Then it’s not going to become the norm. Rich people can afford better things. Better cars, better clothes, better houses, and [gasp!!] better food.
For which you should blame buying tomatoes in October (to be tough enough to travel from their farm, the yum has been bred out). And red delicious apples just suck. Don’t even buy them. Honeycrisp and Cripps Pink. Yum. I love Pink Lady apples but feel guilty buying them (they’re generally from New Zealand).
The best food is local and in-season.
The reason that many store-bought tomatoes have little flavor is that they are bred to look good and handle easily when shipped long distances without blemishes, and are picked when still green. Some of the best-tasting tomatoes “look funny” (have ridges or funny colors, or tend to have cosmetically off-putting defects) and are less likely to sell.
I’m pretty sure you could grow Red Delicious apples under the purest of organic conditions and they’d still taste like crap (it’s ironic that these apples were originally supposed to have had good flavor, but that’s not been the case for a long time).
So organic certified farms and non-organic farms may have the same parent company. Big deal. That’s not the same thing as “most organic produce comes from the same factory farms as traditional produce”.
It’s mono-culture with pesticides applied. Just different pesticides. Bricker asks if the flavor is different. So far we haven’t seen any reason why a big farm company is going to do anything different to change the nutritional content of the produce. Big farms spray pesticides and practice monoculture. Most organic produce comes from big farms (e.g. Earthbound). Even before the consolidation we’ve seen over the past decade, the majority of the organic produce coming out of CA came from ~2% of the farms (DOI 10.1300/J064v21n04_06). You can visit them in the next time your drive through the San Joaquin valley. These big farms may spray pesticides (albeit from a smaller list) and practice monoculture and stick an organic label on their products. We can’t taste the pesticides. Unless we have some reason to believe they are adopting other, optional practices, we have no reason to believe the flavor content will be altered.
But only to a limited extent, same as everybody else.
Rice and pasta are just filler and vehicles for the sauces, anyway.
Until he tosses it in the freezer for a couple months. The point goes to the grocery store or butcher shop, whose meat is generally fresher.
I posted the USDA fact sheet earlier and, as it says, organic certification is more than just using different pesticides (which is just one part of it). It also deals with fertilizers (no use of sewage sludge), animal welfare standards, land sustainability, etc. So taste and nutrition aren’t really the main issue - to use a much more extreme example, organic vs non-organic is somewhat akin to the choice between buying “non blood diamonds” and “blood diamonds”. I don’t even get into organic all that much, but there are some good intentions behind it - which some people are willing to pay for.
The flavour of organic grown tomatoes may be better, but not because the plants are happier - on the contrary in fact. Stressed tomato plants produce tastier fruit (but lower yields) - plants sprayed with pesticides suffer less stress from insect damage and produce larger yields, but the flavour may be diminished.
Also, organic grown food may just be fresher due to having a shorter shelf life (I.e. it may be more likely to be local)
It’s also worth noting that choice of varieties may be quite a significant factor. Again in the case of tomatoes, industrial scale farming will tend to favour varieties with traits that are convenient for that mode of production - high yields of uniform, durable fruit produced all at once on vines with well-behaved growth.
Organic farmers will select varieties that have different traits, such as a degree of natural pest resistance, or longer production (to suit a smaller market).
Not all of these factors necessarily mean anything consistent about organic or regular farming or its outputs, of course - in fact, scale of market/production and the constant drive to reduce cost are probably the real reasons that supermarket tomatoes are mediocre.
Bring 'em on!
Incidentally, the use of genetic modification has massively reduced the amount of pesticides used on some crops. For corn, it’s down from ~200 g/ha in 1996 to ~10 g/ha in 2010. And yields have gone up, so the amount used per bushel has gone down even more.
http://www.sciencemag.org/site/special/pesticides/infographic.jpg
Nutrition: Sheesh, take a vitamin pill if you care. Generally speaking Americans suffer from excess fat, excess sugar and insufficient fiber. Scurvy isn’t a big issue
Thanks for posting this. I’ll add though that while I think Budget Player Cadet went too far, I’m not especially worried about pesticides except insofar as I wash my fruit.
I once saw a table comparing public risk perceptions and expert assessment of environmental risk. Basically one was an inversion of the other: scientists cared about habitat loss, global warming, smoking, seat belts, occupational hazards and obesity while the public cared about pesticides in food, terrorism, airplane crashes and nuclear power. Roughly speaking. I tried hard to dig something like that up, but this link is the best I can do:
ETA: Found it google Perceptions of Risk by Slovic 1987. It could use an update. Here’s the 1987 table: http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/v08/08498t01.gif
While pesticides get a reasonably high rating by the experts (8/30), I suspect that is due to the occupational risks rather than food safety concerns.
Another site also gave a good rebuttal. I’ll post relevant points and highlight:
Regarding the above point about rotenone and pyrethrin:
I’m more concerned about the organic/liberal correlation Bricker alluded to. Someone provided a link that seems to show otherwise, but Bricker didn’t just think there is such a correlation, but intimated he had reasons to think the correlation isn’t accidental. In light of the cite provided above, I’m curious to know whether this has changed Bricker’s thinking as to whatever the cause of that correlation was supposed to be.
You don’t have to wait for high-rise farms. You can start a hydroponic garden in your own home. I’ve done it off and on over the years, and most recently on a shoe-string budget. Here’s my chard crop from a couple years ago.
Oh, and your link took me to a bunch of credit-card spam. Just sayin’
I’m sorry – I missed the link you mention. Where is it?
You must have me on ignore. 
To be fair, it was a random link I found on a quick search, but I was hoping to get your reasons for your statement as well.
My god. I’m not. The thread has been great once we got past that. A real discussion about the merits of “organic”. Inviting Bricker back and taking his nonsense seriously could derail the smart stuff. This thread is so much better without him.
Eh. A recent Gallup poll found that 48% of Democrats “actively try to include” organic foods in their diet, versus 40% of Republicans. So, something of a partisan difference, I would say, but hardly a polarizing issue. The same poll shows household income predicts organic choices about as much (49% of those making over $75K eat organic, v. 42% of those making uncer $30K), and age bracket even more (53% of those 18-29 eat organic, v. 33% of those 65+).