Organic also does not meat poop-free - critters get loose in gardens and farms. Wash your fruits and vegees before eating!
Nitpick, except that sometimes it isn’t a nitpick, in some contexts it matters:
Most E. coli aren’t harmful to humans. Some E. coli are beneficial to humans; your gut is full of e. coli if you’re in any sort of normal state of health, and they’re helping you digest your food.
E. coli 0157, and some other strains, are another matter altogether, and can indeed kill you.
There are materials labeled for use by organic growers as pesticides. These are naturally-occuring substances, which the ecology as a whole has evolved along with. Some such substances aren’t allowed in either organic or conventional agriculture due to toxicity. The ones that are allowed in organic agriculture are allowed only for certain uses under certain conditions (this is to some extent true also of conventional agriculture, but they’re allowed to use pesticides as a first resort as well as allowed to use a much greater range of them.) Many organic crops have no pesticide use at all, even of allowed materials; but some do.
Plus which, there are pesticides in the rain.
So, while organic produce generally carries much less of a pesticide load than conventional, less isn’t guaranteed to be zero.
And birds fly over the fields; of organic and conventional growers alike. Possibly more of them over the fields of organic growers. Rinsing off your produce is a good idea.
Some pesticides, especially some synthetic ones, are systemic: they’re taken up by the plant as a whole. Systemics won’t wash off. But others, and most other things you don’t want to eat, will wash off.
Aside from what’s on the produce from the farm… you don’t know who else has been handling the produce in the store, or where their hands have been.
That is just a lie. Copper fungicides (like copper sulfate and copper oxychloride ) are approved as “organic” pesticides both in the EU and US and probably the UK too. I have never seen copper sulfate or copper oxychloride occur naturally - so these are man made chemicals.
Another example is potassium soaps which is approved as an organic pesticide. This is a man made chemicals too.
Before Covid, the big threat in Hawaii was/is rat lungworm which can make their way into tiny slugs and snails which can’t be easily seen on produce. There have have been dozens of cases and according to one report, at least 82 deaths as of 2019. Once ingested, it can result in a painful death.
On the produce shelf, the slugs and snails can travel to other produce from outside the islands. So I always thoroughly wash all produce that isn’t completely plastic bagged and never eat any part of the fruit that exposed, e.g. the part of the banana without it’s stem.
Look - I get the intuitive appeal of organic but all those things, you mention, are hotly debated.
For example take any Conventional non-organic crop X that uses Y acres of land to produce every year. Say today the worldwide demand is a million tons of the conventional variety. Now if the world shifts to organic farming of this crop, keeping the production same at a million tons ; you will need additional agricultural land to produce it !! This is because organic crops usually have lower yields compared to conventional crops. Here’s a peer reviewed paper on cotton yield (organic versus conventional) : Six-year comparison between organic, IPM and conventional cotton production systems in the Northern San Joaquin Valley, California | Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems | Cambridge Core
Where will that additional land come from ? Yes, you guessed correctly - forests will have to be cut down to make more agricultural land!!
The internet is filled with green washing but look for peer reviewed journal papers debating the issue.
Yes overuse of fertilizers, GMOs and insecticides are bad but all organic is no panacea either.
Look - I am a gardener and try to use organic methods as much as possible. But even for home gardeners, the “green” “organic” washing lobby had a “plan” - about a decade ago; there came to the market something called “Organic Soil”. The predominant part of these “Organic Soils” is peat moss which is taken out of wetlands / swamps. Nature spent 1000s of years developing these wetlands and storing carbon in them as peat. But these wetlands are getting destroyed, the carbon released - and all in the name of organic gardening. More here : The Truth About Peat — In Defense of Plants
A few weeks ago, I started a whole thread on the subject "How does one wash broccoli? "
The consensus was, you dunk it in water and swish it around.
I’ll admit that I’m aghast at the idea of filling an entire stockpot with clean water just to swish a serving or two of broccoli in it and then … down the drain it goes.
Over the next several decades, potable fresh water will be the $$ liquid over which wars are fought and people die (much like the oil, now) and I have to wonder … when people read archives from Grandma’s time and see instructions for how to wash broccoli (wasting an entire day’s ration of water!) how barbaric will we seem to them?
Depends on where you are. Around here, it’s not really possible to waste water: You get it from the lake, and when you’re done doing whatever you do with it, it goes back into the lake (one way or another).
True. Definitely the case in the Third World. The rule there was “if you can’t peel it, wash it.” In Nepal I used dilute iodine solution to wash the very few fresh vegetables that I found. And survived. Soap would be reasonably effective and would be more likely to shift any pesticide residues, but I don’t think you could get all the soap out and something like lettuce would taste funny.
Resistance to e-coli. Nope. The Third Worlders get sick just as we do.