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bogleech

Things food snobs are wrong about

  • “Organic” isn’t better for you or for the environment. It actually means nothing of any significance at best and is sometimes even the more wasteful, more hazardous option.
  • A shitload of “natural” food including a lot of imported produce is grown and harvested through slave labor in inhumane conditions.
  • Pizza, fried chicken, french fries, fast food, candy bars and chips ARE nutritious. They are loaded with good things. Just because they have an abundance of excess fats and might not be healthy as a staple doesn’t mean they are “nutritionless” or that their calories are “empty.” Those are hokey buzzwords pushed by the people in charge of how much you pay for the alternatives.
  • Eating healthier costs more. Much more. Looking down on people for their reliance on cheaper food is extremely classist and expecting everyone to be able to live off fresh veggies and cage-free meats is insultingly unrealistic in the modern world.
  • “Processed” literally only means the food went through some kind of automated process. This can be literally the exact same thing a human being would have done to the food for it to be labeled “unprocessed.” Being processed does not make something less healthy.
  • Chemicals with long, scary names are part of nature. An apple is full of compounds you probably can’t pronounce. A shorter ingredients label only means they didn’t bother listing all 300 things the product is actually made of and HAS to be made of.
  • Preservatives, artificial flavors and other additives are not the devil. Most are harmless and in general they are part of the reason you haven’t already starved to death or died of a food borne illness.
  • MSG is not bad for you at all.
  • The fact that something might be made of “scrap” meats like pig snouts or chicken necks only means one thing: that we didn’t waste perfectly normal, edible meat.
  • I DON’T KNOW HOW I FORGOT THIS IN MY FIRST VERSION OF THIS POST BUT GMO’S ARE NOT DANGEROUS TO EAT. GMO’S ARE SAVING LIVES. YOU’VE ALREADY EATEN GMO’S BEFORE YOU EVEN KNEW THE TERM. IT’S FINE. EAT THEM.
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bogleech

So I’ve literally done this twice before and so have several other people but here are sources on all of these, most of them fairly recent academic studies or otherwise the most up-to-date I could find:

  • Organic food isn’t better for you: [1] [2] [3]
  • Tracing food industry slave labor: [1]
  • Healthier food is more expensive: [1] [2]
  • Saturated fats (i.e. “junk food”) still provide needed energy, aren’t as bad as people thought: [1] [2]
  • “Processed” isn’t synonymous with less healthy, because it means a lot of different things: [1]
  • “Chemicals” also means a lot of things and many food components are misunderstood by the general public: [1]
  • MSG is not harmful: [1] [2] [3]
  • GMO’s are not dangerous to eat: [400 sources collected here]
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olive-the-olive

It looks like your sources on organics are mostly on the health impact. Do you have any on the environmental impact? bc that’s the reason I feel like I should buy organic.

Also, it always bugs me that the GMO debate is over whether they’re bad for you. Like of course they’re not bad for you but the patent issues around them are really concerning.

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bogleech

Oh yeah, I forgot!

Comparative analysis of environmental impacts of agricultural production systems, agricultural input efficiency, and food choice - a massive 2017 study, which is also included in a collection of other research here: “Is organic really better for the environment?” The general conclusion right now is basically “it depends,” but it depends on the produce we’re looking at as well as the type of environmental harm:

If this chart is a little obtuse to read, here’s a breakdown:

GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS: organically grown meat and dairy is better for the environment in terms of greenhouse gases. For all other foods, there isn’t a big difference.

LAND USE: all organic foods are worse here, using much more land.

ENTROPHICATION: all organic food is STAGGERINGLY worse here, HOLY SHIT.

ACIDIFICATION: all organic food is worse, once again.

ENERGY USE: organically grown cereals are worse, all other organic foods roughly the same or better at overall energy use. There isn’t a category here for pesticides, but it’s important to know that “organic farming” DOES NOT AND HAS NEVER MEANT PESTICIDE-FREE. Apparently over 95% of people who choose organic food say they do so because they don’t want to be eating pesticides. That’s pretty fucking alarming, because organic crops are pretty much equally likely to be sprayed with something to kill weeds, insects or both, and just because those pesticides are certified organic in origin doesn’t mean they’re harmless to humans or to the environment. There’s more about that in this article.

Anyway, the biggest failure of organic foods is that “entrophication” thing, which most people have never even heard of. It refers largely to fertilizer and organic waste runoff, i.e. “extra food” dumped into the environment, which SOUNDS better to the average person than most forms of pollution, but is in fact absolutely devastating to entire ecosystems.

Nutrient pollution means food for microorganisms first and that is what causes population explosions of bacteria, fungi and toxic algae. This can kill off every single living thing in a given environment, like the “red tide” blooms that recently ravaged Florida. Overall, organic farming is a mess of poorly understood advantages and disadvantages in different areas.

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bogleech

Wow the number of people who think “organic” means “pesticide free” is larger and more frightening than I even thought. It literally does not mean that. It never did. It was never even supposed to. Certified organic crops use pesticides just as often as traditional crops. Those pesticides just happen to be limited to a list of naturally-derived poisons, making them legally organic themselves. They are not chosen for safety. The plant-derived rotenone is one of the deadliest pesticides still in use, causes tumors in laboratory animals and damages food webs. It’s legally an organic compound and used copiously on organic fruits and vegetables.

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