That said, you can think of mechanically separated chicken as a good thing:
The more we use the fewer we kill.
It's kind of nasty, but it's better then what people have to eat in other countries.
"Organic" was a good idea until the marketing department got a hold of it. It's like labeling milk "Hormone and Antibiotic Free!!! ZOMG!!! 1<3C0WZ!!!1!!!"
"Organic" was a good idea until the marketing department got a hold of it. It's like labeling milk "Hormone and Antibiotic Free!!! ZOMG!!! 1<3C0WZ!!!1!!!"</p>
QFT.
I shall soon market my new cereal brand. It's Asbestos free!
I find myself increasingly distrustful of all the food I eat. No matter how amazing the labels make it look, I always find out "oh wait, product X is actually lying or has some other bad thing for you." Yes I eat a lot of food I know is bad for me, but I also try to get food thats supposedly good for me. When I turn down say, white bread for a loaf of bread that says "WOAH OMGZ this bread has all the whole grain + XYZ you ever need!"... I want it to know its for real.
Why can't we just have good honest food? Whyyyyyy.....
I find myself increasingly distrustful of all the food I eat. No matter how amazing the labels make it look, I always find out "oh wait, product X is actually lying or has some other bad thing for you." Yes I eat a lot of food I know is bad for me, but I also try to get food thats supposedly good for me. When I turn down say, white bread for a loaf of bread that says "WOAH OMGZ this bread has all the whole grain + XYZ you ever need!"... I want it to know its for real.
Why can't we just have good honest food? Whyyyyyy.....
Eat what you crave when you crave it in small quantities. If you crave many things simultaneously, go with bread first and see if you still have a craving afterward.
Eat what you crave when you crave it in small quantities. If you crave many things simultaneously, go with bread first and see if you still have a craving afterward.
Eat what you crave when you crave it in small quantities. If you crave many things simultaneously, go with bread first and see if you still have a craving afterward.
THIS. In fact, if at any time during the day you feel hungry or the need to snack, go get a glass of water first and then wait about fifteen minutes. You'd be amazed at how many "hunger" cravings are just the body needing more liquids.
I think Pete rages about the FUD marketing campaigns used to promote "organic" products, not necessarily the products themselves.
Well, some of the products themselves are actually more hazardous and harmful to the environment than their conventional counterparts.
Free-range chickens have roughly 8 times the carbon footprint of conventional coop chickens, for example. Organic milk farms crank out way more pollutants than conventional milk farms.
But yes, the organic and natural marketing campaign is the majority of the problem. These companies know exactly what they're doing; they create a campaign that touts their products as being better and safer than conventional farming, while creating the impression that they're motivated by a desire to do the "right" thing and not by profits.
You cannot be Stonyfield Farms and not be profit-motivated. That's the only way the company became as successful as it is. Farmers at any scale are businessmen like any other, and they want to sell you a product.
My real beef is that the natural food movement is contributing to an increasing mistrust in science. The raw food and anti-vaccine movements grow every single year, and I've seen focus group studies that show ties to the natural food movement. People want "natural" food because they're told it's better than all that sciency food that you've eaten until now, and that helps create the mentality that the sciency stuff is bad and the old-fashioned stuff is better.
And people die because of it, and that disgusts me on a level that I cannot possibly express in words.
When I go to the store, I want to be socially responsible in my purchasing. When I am looking at a product and there are organic and non-organic options, it's really difficult not to just buy organic on the grounds that at least it's something.
I wish Seattle had farmers' markets like LA, where I could just go to the producers and buy quality food directly for a good price, but while our markets up here are large and full of great food from cool, sustainable local farms, they're also super-yuppified and I'm just plain priced out. I can't afford to pay as much for a head of cabbage as a DINC couple of Microsofties can, so I have to buy shitty produce at the grocery store and fight myself to keep from knee-jerk paying the organic premium.
Fuck all of the following: white guilt, yuppies, short growing seasons, and the organic industry.
But there's a bigger problem to the organic marketing. OK, sure, so some people make unwise purchasing decisions. So they spend more than they need to on food. I'll even ignore the fact thatorganic farming is not always better for the environment.
