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Beware Of The Marketers

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  • ddmcwhirter
    commented on 's reply
    He also recommended soaking your salad fixins (before chopping) with a little bleach for some time before rinsing. I don't recall how much bleach...just a little. I didn't care at the time, I had no fear and never got sick...just chopped that head of lettuce and ate.

  • ddmcwhirter
    commented on 's reply
    Remember the contaminated tomato scare? I think it was salmonella. My old buddy, retired from HEB Grocery, told me they discovered the tomatoes are washed under pressure so that, if the wash was contaminated with germs, the germs could be pushed through the skin. So at home, you wash again, make a fine salad, and could still get sick.

  • Bkhuna
    commented on 's reply
    One more correction; Charlatan, not Gwyneth.

  • Willard
    commented on 's reply
    Where did you get it?

  • EdF
    commented on 's reply
    As an aside, I've had Scottish farmed salmon that rivals the wild catch. Worth trying if you get a chance.

  • Dr. Pepper
    replied
    Red Man, I agree with most of your observations. Re: farmed or wild salmon, however, my thoughts have evolved. Yes, nothing in the world tastes better than Alaskan line caught Chinook (King salmon). However, just like the world can't feed itself by hunting wild animals and foraging for wild grains and roots, so can't the world consume fish only by catching wild seafood. We'll completely strip the oceans (and have been close in many instances.) So, I have resigned myself to also enjoying farmed seafood, and hope that we can improve 'best practices' so as to avoid problems like the recent broken pens in WA. (Sorry for the delayed response, we were out of country for a while.)

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  • Willy
    replied
    Murdy I am most definitely not suggesting we just "throw up our hands". There are indeed issues with "Big Ag" and I mentioned some of them elsewhere herein. They include fertilizer run-off (water contamination), mono-cropping (leading to increased pesticide use), and antibiotic overuse among them I don't think there are issues with the food produced by Big Ag as regards nutrition or safety. Smart people, people in positions to make changes, are aware of and working on all of these issues, none of which have simple, economical answers. I want to emphasize the economic issue. Conventional agriculture has succeeded because it produces an economical product. Its excesses have become apparent and they are being addressed--GMOs are likely to be an important part of solving some of the problems.

    I will say that the controversy between conventional and organic agriculture isn't really an issue, imo, that is of any consequential concern. I think it's all but irrelevant. Both systems produce nutritious food that is safe to eat. As consumers, we can vote with our dollars if we do have concerns. That and growing some of own food are about the only important impacts individuals can make.

    The human condition is fraught with problems everywhere one turns--rather than provide a partial list, I'll leave up to people to think of their own issues. We must just keep doing what we've done for millennia--moving forward and solving problems as they arise--hopefully on a stomach full of tasty food.

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  • Willard
    replied
    Just read this. Something to chew on...
    Global reliance on just a handful of crops for calories is hurting the environment — and wildlife, a new report says. It urges the world to diversify its diet to save plant and animal species alike.

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  • Red Man
    replied
    This has been a very interesting discussion. I’m no expert and have read few studies on the subject...mostly because I don’t really trust the studies so I don’t bother wasting my time. I like the reference ComfortablyNumb made to soylent green. I feel that we can’t just blindly accept that food enhanced in a lab will be good for us. Maybe our bodies won’t be able to process the nutrients in them, even if they have no long term health risks. I know the term natural on labeling is completely unregulated, but I would prefer that the majority of what I eat has not been "enhanced" in a lab.

    I don’t really agree with the comments Meathead made about refusing to buy products labeled as natural or organic or cage free. I buy Costco maple syrup. It’s not fantastic, but it’s reasonably priced and it’s pure maple syrup. It’s labeled as organic. I like other syrup more, and buy it occasionally, but it’s way more expensive. I buy chicken that’s labeled free range because it’s also air chilled and raised without antibiotics. My other option is labeled as "southern chicken". It’s cheap and doesn’t taste good.

    I do refrigeration work and work on many farms and food processing plants. I buy my bacon, hams, sausage, etc from a local company whose refrigeration I work on. I’ve been in the plant. I’ve seen how they produce the food. It’s a high quality product and I trust them. Same for a lot of fruits and vegetables. I like to support local farms when possible and the product is superior. Most produce is better when local because it was picked when ripe, not picked early to ripen in transit. I do buy bananas year round. No bananas are grown any where near me. They taste fine. I’ve had bananas in the Caribbean where they were picked ripe and can hardly be compared to the bananas I get here.

    I guess what I'm getting at is, I like to buy organic, natural, cage free, etc sometimes. I also like to buy things without those labels sometimes. I don’t like to buy things like Tyson chicken strips, farmed salmon, cheap pork, chicken, and beef sausages. I look for products that are made or produced with quality and care. Sometimes they have misleading labels and sometimes they don’t.

