151–160 of 196 posts
This is part of the reason I really want to move out of the U.S. Other countries are much more strict with what they allow in their food. I understand that I can pay more for organic produce and meat, but for a supposedly first-world country, you'd think decent produce would be a given.
This is part of the reason I really want to move out of the U.S. Other countries are much more strict with what they allow in their food. I understand that I can pay more for organic produce and meat, but for a supposedly first-world country, you'd think decent produce would be a given.
Unless I missed something, it’s completely self reported and only following people working in healthcare. This is not a very convincing result.
The cohorts are huge (120,000+ people) and they controlled for a number of other factors in the analysis, so I don't think sample error is here to blame for why they observed high-pesticide fruits/veggies having less health benefits than low-pesticide fruits/veggies.
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Sure, whatever. Organic farming isn't perfect and isn't a panacea, and I've zero interest in defending it, or in attacking high-chemical factory farming for that matter. We need to gain a better understanding of our food production systems, the full chain, precursors (seed, fertiliser and chemical suppliers), farms, processors, distributors, retailers. We need to stop thinking in terms of pure cost. We need to stop t…
> To a large extent these are two sides of the same coin. Yeah, I think that's the interesting thing here. People don't routinely starve in droves anymore and malnutrition is increasingly rare. On the other hand there's creeping fragility in the food system(s), unknown knock on effects of chemicals applied to lots of staple crops, and land/water use issues. It seems to me like a lot of smart people are actually worki…
It's a very complex system with complex trade offs. But, and this is crucial, not so complicated that the issues cannot be understood by an adult with high school education.
As it is, there is very poor understanding among adults in the rich world of where their food comes from, how it is grown or reared, what food/fertiliser it is given, what chemicals it is treated with and how much, how it is processed, how it is packaged, the margins along the way, and the power dynamics along the chain
Even educated adults can be shockingly uninformed, witness Gweneth Paltrow style fantasies about imagined health benefits of organic food, or on the flip side, total ignorance about the quantity of chemicals that go into the production of conventional food.
The increased frailty of our food chains and environment means that collectively we need to get educated, realise the high environmental and health cost of chemically intensive farming and start exploring alternatives. And not with this dumb "organic good, chemical bad" mentality but properly evaluating the trade-offs in each system
It's hard to envisage a world where we feed 8, 10, 12 billion people without some chemical input, but it's certainly a good idea to try at least move in that direction
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Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor Great Leap Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward Stalin allowed for the household plot, because.... everyone was starving due to communism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_plot During the Holodomor and in "the breadbasket" of Ukraine, people were arrested for not yielding _all_ of their produce to the state. Now the effect of terrorizing peo…
Europe and Russia has a history of peasants growing their own food. Subsequently farmland was divided into small lots. With lots of small farmers. This did not sit well with ideological goals of communism and also the soviets were in a military race with the west. Stalin wanted the state to be productively competitive with the high output large farms in America. So centrally controlled economy, and taking away land f…
Now, in retrospect we can say it was just the process of industrialization played out in a super-compressed timeline, and not due to the inherent economic superiority of communism. But it wasn't clear at the time, it was really an open question whether communism was a economically superior system. Which made the capitalist class really afraid, and caused various forms of communist repression in the West like McCarthyism.
As an aside, it wasn't like industrialization as a process was all roses in the West either. Enclosure of the commons drove masses of subsistence farmers into brutal factory work in the cities.
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It's a side effect of building the wrong structure for the environment. If you ever go to the south take note of the architecture in the old homes and even rowhomes where working class people lived. The cielings will be very high, and there will be second window above the doorway perhaps. The windows will have awnings. There will be porches with large overhangs shading living rooms and dining rooms inside the dwellin…
Building with classic Southern US techniques doesn't negate or even significantly reduce the need for air conditioning. Without AC, these types of structures still become incredibly hot during the summer; they suffer from mold and material damage from humidity; they required workarounds like sleeping on a screened-in porch during the summer instead of inside the house, because the house itself was too sweltering to t…
Recently in CA in my neighborhood, someone decided to paint their spanish style home dark brown. I can't help but think going from ivory white to dark brown is going to increase their AC bill in the summer. Just using basic physics with consideration to the environment can go a long way.
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It's just starting to get early adopter traction in an early adopter country, so it'll probably be a while until you can find something locally. https://www.rahatsmall.com/ http://www.livinghertz.com/ are apparently 2 popular consumer brands in Korea. I just searched aliexpress for "ultrasonic food cleaner", they probably work but no idea how they compare. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001039347867.html?spm=a2g0o.…
I see some 10W models, 50W models and 100W models - how much power is appropriate?
>As a general rule of thumb, you will require between 50watts to 100 watts per gallon for your ultrasonic jewelry cleaner to achieve efficient cleaning.
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The only part of your first post I object to is the attribution to communism. Literally, growing all the food and then sending it to the collection point of the commune. That didn't work at all and home plots were _allowed_ as a violation of pure communist idealogy. They existed before, they were opposed by communism, but then allowed to return because they actually work.
I don't disagree with that. I just wanted to advocate for something more like it here. Allowing more poor to be self reliant and sufficient through more equitable land ownership.
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IMO the issue is ideologies vs actuaries/statisticians ... It's shocking how both the "left"/"right" agree on many values, but also so disagree on how to achieve them. Eg: Both sides care about children, productive economy, value of education
Using education as an example, I think great harm has come as a result of making it a government monopoly. Not sure how it is in the US but in Europe there's not really a free market with regards to how children are taught. So there's no room for a competitor to come in and say "we can do it better", because when this happens (and it does happen occasionally) they are just shut down by police. The school I went to wa…
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that study doesn't show that "organic farming and permaculture nearly always yields higher per acre output" It's about cultivating vegetables in a specific, labour intestine, urban environment, and is partly speculative. It's not about organic farming yields in general which are generally significantly lower that those of conventional farming.
I'm not defending a thesis here. You asked for a source for the assertion that one could have high yields under organic farming and I provided one. I understand organic farming yields are lower when comparing against most conventional agriculture, but your original assertion (I hate we don't have thread context in reply windows) was implying that we couldn't properly feed everyone fruits / veg using organic agricultu…
> Everything I've read on organic farming and permaculture _nearly always_ yields higher per acre output
_nearly always_
Your second assertion is accurate:
> organic farming yields are lower when comparing against most conventional agriculture
I didn't at any stage say "we couldn't properly feed everyone fruits / veg using organic agriculture" - maybe you're mixing me up with some other commenter. What I do think is that currently we are not in a position where we could feed the world's population only with organic (not just fruit and vegetable - grains, meat etc also).
Parts of Africa are facing grain shortages due to disruptions in the supply in Ukraine. This shows how tight supplies are.
Those chemicals ( and I'm no fan) do enable a massive increase in yields. There's no "simply" - I agree with you that a move away is desirable, but it is far from simple or easy.