Ok, I just took a survey on a brand of organic milk that really bugged me… In the ad, the milk was touted as being antibiotic, pesticide, and hormone free, as the best way to keep children healthy and strong. Later they showed a second add demonstrating how this milk fortified with DH5alpha fatty acids helps give kids the things necessary to be healthy. What a mixed message.
This type of advertising conjecture constitutes propaganda worthy of Goebbels. Implications that organic offers a better alternative ignore the true meaning of the word organic. By the true scientific definition of “organic”, acetone (nail polish remover) and cyanide (poison) are also organic, yet none of us would voluntarily ingest either of those two things. Actually, we do. If you ever ate an almond, you VOLUNTARILY ate poison. Also, what’s wrong with hormones, antibiotics and fertilizers? Humans take them, they manufacture them in their own bodies, and they constitute simply a concentration of things that occur naturally.
Now, these advertisers tout their products on the auspices that they’re as close to the wild as possible. Granted, any product nourished with nothing but that which it obtains without mans interpolations usually tastes better, that’s not the primary culprit, nor is it feasible, affordable or practical for most people to nourish themselves. Grow a garden. I plan to. I trust my own food more than I trust anything that I buy. However, man was not meant to live forever, and God knows I don’t intend to. Oxygen, which breaks down everything it touches, is far more hazardous to our health than BHT, DDT or tetracycline. Yet, nobody has thought, thank God, to ban its ingestion.
The second ad was what really got my goat. You can add DH5alpha, but not antibiotics or hormones? Howsat? If they add something that wasn’t there already, isn’t that tantamount to the crime of fortification? I spent years in graduate school measuring different natural treatments to plants meant to increase their antioxidant production. Another lab studied Creosote (chaparral) as a means to make rubber. In the end, I learned that we don’t know enough about why plants or animals make certain things to force them to make it naturally.
The very best thing you can do is grow your own food. Then you control what it gets, when, and how much. You can monitor it for the opportune moment to harvest. Then, you can store it in the most expedient and safe manner. Much of our food processing comes from our urban sprawl. As a resident of Vegas, I know it’s neither possible nor practicable for everyone who lives here to grow his own food. It would negate our productivity and limit our livelihood for want of the water required to just keep things alive. We grow things where they grow best and move them to where people want to live. As a result, we add things to preserve the food until it’s consumed.
I have long been a proponent of self-reliance. Grow what you need. Raise what you kill. Use it all. The Indians ate meat, and they were lean and strong and healthy to ripe old age. Organic is not a panacea, but it is not in the interests of most people to revert to subsistence agriculture. Do what you can yourself, then augment the rest. Whatever you do, don’t you DARE legislate such that it forces me to live “organically” if I don’t want to.
Please pass the almonds.
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