Interesting study

[NoNo]

Organic food no healthier than regular food, study finds

I'd like to know who funded this. It doesn't address the use of chemicals in conventional foods as a possible health risk, so I don't know if that was a consideration or if this was just specifically looking at nutritional differences.

[Fredwina]

http://www.latimes.com/features/food...C2885942.story
Thought this was interesting

[OakLeaf]

Meanwhile, stories like this one never make the national news, and often don't even make the local news. The far more common incidences where the poisoning is cumulative and chronic, rather than an acute overexposure, get reported only in the rare event of a lawsuit.

Never mind that the referenced study - which I can't find online - appears to have examined only vitamins and minerals, not other components of food.

Edit: abstract online (full text is by subscription) - this is a meta-analysis examining other studies' findings concerning nitrogen, phosphorus, acidity, and eight other nutrients not identified in the abstract.

Parsons has a very good point, though (expanded on in much more detail by Michael Pollan in the opening chapter(s) of The Omnivore's Dilemma).

I've said it here before - as far as I'm concerned, consumers' personal health is the very last reason to choose organic. It may be a nice side benefit - I tend to believe that it usually is - but that's all.

[NoNo]

I agree with Parsons that local is the way to go, but let's face it, the vast majority of the population doesn't shop at farmer's markets. Yes, in that setting I'm less apt to care whether my tomato is organic or not, but in a supermarket, you'd better believe I'm searching out all the organic goods I can find.

[GLC1968]

I agree with Parsons that local is the way to go, but let's face it, the vast majority of the population doesn't shop at farmer's markets. Yes, in that setting I'm less apt to care whether my tomato is organic or not, but in a supermarket, you'd better believe I'm searching out all the organic goods I can find.

What she said. I don't buy organic because it's better for me, I buy it because it's better for the planet (or, at least most of it is). But as others have mentioned, it's important to know where your food is coming from, organic or not. We've been really shopping around lately to find organic sources for our animal feed needs. We don't care if it's 'certified' but we do want to know the people who produce it and what their methods are... I feel the same way about our people food (though, I'm more willing to eat something bad for me than I am to feed something bad to my animals ).

Contrary to the LA times article, I have found that organic almost always tastes better than conventional. It may not be as pretty, but looks are only skin deep!

[smilingcat]

There are those of us who are lucky enough to be growing much of what we need. Lisa in NY, GLC in Ore. and me here in California.

I for one am getting bit fed up with the term "organic", "free range..." For my partner and me, we are looking at number of incidents of mass posioning, E.coli, salmonella, chegella(sp)... vegetable wax coating on food, to melamine contamination of food, BPA.

We do not buy from Mexico nor from China. The ONLY REASON, WE AVOID it is because we have very low trust in our food safety inspection.

We support family farms. We support sustainability. We support humane way of doing business and this also means to pay a living wage. Conservation is also very important to us.

Lastly, we prefer heirloom variety because we like the BETTER TASTE!

One thing that is perplexing to me is that there have been numerous study which points to properly grown food (traditional sustainable organic) to be nutritionally more dense than the GM food with accelerated growth. I do not care to eat Bt-corn.

I may sound mad here but I really am not. I consider it to be of personal safety issue for one. There are many other reason for doing this but I don't want to be preaching here. so we'll just let it go for now.

BTW, looks like we are going to be buying a shredder/chipper so we can recycle yard waste within my property. Other items on our shopping list, rain barrels, emergency generator cause we lose power often, PV electric system, solar water heater. All of this in my very urban neighborhood.

GLC,

we found a reasonable priced chipper on Amazon of all places.

[OakLeaf]

we found a reasonable priced chipper on Amazon of all places.

But how much was shipping?

I just can't justify a standalone chipper/shredder. We have enough motorized gadgets. But I wish I had one that was hand-cranked, pedal operated (yeah I know it'd have to have a monster mechanical sequence to get enough leverage, but it could be done) or at least got its power from the tractor PTO.

[bmccasland]

Of yard tools to buy, a chipper/shredder rates higher on my list than a leaf blower (I sweep my walks, and rake the leaves). But I have sucker branches that I trim regularily and think a shredder would be a nifty thing to have.

I support my local farmer's market, and am addicted to the milk from the dairyman there. This week I bought peaches, blueberries (last of the season), tomatoes, cucumbers, and yellow squash. Ate a peach this evening the size of a baseball - it was wonderful!

[Trigress]

I know of a study of organic foods done here in Norway only a few years ago at a state university, thus neutrally funded. The research was done on strawberry plants and found no difference in measurable content whatsoever. Mind you, she tested only the plants/berries, not the environment around. This research doesn't support buying organic foods out of a belief that it's healthier, but I still buy organic foods with the environment in mind - no artificial fertilisers can't be all that bad.

[GLC1968]

Ah a chipper - something we haven't thought about yet. We live out in the middle of nowhere where it rains most of the year, so we can easily and safely burn our yard waste. After the goats get through with it and after we pull everything we can use to heat our home in the winter, we actually don't have much left over. We've only had to burn once in the last year and it wasn't a very big pile. Our property is so small and pretty much our only trees are fruit bearing ones that get pruned yearly (and the goats take care of the blackberries), so yard waste for us is minimal.

