Locally grown is usually far less environmentally friendly. Economies of scale, specialization, and so on, mean that you can buy a Kiwi for example (from New Zealand), for less than the price of a stamp to send a letter to the same place. Do the math on that. If it was cheaper to produce here, you can damn well bet that someone would be producing it here.
  3. Pasture raised, blah blah blah. If you're not vegan, and you're an environmentalist, do yourself a favor and shut the fuck up. Meat (chicken, pork or beef doesn't make much difference), causes more greenhouse gasses than all the coal plants do (which are worse than oil). And free range is actually less efficient (thus more wasteful) than feed-stock raised animals. So you can prefer free range, local farms, etc., for other reasons. (like arguing happier/healthier animals make better meat, or are somehow less upset at being turned into breakfast, lunch or dinner)... and I don't care. That's a personal decision, but if you're going to go all CO2 and environmental, then you need to learn that there's no significant benefit, and probably a loss. And if you really cared, you'd be vegan anyways.

Lastly, anyone that has kids can't lecture me about my environmental impact. We don't have kids. Your kids footprint will be higher than my non-kids, no matter how little or healthy they eat. Again, that doesn't mean you can't have kids, or you're wrong to do so. It means you're a hypocrite if you have kids and somehow pretend you care more about the environment than anyone who doesn't.

Live and let live. Make your choices. If you want to eat locally grown more, and pretend that you care, fine. Driving an electric car, getting solar panels, whatever. Go for it. I think those a nice, almost utterly irrelevant symbolic moves -- but if they make you happy, I'm happy for you. But when you do stupid things like plastic bag bans, opposing food packaging, pretending that your sustainable beef is somehow less impactful than my SUV, and so on, I'm going to probably think you don't know what you're talking about. It's when you don't live and let live, and you replace trying to educate others to your cause, to trying to force them to live by your choices, that I might point how off the mark your causes are.


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