Organic Food? Just Another Scam ...

SEE HERE I grow hydroponically the awful way with shudder "chemicals." My tomatoes, which is mostly what I grow are nicer, more uniform and on the whole healthier (from the appearance, texture, and taste of the fruit) then the somewhat rattier tomatoes I get from my dirt garden. If I'm careful with the dirt garden, fertilizing and watering regularly I get comparable fruit but with a lot more work. My many hydroponic adventures were documented in The Growing Edge and now on my blog. I'm just a backyard hobbyist. I've thought for a long time that "organically grown" was just a scam to charge more for produce. This study suggests that that's actually the case. Indeed, there is no guarantee that just become someone is growing "organically" that some boogieman won't put heavy metals in the ground or do other ultimate evil acts.

I'm sort of joking, but we live in a society that's increasingly paranoid about largely non-existent threats and seems hell bent to make up more. Can't we live a good life without being scared of some boogieman that the elites conjure up to frighten us? Global warming, mercury, agent orange, asbestos, swine flue, Alar, DDT, hormones, Global Cooling, bio-diversity, Ethanol, and the beat goes on ... a crisis for every day so we can be scared into spending more tax money on some boondoggle the government has cooked up. Show me the data! Then show me the cost benefit ratio. In most cases the threat is blown way out of proportion and the cost benefit ratio is nil, i.e. the money spent did almost nothing to reduce the threat if there even was a threat to begin with.