That is mostly about land usage. I'll grant you that it is not as efficient as far as land usage. Dang tootin' it uses more land to raise grass-fed beef, because they wander around and are not kept in a box. There are problems with Organic farming, and I think there needs to be more research into sustainable farming techniques and pesticides, rather than the focus on short term gain. I'll put it another way: When there is very little environmental regulation, it leads to a high profit, but it severely damages the area in the long term. We need to find a way to sustainably farm that won't fuck us later, a way to not deplete the soil and damage the water system, and if that leads to the development of bug resistant GMO apples and pesticides that are highly targeted toward specific pests, then so be it. I just feel that while organic is not the be all end all to this question (and indeed, unable to support the worlds population in its current state), it is at least something. I just get frustrated because I don't want to sit around and do nothing, because there needs to be a change in the way America farms and eats, and the only way to affect that change is with my purchasing money.
Myrealbeef is that the natural food movement is contributing to an increasing mistrust in science. The raw food and anti-vaccine movements grow every single year, and I've seen focus group studies that show ties to the natural food movement. People want "natural" food because they're told it's better than all that sciency food that you've eaten until now, and that helps create the mentality that the sciency stuff is bad and the old-fashioned stuff is better.
The thing is food science keeps giving us stuff like transfats and stuff that keeps making us sick. People eat braken, which is wild, natural, and carcenogenic. Natural does not always mean good for you, but people have been burned by the nasty processed food before so they worry. (I think poor diet contributes to making Americans fat.) However, this does not mean that you should eat raw milk or bathtub cheese. That is dumb.
Actually, in a lot of ways, it's less than conventional farming. That's my main issue with it. In fact, the organic lobby has expressly said that they think they're plenty safe as it is.
Organic and all-natural is probably not the key to sustainable agriculture. I want sustainability too, but we're not going to get it through buying local or organic farming. Centralized farming is flatly more efficient; if we can come up with more effective waste and runoff management strategies, we can reduce the environmental impact of industry farms.
That's really not true at all. Centralized, monoculture farming - the current "conventional" model - only works through massive fossil fuel inputs, both for farm operations and product transport, and for petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides. It's actually much less productive per acre than well-managed polyculture; it's just less human-labor intensive, so fewer farmers can farm more land and sell one or a handful of commodity crops more easily. It also radically speeds up soil depletion, since fertilizers don't add back all of what plants take out of the soil, and the practices of tilling and pesticide use kill off the biota that replenish the soil.
Centralized farming is only more efficient by certain very narrow 20th-century metrics, the two greatest of which - energy use and human labor - are rapidly flipping to conditions opposite the assumptions of the model as energy becomes far more of a problem and as a changing workforce with high unemployment makes reduction in human labor input a very dubious benefit. It's also completely unsustainable for a variety of reasons, many of which are common to a lot of the various types of centralized industry we've grown used to. Those common problems are a primary driver of the modern locality movement.
Monoculture is a MASSIVE issue from an evolutionary standpoint; we need to fix that. However, we also need to find out how to farm sustainably without using huge fucking fossil fuel inputs on every level. Vert farming, kangaroo farming, shit like that is going to help. GMOs help. Nuclear energy helps.
The problem lies in convincing people that they've just been gobbling up "organic=superior" truthiness, instead of hard facts.
The problem lies in convincing people that they've just been gobbling up "organic=superior" truthiness, instead of hard facts.
Some people know. Some people don't care; they haven't been given any better option to speak out again unsustainable practices. They want to do something environmentally friendly. If they aren't presented with any truly good options, they will go for the one that at least sounds better. Even if it's not actually that much different, it at least expresses their willingness to pay a little more for something that's produced sustainably.
Whatever else we say about the "organic" market, it has definitely been a huge impetus for companies to move toward green-in-fact practices. Without an indicator that there is a market for more expensive, environmentally-friendly products, we wouldn't have many companies even attempting to produce them. At least now we have a mixed bag - some products really are what they claim to be, and some are not. The organic food market affected many other industries, including energy and cars. While it's easy to point to the direct problems with organic labeling, it's not so easy to dismiss it as completely useless when you look at the big picture.
t's actually much less productive per acre than well-managed polyculture
This depends very heavily on the crops in question. Organic vine tomatoes can take up to 122 acres to yield one ton, whereas conventional vine tomatoes take 45 acres to yield that same ton. You see similar patterns in other crops, and organically raised livestock is terribly, terribly inefficient in terms of land use.
