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- buy organic food with no preservatives
- look ingredients
- salt (inorganic preservative)
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this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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Nothing inherently, you can go ahead and eat apples from your apple tree.
The main issue with "organic" foods is that the term is usually very badly regulated. Sometimes there is no difference between "organic" and "non organic"... besides price. Sometimes "organic" foods use very ecologically unfriendly techniques, or are grown/processed in countries where supply chains are not inspected anyway.
Then there's the fact that if something is different, it may not always be an environmental or health win. Growing your food in 30cm of water may be one organic and traditional way to avoid using pesticides (see: rice), but doing that with corn in the middle of Arizona would obviously be a terrible idea!
Anyway, overall I don't think organic foods are worse if you're well off enough that the price is not an issue. But you shouldn't feel personal guilt for buying whatever's cheaper, because quite often the alternative does not justify the price anyway. Eating truly "organic" food unfortunately requires a lot more involvement than picking the green package at a national supermarket chain.
Probably the most amusing example is strawberries: it's essentially impossible to grow them without using non-organic pesticides (and there are such things as organic pesticides despite the near-universal but incorrect belief that "organic" means "no pesticides") so the USDA allows them to be labelled "organic" if they're grown with non-organic methods but then replanted and treated organically for a few days before being harvested and shipped to market.
I imagine the USDA as a tired underpaid fast-food employee that has to deal with moronic entitled customers.
- "I want an organic strawberry!"
- "I already explained to you that strawberries cannot be grown without non-organic pesticide."
- "Are you telling me no?!"
- "I'm telling you that what you want is agriculturally impossible."
- "Do you have any idea who I am!?"
- "Ugh.... you know what? Okay."
* Takes a perfectly regular "non-organically" grown strawberry.
* Slaps an "organic" label on it.
- "Here you go. One organic strawberry. Thank you for shopping with USDA!"
- "Was that so hard?"
I thought people in the US calling food "organic" was akin to our "Agriculture biologique" in France, which is heavily regulated at an european level. Is it nit the case?
The AB label is regulated yes, which is almost equivalent to the EU green leaf. Then there are various private labels. In the US it's all up to private labels I believe.
Anyone can put "bio" and a vaguely green packaging on anything though AFAIK. And I don't think the average consumer is very knowledgeable about which label means what; I certainly am not.
Then there's the problem of fraud, and various issues with the way the EU defines "biological agriculture", but I don't really know much about either.