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  • Murdy
    replied
    The stricter oversight comment was more a question than a proposal. It seems to me that you are suggesting that we simply should throw up our hands and accept the Big Ag status quo. Organic is flawed (a proposition with which I agree) and the only safe alternative is impractical (limiting all purchases to a local farmer you know and trust). Whether it be stricter oversight or some other changes, I would not be willing to abandon the organic movement at this early stage.

    I read Pollan's book too, and the part I think relevant is big ag lobbying over the food pyramid and (I believe it was in Pollan's book) the lobbying around the Generally Recognized as Safe designation to food additives. There's a lot of industry interference in attempts to ensure what we consume is safe taken in the name of profit, and those folks don't have our best interests at heart. There's plenty wrong with the conventional food chain. It is efficient and cheap, both important values, but not the only ones. I think it important to try to develop a real alternative.

    As the Scientific American article points out in the beginning, criticism of how organic is regulated is not the same thing as criticizing organic itself.
    Last edited by Murdy; March 23, 2019, 06:46 AM.

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  • grantgallagher
    commented on 's reply
    Willy the media does an absolutely terrible job of covering this topic. People writing up blogs for clicks. The potato example i gave was one that drove me nuts. The title of the post specifically called out potatos yet when you read the study they actually attributed it to french fries. Whether thats true or not its how stuff gets twisted by clicks.

  • Willy
    replied
    Murdy I'm really not trying to be contrarian or argumentative here, so please don't read my posts that way. After I retired ten years ago, I became seriously interested in home gardening and joined a Master Gardener program. The MG program is associated with university County Extension Offices which are in every state (and likely almost every county) in the US. They are science-based organizations and work in conjunction with paid Extension Office employees and degreed university instructors. They exist to help local commercial growers and the public at large deal with ag issues--disease, poor yields, soil analysis, pests, and whatever. BTW, getting into the MG program involves only a forty hour class (followed by a test), so take the word "master" with a grain of salt. My view is it's a way to blow smoke up the skirts of unpaid volunteers. :«) Nonetheless, most MGs are serious and continue to educate themselves regularly, mostly through further study on their own.

    I began as an advocate of "organic", not rabid, but solidly pro. It just makes sense right--no "poisons" and going back to the way Mom Nature "intended" can't be wrong? Well, yes it can in some ways. Elsewhere herein I've posted about organic practices being unable to use land efficiently with respect to yields per unit of land as compared to conventional agriculture. We really have no more land to farm or raise livestock on without cultivating land that is currently wild. Also, organic ag does use pesticides, approved as "organic" because they are "natural" and some of which are quite toxic to wildlife and, in some cases, humans--copper fungicides and rotenone are two examples. I read a lot and attended agriculture conferences every year since becoming a MG. The more I learned, the more disillusioned I became with "organic". Michael Pollan's book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" was a real eye opener as regards "Big Organic" (not necessarily your farmers market organic grower, although ComfortablyNumb posted some revealing information about dishonest practices at farmers markets earlier in this thread). I think the final straw for me was when "Organic Gardening Magazine" (now called Rodale's Organic Life and now owned by Penguin Random House) came out advocating for homeopathic "medicine". Homeopathy is often perceived by most folks as some form of herbalism, which is often harmful in itself, but it isn't herbalism at all. Homeopathy is simply magic water, magic water that literally doesn't even have a single molecule of an "active" ingredient left because of successive dilutions, coupled with "succussing" between each dilution. The founder of homeopathy believed that the weaker the solution, the more potent it was, because the water "remembered" the potency. One active ingredient in a popular homeopathic "medicine" is duck liver (!!!). Succussing is slamming a container of the solution against a board. You can read about homeopathy here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy and you can ponder the fact that most "health food stores" carry a wide ranges of homeopathic products. Our local store even has an employee who is a registered nurse to assist one in finding the proper remedy for you.

    I am now an active skeptic of organic as it is marketed. It was a long road for me, for, as you commented, who can argue against wanting to reduce consumption of "poisons". Well, as I noted yesterday, almost everything is a poison in some sense and at some dose. Overcoming our innate, intuitive, LAYMAN'S understandings of technical topics takes study and self-questioning. After all, do Einstein's ideas on time not being constant make intuitive sense to anyone?

    Anyway, rant over. As for your comment about needing "stricter oversight", I'd ask what it is that makes you think current oversight is lax and in what areas?
    Last edited by Willy; March 24, 2019, 01:12 PM.

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  • Huskee
    commented on 's reply
    Ain't that the troof! Despite some good intentions from individuals or large groups, and lots of bad ones, it is not improving big picture-wise. We need to make the smartest decisions we can with the knowledge we have, and share the good knowledge we have with those who'll listen.

  • FireMan
    commented on 's reply
    That’s called outlook. 👍 🕶

  • CaptainMike
    commented on 's reply
    Not likely, nor likely to. It's still a (mostly) fun ride though.

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