https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2013/05/17/organic-101-can-g...
Prove it for yourself.
[1]https://www.ewg.org/foodnews/dirty_dozen_list.php
Also in my experience, organic tastes WAY better. For example I never liked the taste of conventional celery; some bitter aftertaste (pesticide residue?) and just bland. But organic celery really pops, with no aftertaste. Baby carrots are noticeably tastier as well. The difference is so stark I think I could validate these on a double-blind test any day.
Anyway if double-blind is what you need to be convinced, then by all means do the same test double-blind.[1] Shouldn't be terribly difficult to craft such a test for yourself.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinded_experiment#Double-blin...
I think that would be the definition of a placebo effect. Headaches and yuck feeling when eating food you perceive as dirtier/less healthy.
Maybe you should get two of your friends together and do a double blind test. Have one of your friends go shopping, take the vegetables out of the bag, and write down which is which. Then have your other friend who doesn't know which is which give both portions to you and see if you can tell the difference. It would be interesting for sure.
Bitterness is normal in celery though the degree is manageable by techniques that are orthogonal to non-organic vs. organic status. To the extent that there is a non-placebo difference, it's probably that your conventional supplier is more devoted to rigorous labor cost cutting then your organic supplier, which is likely to become less and less common for randomly chosen organic vs. non-organic as organics become more and more mass market and less upper-middle-class niche.
Try a double-blind test and ask a series of questions. Some of the questions about taste should be the things you're looking for. Others should be irrelevant, just to set a baseline. Perceptions of taste are very subjective and easily influenced. Experimental rigour is necessary to mitigate that.
Take that for what it's worth, but do suggest you give organic celery a try, see if you notice the same. Do it double-blinded if you must.
Here’s the list of allowed chemicals. It’s a short list. And, I’m ok with more being used, since most look harmless (e.g. ethanol, lye).
http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&SID=9874504b6f10...
Organic seems good to me.
[0] http://www.xerces.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/xerces-orga...
'Good' organic growing practices are perfectly safe. They'll minimize pesticide application, and ensure they do it at the correct times, i.e. away from harvest time. They'll apply Bt toxin (yes, the same stuff in the GMOs, just exogenously applied) and neem oil, as well as some soaps with potassium salts.
There are some 'dangerous' organic pesticides. As far as I know Rotenone isn't used anymore, but it is dangerous to humans and was once employed as an organic pesticide.
Copper sulfate is a fairly big issue. It's definitely toxic to humans and has been found to accumulate in soils. It's a fairly big deal in Napa and the vineyards have moved away from it because of the accumulation. This copper definitely makes it's way to consumers, so the question is how much, and how much is too much?
This is an interesting anecdote about brewing beer with fruit, and needing to pay attention to copper levels. http://scottjanish.com/peaches-and-quinoa-sour/
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Ultimately, at the scale of the modern organic industry, you're not always going to get good stuff. There are certainly potential dangers, just as there are with conventional agriculture. I would contend that both are perfectly safe when done appropriately.
Copper sulfate used to be used to induce vomiting. It turned out to be more toxic then we'd like in that usage... but that usage was feeding people spoonfuls of it!
It passes the sniff test that a farmer controlling pests with ethanol might use more than a farmer using, e.g. neonicotinoids.
As for fertilizer, I wonder if compost is considered fertilizer. I use lots of compost on my garden.
“Even with bicarbonate, buying organic may still be worth it!
One thing this article should not be abused is as evidence in an argument against buying organic. Yes, you can reduce the pesticide load on the peel of your favorite produce to almost zero and yes, even the latest (highly pro-organic) review of the literature highlights that pesticides are where the major differences are, but you're (a) still left with the pesticides beneath the skin and will (b) not benefit from the other potential benefits Tiziano Gomiero highlights in his latest paper in Applied Soil Ecology (see Figure 4).”
http://suppversity.blogspot.com/2017/10/nahco3-aka-baking-so...
That however is the actual definition of organic as opposed to how it's used in marketing material. When talking about marketing, organic just means that a particular subset of approved pesticides and possibly fertilizers, was used in growing the produce. It has no particular meaning beyond that when used as a marketing term. In particular what pesticides are or are not approved is at the discretion of the organization providing the organic certification, so depending on where you are and what group is certifying a product as organic will determine what was used in growing it.
This is a totally different meaning than “organic” in “organic chemistry” or “organic compounds.”
However, there is a huge list of exceptions to this rule. Full text of the regulations is here: https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&rgn=div6&view=t...
If this is true, I would love to see your source.
I buy a lot of organic because I expect it to have less pesticide (and other potentially 'bad' things). And, if that's not the case, I will change my buying habits.
I do understand that there is a fraud issue in organics. I have seen examples of farmers owning organic certified farms and then buying produce from the distribution market to resell as organic. Also, I have seen examples of people doing similar things at farmers markets.