The problem with increase land use is that it also increases energy use (traveling, transporting, and harvesting more acres), and harms biodiversity. Sure, you might be able to maintain better biodiversity per acre of organic farming, though the research I've read shows that this is not always the case; however, if you also need to use 3 times as much land to do that, you still wind up creating a biodiversity issue as you force out native species to convert land for agricultural purposes. Sounds like a wash to me.
You also can't discount the economic infeasibility of buying locally, nor the locality of such a thing. Here in upstate New York, a lot of the land we have isn't readily arable, and the climate is unsuitable for a lot of crops. I grew up in the Adirondacks proper, and the actual amount of arable land simply could not support a significant population without some kind of food importation. You can raise some cows, and maybe barley and corn, but most other crops just can't survive on glacial till soil and short growing seasons.
But yes, conventional farming is problematic. The rapid soil depletion is a major issue, as are the waste products and transportation issues. Still, the notion that we can support a population as large as we have using techniques developed at a time when our population was at least a full order of magnitude less than it is now, and when we knew far less about environmental management, is a little ridiculous. Our society drifted away from relying exclusively on local farming because that's what it took to get us where we are today.
It's a hell of an issue, but I'm with WindUpBird; the only way we're going to fix this is to get away from fossil fuels, and to purposefully engineer crops to meet our needs. That latter issue is something that the "green" movement wants to destroy, because it represents a threat to their business model.
Trying over and over again not to lose my temper while working, it fails every day. The doctor I'm transcribing for talks in endless run-on sentences, so fast that even at half speed I can't keep up (but I can sure hear him stopping to take a nice, deep breath so that he can spill out another one). He slurs his words into incoherence. I have no idea where to punctuate, and therefore no idea how to make this medical report make sense. My fingers are feeling stiffer than ever and can't type correctly, I make a million unbelievable typos and a 6 minute dictation becomes a 30 minute ordeal. I am constantly behind now.
It doesn't help that I hate his voice. He sounds like a drugged frog talking a million miles a minute, and his P's and D's and T's all sound like they have gallon of spit on them, which is a nasty pet peeve of mine. I hate lip smacking noises. I can hear the details of this guy swallowing his coffee (EW), but I can't understand him. And yeah, I've called to talk about the completely stupid way that he talks and how impossible it is for me to type it in a sufficient and timely manner, and he says it will change, but we'll see.
For some reason this has been a huge problem just for this week. It doesn't help that my fingers have been stupid, stiff, and just plain not working like they should be once it's time to do work. I'm finding myself screaming into a pillow from frustration again, and I know I need to find a way to calm down, for a long time.
These are people's medical reports! Why would you dictate them in a way that makes them harder to accurately relate?? The other doctor doesn't do that!
These are people's medical reports! Why would you dictate them in a way that makes them harder to accurately relate?? The other doctor doesn't do that!
Have you asked him to slow the fuck down? Medical reports are serious business, and it sounds to me like he's not taking them very seriously, like he thinks they're a bother or something.
Comments
However, I stand by some of my purchasing decisions after looking into them more.
It's kind of nasty, but it's better then what people have to eat in other countries.
"Organic" was a good idea until the marketing department got a hold of it. It's like labeling milk "Hormone and Antibiotic Free!!! ZOMG!!! 1<3C0WZ!!!1!!!"
I shall soon market my new cereal brand. It's Asbestos free!
Why can't we just have good honest food? Whyyyyyy.....
Simple enough. ;^)
Free-range chickens have roughly 8 times the carbon footprint of conventional coop chickens, for example. Organic milk farms crank out way more pollutants than conventional milk farms.
But yes, the organic and natural marketing campaign is the majority of the problem. These companies know exactly what they're doing; they create a campaign that touts their products as being better and safer than conventional farming, while creating the impression that they're motivated by a desire to do the "right" thing and not by profits.
You cannot be Stonyfield Farms and not be profit-motivated. That's the only way the company became as successful as it is. Farmers at any scale are businessmen like any other, and they want to sell you a product.
But there's a bigger problem to the organic marketing. OK, sure, so some people make unwise purchasing decisions. So they spend more than they need to on food. I'll even ignore the fact that organic farming is not always better for the environment.
The report mentioned in the article.