I don't have my book with me to look up the source, but if I remember correctly, in "In Defense of Food" didn't Michael Pollan cite some studies done about the nutritional difference between GMO conventionally farmed produce and OP organically grown items?

[tulip]

I have five very huge oak trees in my yard, and I collect all the leaves for my compost system. A leaf shredder would do wonders, but I'm hesitant to buy one because it's just another "thing." I'm sure one can be rented somewhere, and that would be ideal because I only need it once or twice in the fall. I'll call around.

I'm not a fan of burning at all. I'd rather cut it into smaller pieces and have a very long-term compost pile out of the way somewhere. Eventually it will break down, and you won't be polluting the air by burning.

--back to your Organic discussion--

[OakLeaf]

Maybe it's more of a problem when you have a lot of invasives. We have tons of ailanthus and multiflora rose. If you just leave the cuttings lie, you now have an area that can't be mowed or weeded - prime growing ground for more invasives. Plus, you just run out of room for it all; hand cutting it into pieces small enough to put in the garden trailer would take weeks, literally.

Depending on where you live, I think occasional burning (once or twice annually, with a check of the local air quality ahead of time) isn't necessarily a bad option. Technically, you need ash in your compost pile anyhow.

Most equipment rental places do have chipper/shredders. But that's one of the few things that won't fit in the back of a Prius.

I wonder if it's possible to rent some goats that are trained to eat ailanthus and multiflora rose, but leave the raspberries and native roses alone?

[channlluv]

I have five very huge oak trees in my yard, and I collect all the leaves for my compost system. A leaf shredder would do wonders, but I'm hesitant to buy one because it's just another "thing." I'm sure one can be rented somewhere, and that would be ideal because I only need it once or twice in the fall. I'll call around.

I'm not a fan of burning at all. I'd rather cut it into smaller pieces and have a very long-term compost pile out of the way somewhere. Eventually it will break down, and you won't be polluting the air by burning.

--back to your Organic discussion--

My grandfather was a Master Gardener and he had a huge long-term compost pile of leaves and greenwaste from the garden, which was about 1/4 acre (on a 2-acre lake-front lot - the lawn was huge and populated with live oak, pine, fruit trees, azaleas, roses, lilies, and all kinds of other flowers). His garden was legendary in our county. He could grow anything.

He had a leaf cutter machine and it was well-used. A bonus to a big compost pile -- and this one was, like, 10 feet wide by 25 feet long, and a good four feet deep - we had to turn it with pitch forks -- the bonus, though, is that there were fantastic earth worms under those leaves, and they made for really good fishin' in the lake and they were great in the garden.

To give you an idea, when he'd grow Silver Queen corn, my cousin Jeff, when he was little, would climb up on his mom's shoulders to reach the tops of the plants to pick the ears and drop them down to whomever was holding the basket below. Not kidding.

And yeah, it was all organic. That garden fed multiple generations for many years. I was in my twenties, I think, before I ever had to buy a jar of jelly in a grocery store.

I still buy organic, and local, every chance I get because I really do think it tastes better, may be healthier, and it's good for the planet.

Roxy

[tulip]

I would probably borrow a pickup truck for the day or two I have the shredder. I've also rented pickups before, and that's also an option. The hard part is finding someone to help unload and load the thing. I could probably buy a six pack for the college guys who live behind me.

I just got word that our Neighborhood Resource Center (lots of great kids programs) has started selling local eggs. They also have a Tuesday Farmers Market from their gardens. I have been getting my produce and eggs from a local farm stand, but I'm going to check out the NRC next week.

[GLC1968]

Oakleaf - I think we have both those varieties here (from the photos), too. I'm only just learning about invasive species in the PNW - totally different things from what I saw in NC or in FL (or even in New England). For us personally, blackberries and wild grapes are an issue...among other things. But the goats love em!

Our secret is having goats fenced in...then you just rip up the plants/branches that you don't want and bring them to their pen! Seriously, the amount of yard waste that we have 'left over' is soooo small. We actually lopped the tops off two old apple trees this winter and we managed to chop it all up for kindling or firewood. The amount that was 'waste' was barely enough to make a pile (even though it took us WEEKS of hard labor ).

We are definitely limited in our ability to burn (both in a yard pile AND from the woodstove) by the weather. If there is an inversion, you can get fined if you are caught with smoke coming out of your chimney! They take pollution pretty seriously around here - even in the country.

When we lived in NC - we used to run over the leaf piles with the lawn mower (with a bag on) to shred the few bags we needed for our tiny garden. It worked well and all the rest of the leaves were raked up and left at the curb for the city's leaf collection program. Now, we don't get enough leaves for all our needs. We collect all we can to dump on the garden, but we don't have to bother with shredding - with our warm, wet winters, it decomposes easily from a whole leaf. And we never have enough to add to the compost pile once we do the garden. It's such a joy in comparison to previous houses I've lived in where the fall leaf situation dominated our October weekends.