Geeze, what other myths of the Greens aren't true?

Buying organic foods not worth the cost

Small excerpts from a far lengthier excerpt at the link, which is well worth reading. And if nothing else, it’s comforting to know that Harvard still has at least one non-woke professor on staff.

Consumers tend to favor organic food because they believe the advocates who claim it is safer and more nutritious to eat, but there is little or no scientific evidence to support these claims. Others buy organic food because they assume it comes from farms that are smaller, more traditional, and more diverse, but this is not a safe assumption either. Most organic food on the market today comes from highly specialized, industrial-scale farms, not so different from those that produce conventional food.

It doesn’t usually pay to challenge popular beliefs, even with scientific evidence, but some have felt compelled to do so in the case of organic agriculture. Louise O. Fresco, trained as an agronomist, is the president of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, the world’s leading agricultural university. In her 2016 book “Hamburgers in Paradise,” she drew a harsh conclusion: “Organic farming as a whole is a mish-mash of valuable goals and ideals that have either been insufficiently tested or are completely misguided.”

…

Consumers pay considerably more for organic. In 2018, the Food Marketing Institute reported that the average retail price (by volume) for organic produce was 54 percent higher than for conventional produce. One USDA study showed that organic salad mix cost 60 percent more than conventional; organic milk 72 percent more; and organic eggs 82 percent more. Organic corn and soybeans sell for twice as much as conventional. These are high premiums, but not high enough to move most farmers toward organic, because the farming costs required by organic methods can be higher still.

There is nothing novel about producing foods without the use of synthetic chemicals. Before science first made these chemicals available to farmers early in the 20th century, all crops were de facto organic. When synthetic nitrogen first became available for fertilizer, farmers who began using it saved on labor and enjoyed higher crop yields. The timing was fortunate, since the earth’s population was just then in the process of increasing from two billion up to nearly eight billion today. Vaclav Smil, from the University of Manitoba, has estimated that without nitrogen fertilizer, 40 percent of the increase in food production needed to feed these much larger numbers would never have taken place. For at least a third of humanity in the world’s most populous countries, the use of nitrogen fertilizer in the 20th century made the difference between an adequate diet and malnutrition. In 1940, the average corn yield in the United States had been 30 bushels an acre, but by 1960 it had increased to 55 bushels, and by 1980 to 91 bushels and now it’s nearly twice that.

…

When the new National Organic Program came into full effect in 2002, commercial production and sales began to increase rapidly. Food stores specializing in organic products, such as Whole Foods and Wild Oats, expanded operations by building new outlets and buying up or consolidating existing organic and natural food stores. Like all supermarkets, these retailers sought out suppliers who could deliver a steady volume of high-quality products on time, at a consistent grade, and uniformly packaged. Small, diverse organic farms could not meet these requirements, so it was the highly specialized, industrial-scale operations that expanded to take over. Earthbound Farm in California, for instance, started out with 2.5 acres of organic raspberries in 1984, but now it manages 50,000 acres and has taken over more than half of the national market for organic packaged salad greens.