Organic: IS IT WORTH IT?

ORGANIC: IS IT WORTH IT?

Robert Folse
Louisiana Tech University
Ruston, Louisiana

Until the early 20th Century food scarcity has always been a huge problem among all societies.   Modern technologies like gene splicing, gene mutation, new farming techniques, and new fertilizers/ chemicals have curved the food scarcity problems for developed countries.   There have been more than 98,000 metric tons of agricultural perishable goods exported from the United States already in 2008, and we are only four months into the year (FAS, 2008).   These numbers obviously show how much our new farming technologies help in increasing the size and magnitude of our crops’ yields.   With these new technologies and techniques comes opposition. This oppositional force is the organic food market; organically grown food means the farmer does not use any of these new techniques to grow their crops. Some people think organically produced foods are better, but they are no better in quality, taste, or price.
There is a common belief that if you pay the extra money for organic foods they will
somehow be better for you. This is a myth started by the organic food industry to create
demand for their products. The quality of perishable foods differs among different countries,
but some universal factors are: the storage life, the color, the residual pesticides found, and
nutritional benefits.
Weaver (2007) quotes several Sydney professors stating: A consumer would have to eat truckloads of non-organic food to accumulate any meaningful amount of pesticides or chemicals in their body…and analysis shows some organic produce does contain residual pesticides.

There has been evidence that organic foods have a better storage life, but only by a couple of days or maybe a week.   So if the storage life is essentially no better, both organic and conventional foods contain residual pesticides, and neither produces more nutritional benefits, why do we as a society prefer organic? Maybe...