Newsflash, foodies: Organic crops use carcinogenic pesticides [View all]

http://deadstate.org/newsflash-foodies-organic-crops-use-carcinogenic-pesticides/

"The organic food industry spends billions of dollars through different organizations, subtly using fear and panic as tactics to sell their products. However, it turns out their actual practices may be a foodie’s worst nightmare.

While the organic food industry sinks a lot of money into spreading fear, uncertainty, and distrust toward Monsanto and GMOs, they themselves are utilizing large quantities of proven carcinogenic (cancer-causing) pesticides to grow their alleged superior products. The organic food industry, which is worth roughly four times as much as Monsanto ($65 billion), owes its brand to this facade.

Below is a list of Organic substances which are far more toxic than anything you’ll see on a GMO (which is why about 90% of certain crop farmers grow GMOs; they are far better for the environment). The full list of permitted organic substances can be found on the EPA’s website.

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Originally, no one thought to check the potential harmful effects of natural chemicals, like organic pesticides. Even after studies were done showing roughly half of the commonly used organic pesticides to be carcinogenic, the organic industry still continues to use them.

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Forget What You’ve Heard: Organic Food Is Not Food Grown Without Pesticides
http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/forget-what-youve-heard-organic-food-is-not-food-grown-without-pesticides

"In a paper about to be published in The Proceedings of the Royal Society, a team of researchers identifies something they call the "paradox of unanimity." If you've ever smelled a rat when everyone else is celebrating an idea then this paradox is for you. While unanimous agreement (or something close to it) might suggest that a particular claim is right, the researchers, led by Lachlan J. Gunn, an engineer at the University of Adelaide in Australia, found the opposite to be true. Rather than confirming truth, unanimity indicates that something went wrong, that a "systemic failure" undermined popular judgment, that the confidence of the crowd has been skewed by bias.

As it's currently framed, the paradox applies primarily to criminal justice concerns—police line-ups and the like. But it also has implications for food and agriculture. Few fields of popular interest have cultivated a wider array of glib axioms of empowerment than food: genetically modified organisms are bad, local is better, you shouldn't eat food your grandmother wouldn't eat, and so on. In the context of Main Street foodie wisdom, these claims enjoy something close to unanimity. But, for all their support, none comes closer to the unanimity quotient than the gilded assertion that organic food is food grown without pesticides.

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But what's more interesting in this case is the possible explanation. Why was there synthetic residue on organic crops? The most logical culprits are drift from nearby farms growing crops conventionally and cross contamination from the bins used for harvesting both organic and conventional crops (many farms grow both). "Many of the detections are at such low levels they fit th[e]se scenarios," according to Savage. In other words, yes, makes sense.

One likely response to the drift dilemma is to argue that organic produce deserves better protection. That perhaps there should be laws requiring conventional agriculture to keep its distance from the organic good guys. But the problem with this objection is not only that, as indicated, many farmers grow both organically and conventionally, but that (as a conventional apple grower once told me) organic farmers sometimes want to be around the conventional growers because pesticide drift helps reduce pests on their farms as well.

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Berry interesting.