I know that my poultry and eggs taste better than store bought, the birds are free range and eat all sorts of stuff, and are not medicated other than when they need it. The veggies I have grown taste better, but I seek out heirloom varieties that are not hybridized into plastic yuckiness.
If we had the space, I would raise my own beef and pork also… but we simply do not have the space =(
Organic eggs are way better tasting, to me. It’s not just marketing, either. They’re the only thing that I buy exclusively organic, but in general I find organic dairy and meat taste better overall.
After work I try to pickup a piece of ass at the olive bar.
We produce our own organic vegetables, eggs and poultry so we don’t buy those, but what I insist on buying organic is various flours and yeast. I have found that the quality of that has a great impact on how nice my bread will be.
Oatmeal is unsual to buy here and the organic stuff I buy by 5kg is way better than the quaker brand we have here.
And except for stuff like, say, bananas, I only buy locally produced, or at least, french-produced, stuff. It makes no sense for me to buy something organic if it travelled for thousands of miles to go here.
I chose “Other” - I buy a few organic products because they aren’t available in regular.
That may be the problem though. It’s not so much the growing but what happens post harvest that affects the taste. We buy organic fruits and vegetables. The organic Gala apples are smaller and frequently a bit beat up, the non-organic Gala apples are significantly larger, have no blemishes, and often coated in wax to increase their shelf-life in the grocery store. They taste quite bland, whereas the organic apples—probably actually in the early stages of spoil—have a more robust flavour from the sugars and acidity. If non-organic produce wasn’t set-up to last for a month in the fridge, the same varietals would probably have a similar taste. But if the apples are treated post-harvest with waxes to prolong their shelf-life and keep them pretty at the grocery store, I’ll take the one that taste better because it’s aging/spoiling naturally and the sguars and acids are doing what they are supposed to do.
It could be the chicken feed. We sometimes farm sit for our friends that had free range laying hens. The eggs were divine! Then they switched to a different feed, and the eggs tasted… “non-eggy” if that makes any sense.
I chose ‘better for the environment’, but that’s not the whole reason. As others have said, I like to support local agriculture and often those veggies and fruits just happen to be organic. Also, I have a theory that part of our problem with obesity in this country comes from the hormones in our food- for example, I look at pictures of my mom, who was my age in the 70s, and she is skinny, as in, you can see her ribs and everything, and so are all of her friends. Same thing with people in the 60s, 50s, 40s- anyone who vintage shops knows this. People were just… smaller. I wondered what was so different about then and realized that it seems to me that people started to just get bigger in general when we moved away from local and family farms and into giant econofarms. I really think that some of the gradual ‘biggening’ of our bodies can be attributed to the hormones and chemicals in our food. I’d like for that not to happen to me, so I try to eat organic.
I buy hormone free and grass fed beef because it tastes better. However, everything else that I buy organic (the top 20 or so of the EWG’s veggie list, poultry and dairy) is for my health.
I know there are studies in both camps, but it’s too early to tell what the outcome with be. However, I can afford it, and I don’t want to be looking at cancer or insulin resistance years down the road.
I don’t care about the environment in relation to my food. I buy local in the summer cause produce taste SO much better. But in the off-season, a lot of organics are shipped from California. Makes no difference to me.
I should also point out that organic dairy standards are absolute shit. Dopers who purchase organic dairy should check their brand against Cornucopia’s ratings. You can find their report here. I always wince when I see people purchase Horizon, which is simply Dean’s regular milk sold at a higher price.
Mods, please take this down if I’m not allowed to post a link to my own blog, but I detail the scandal and lawsuit regarding Dean Foods/Horizon “organic” milk here.
All of the above, really, and I’m lucky enough to be living in an area in NC that has a plethora of great organic farmers, a good many I count as friends. I know their farms and practices, so I buy their products knowing it’s as good as can be produced.
Oh, it’s tough being both an aspiring foodie and a broke college student. 
I try to buy chicken and eggs organic, because they taste better. For veggies, I do local when I can, like aruvqan, because they are tastier and I like to try to support local farms (plus, our town’s farmer’s market is wonderful!).
IF you have a few shekels to spare, I really urge people to check into getting an aerogarden … frequently they have them on sale… or pots and a grow light.
There is nothing like fresh basil, or fresh arugala right at your fingertips all year. I can heartily recommend the genovese basil plug, mine got huge and if we didn’t chop off 6 inches every week it would have taken over the world!
Grow radishes in a window box [20 day life cycle from planting to eating] you cant get more instant gratification than that! Loose leaf lettuces in a pot … fresh herbs. Dwarf lemon trees in the living room … tomatoes in an aerogarden [my black krim are doing very nicely thanks!]
Couple of reasons:
I do because of a belief of what you put into something goes into the product. If the issue is the bottom line, mass produced food then that is what you consume when you eat it. If it is care that is what goes into you.
Probably the most recognizable example is art where people can tell if it is a angry (or whatever) picture, but everything we do IMHO what we put into it carries through.
[QUOTE=ITR champion;11876804 We first legalized Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) for dairy cows in the early 90’s. This hormone works by breaking down cells’ natural restrictions on cell division. Anyone with a basic knowledge of biology could suspect that this might lead to tumors and cncers. It certainly causes cancers in the cattle themselves. Of course, we’ve done studies showing that humans can drink milk from cows treated with BGH for a few months without bad effects. But what happens if you drink such milk for your entire life? Nobody knows. If you’re drinking non-organic milk, then you’re the guinea pig.[/QUOTE]
BGH is a hormone that cows produce naturally. If you say that it could cause cancer you are saying that all milk could cause cancer because all milk has the same hormone in it. The milk labeled BST-free is a joke, there is no way to test for the hormone because the hormone is there anyways.
I do eat some organic produce, but only because the neighbors grow organic and trade us free veggies for storage space on our farm.
I would like to add that there is something between the organic farm and the mega dairy. We milk roughly 100 cows, and grow crops on about 300 acres. We are not an organic dairy, but I know every one of my cows like the back of my hand. They aren’t just numbers on legs, they are our livelihood and we work our asses off to keep them happy and healthy. We receive awards for our milk production and quality. The same neighbors that grow organic produce also have an organic dairy. The number of cows they loose because they can’t use the same medicine we can is astounding. There is no way I could ever let one of my cows die because I couldn’t give her the medicine she needed.
This is pretty much the only reason I buy organic. I find that some of the quantities and selection that I desire are only sold as organic in the store I frequent. I guess I could go somewhere else, but it doesn’t really bother me.
I buy organic because I have celiac’s disease and have to avoid gluten & wheat based products.
Sometimes if you read a label and it’s not organic it might look like there’s not any wheat or gluten in it, but if it doesn’t have an allergen warning label on it to clarify, there’s a chance that it might have a “modified food starch” in it that does indeed carry something my body can’t handle.
The other things: taste, price, local produce, enviro-friendly, etc, are important - but the wheat-free readability is a primary for me.
But as Pollan points out in that book, sometimes it’s better to do your research than buy organic as a knee jerk reaction. I’d rather buy from a small, local farm that can’t afford to (or simply chooses not to) have organic feed trucked in from hundreds of miles away – and therefore doesn’t get organic certification despite practicing sustainable farming – than buy organic chickens from Peru.
Buying local is great if you can do it, since it basically ensures that you get the best quality – everything’s in season and whatever’s growing the best is going to be sold more cheaply so the farmers can get rid of it.
I chose “other”. The only thing I go out of my way to purchase organic is dairy. It tastes better to me.