My real beef is that the natural food movement is contributing to an increasing mistrust in science. The raw food and anti-vaccine movements grow every single year, and I've seen focus group studies that show ties to the natural food movement. People want "natural" food because they're told it's better than all that sciency food that you've eaten until now, and that helps create the mentality that the sciency stuff is bad and the old-fashioned stuff is better.
And people die because of it, and that disgusts me on a level that I cannot possibly express in words.
I wish Seattle had farmers' markets like LA, where I could just go to the producers and buy quality food directly for a good price, but while our markets up here are large and full of great food from cool, sustainable local farms, they're also super-yuppified and I'm just plain priced out. I can't afford to pay as much for a head of cabbage as a DINC couple of Microsofties can, so I have to buy shitty produce at the grocery store and fight myself to keep from knee-jerk paying the organic premium.
Fuck all of the following: white guilt, yuppies, short growing seasons, and the organic industry.
Organic and all-natural is probably not the key to sustainable agriculture. I want sustainability too, but we're not going to get it through buying local or organic farming. Centralized farming is flatly more efficient; if we can come up with more effective waste and runoff management strategies, we can reduce the environmental impact of industry farms.
Centralized farming is only more efficient by certain very narrow 20th-century metrics, the two greatest of which - energy use and human labor - are rapidly flipping to conditions opposite the assumptions of the model as energy becomes far more of a problem and as a changing workforce with high unemployment makes reduction in human labor input a very dubious benefit. It's also completely unsustainable for a variety of reasons, many of which are common to a lot of the various types of centralized industry we've grown used to. Those common problems are a primary driver of the modern locality movement.
The problem lies in convincing people that they've just been gobbling up "organic=superior" truthiness, instead of hard facts.
Whatever else we say about the "organic" market, it has definitely been a huge impetus for companies to move toward green-in-fact practices. Without an indicator that there is a market for more expensive, environmentally-friendly products, we wouldn't have many companies even attempting to produce them. At least now we have a mixed bag - some products really are what they claim to be, and some are not. The organic food market affected many other industries, including energy and cars. While it's easy to point to the direct problems with organic labeling, it's not so easy to dismiss it as completely useless when you look at the big picture.
The problem with increase land use is that it also increases energy use (traveling, transporting, and harvesting more acres), and harms biodiversity. Sure, you might be able to maintain better biodiversity per acre of organic farming, though the research I've read shows that this is not always the case; however, if you also need to use 3 times as much land to do that, you still wind up creating a biodiversity issue as you force out native species to convert land for agricultural purposes. Sounds like a wash to me.
You also can't discount the economic infeasibility of buying locally, nor the locality of such a thing. Here in upstate New York, a lot of the land we have isn't readily arable, and the climate is unsuitable for a lot of crops. I grew up in the Adirondacks proper, and the actual amount of arable land simply could not support a significant population without some kind of food importation. You can raise some cows, and maybe barley and corn, but most other crops just can't survive on glacial till soil and short growing seasons.
But yes, conventional farming is problematic. The rapid soil depletion is a major issue, as are the waste products and transportation issues. Still, the notion that we can support a population as large as we have using techniques developed at a time when our population was at least a full order of magnitude less than it is now, and when we knew far less about environmental management, is a little ridiculous. Our society drifted away from relying exclusively on local farming because that's what it took to get us where we are today.
It's a hell of an issue, but I'm with WindUpBird; the only way we're going to fix this is to get away from fossil fuels, and to purposefully engineer crops to meet our needs. That latter issue is something that the "green" movement wants to destroy, because it represents a threat to their business model.
It doesn't help that I hate his voice. He sounds like a drugged frog talking a million miles a minute, and his P's and D's and T's all sound like they have gallon of spit on them, which is a nasty pet peeve of mine. I hate lip smacking noises. I can hear the details of this guy swallowing his coffee (EW), but I can't understand him. And yeah, I've called to talk about the completely stupid way that he talks and how impossible it is for me to type it in a sufficient and timely manner, and he says it will change, but we'll see.
For some reason this has been a huge problem just for this week. It doesn't help that my fingers have been stupid, stiff, and just plain not working like they should be once it's time to do work. I'm finding myself screaming into a pillow from frustration again, and I know I need to find a way to calm down, for a long time.
These are people's medical reports! Why would you dictate them in a way that makes them harder to accurately relate?? The other doctor doesn't do that!
As for venting frustration, I recommend beer.