I'm not anti-organic, but there are a couple of good arguments against organic food. First the end product is pretty much identical nutrition-wise. Second, organic produce requires more land, so it's unclear whether that scales to feed all people. And third, many "organic" pesticides are not shown to be better for the environment than the non-organic alternatives.

Personally I think we could achieve more by picking up some ideas from organic farming (e.g. more diversity to combat pests, better preservation of the soil) without demonizing all advances in agriculture like improved fertilizers or GMOs.

> First the end product is pretty much identical nutrition-wise.

In my own experience, organic fruits and vegetables at least taste much better.

> Second, organic produce requires more land, so it's unclear whether that scales to feed all people.

This isn't strictly true. In practice it has been, but it's not inherent to organic production in general but rather how it's been carried out so far. The agricultural system Permaculture addresses this directly and can yield on par with conventional farming.

> And third, many "organic" pesticides are not shown to be better for the environment than the non-organic alternatives.

This too isn't a strict requirement in organic farming, but I guess I'm arguing semantics here. To be more clear, non-conventional farming doesn't require pesticides.

> In my own experience, organic fruits and vegetables at least taste much better.

Have you done blind taste testing? We already know that e.g. more expensive things taste better.

I suspect the correlation runs the other way. Farmers willing to go through the efforts of producing higher quality produce are more likely to also go through the steps to get that produce certified organic. Not because it improves the quality per se, but because it lets them charge more.

Comparing best case scenario organic farming as it might be done in the future with worst case scenario conventional farming methods is not particularly fair.

You're right, I wasn't clear. There are already farms producing food using permaculture systems, but I meant rather that it's not the majority of what you hear about for what is organic.

A third point against "organic" is that with foreign imports it only means the seller told the import company it was "organic". So foreign food producers just say their stuff is "organically grown", even if it was smothered in pesticides, pumped full of steroids etc, because then they get to claim a premium too.

Lack of consistent standards, or authority to enforce mean it's essentially a rubber stamp.

> So foreign food producers just say their stuff is "organically grown", even if it was smothered in pesticides

Organically grown products are usually smothered in pesticides, since “organic” doesn't prohibit pesticides, just the more targeted and effective ones, forcing quantity to make up for quality.

They are now growing potatoes in the Egyptian desert, to fill demand for organic potatoes in Germany. Organic is not automatically better for the environment.

Organic uses pesticides

The problem with GMOs is that you can skip to dangerous islands of viability that would be impossible with standard breeding.

At least that's my understanding of Taleb's argument against GMOs.

Imho the problem with GMO is patents on gene sequences.

I don't see how altering plants to produce chemicals is more dangerous than introducing new chemicals produced in a lab. We do the latter all the time, most chemicals we use in industrial processes are basically untested for safety (e.g. look at all the additives in plastics or textiles). GMOs can help reduce the need to pesticides and fertilizers so their use can help the environment. But due to overblown fears even completely harmless modifications like introducing new colors of flowers are treated as if they were literally the devil [1].

As with all new techniques it's probably good to be careful and test things for long term adverse effects, but the kneejerk reaction of GMO=dangerous does more harm than good.

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/how-transgenic-petun...

This sounds like a good argument agains new untested chemicals, not an argument for GMOs.

Non GMO crops are patented

> The problem with GMOs is that you can skip to dangerous islands of viability that would be impossible with standard breeding.

I don't think that's true. GMO only provides an average of 5% more production in the developed world, and that's what I've read from the studies cited on the Monsanto website, so presumably the studies which put them on the best light possible. It's a clear increase of revenue and production but it's not a game changer revolution either.

Yeah there's a weird logical disconnect amongs the people that Taleb would call IYI "Intellectual Yet Idiots", many of which subscribe to mainstream left-progressive politics.

X is bad for natural diversity. X has the potential to make it much easier to produce enough food to feed people. X might result in all insects, in particular bees, dying. The biggest danger of X is that it could trigger a positive feedback loop, a runaway process that ruins the world. Although X also happens naturally albeit at a much slower rate, we don't have enough understanding of X to ensure it's safe.

If X == "global warming", then X is bad. If X == "GMOs", then X is good. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I work for a company that has sibling companies that do GMO work.

I myself feel like there are plenty of legit discussions to have about GMOs, yet we cant have those discussions because of the startlingly large number of people that think GMOs will mutate YOU.

It is refreshing to see a comment on the topic that doesn't trigger a reflex laugh/sob.

> "At least that's my understanding of Taleb's argument against GMOs."

I'm interested in reading more about this perspective. Is this in one of his books? Or does he have articles about this somewhere?

He talks about it in Antifragile and has written a few articles on the topic

This one: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/14/business/dealbook/another...

is more of a popular-science take and this one: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIbGFzOXF5UUN3N2c/... is a more rigorous analysis.

He also talked about his thoughts about GMOs on an econtalk podcast here: http://www.econtalk.org/nassim-nicholas-taleb-on-the-precaut...

The organic industry activity demonizes GMOs to boost their profits (GMOs aren't permitted in organic). Much of their rhetoric is based on pseudoscience.

Organic is less efficient requiring more inputs and land and can be argued is worse for the environment.

Organic uses pesticides yet they advertise themselves as not.

> can be argued is worse for the environment.

Worse utilization doesn't mean worse for the environment overall, especially considering the extreme damage conventional farming leaves on the health of the soil, as one example.

> Organic uses pesticides yet they advertise themselves as not.

I do think that it's frustrating the level of permissiveness that the term "organic" encompasses in the US especially, but pesticides aren't required for organic farming -- check out Permaculture.

Habitat loss is probably the leading cause of decline and extinction right now. I'd wager habitat loss due to agriculture is killing more than glyphosate runoff by a significant margin. Whether the degree to which habitat loss is averted with space-efficient GMOs is sufficient to offset glyphosate runoff, I cannot say. I suspect the most ethical option is to stop consuming food grown in particularly threatened environments, particularly imported tropical fruits, whether or not they're organic.

Regardless, it seems clear to me the matter of organic vs non-organic is not as clear cut as the organic industry and their prolific passionate proponents would have us believe.

Most people greatly underestimate habitat loss as the biggest problem for ecosystem decline. The appearance of many animals not seen for 100 years in the Chernobyl exclusion zone suggests that an area contaminated with high level radioactive waste is a net positive for natural ecosystems because it keeps the humans out.