One of biggest frauds in U.S. farm history(kansascity.com) |
One of biggest frauds in U.S. farm history(kansascity.com) |
The same people who bitch about big government will strangle inspection programs via budget cuts, and then when something like this story comes out, use it as proof that government inspection programs don't work and that even more defunding is in order.
It makes me despair.
I'm just trying to say you can argue for more, better inspections without having to argue for "big government".
And then there is the whole milk thing, where kashrut organizations have largely said that the FDA is enforcing the rule better then they can, so they won't bother, but some consumers don't think this is good enough.
There is also a controversy over slaughterhouse conditions brought to light when a kosher slaughterhouse was raided by the agriculture department for health violations.
I think country-wide, there need to be, usually, 3-bodied system of inspection/certification (whether it is financial organizations, law firms, doctors, educational or food suppliers.. ).
one organization should be multi-state collaboration of supervision & certification.
The other should be industry collaboration of supervision & certification.
And 3rd -- is academia-powered.
Any business claiming to have certificate in something needs to strive to get it from all 3. 2 out 3 may be acceptable, and 1 out of 3 is not.
This model would prevent corruption that more likely occurred in single-bodied systems.
It seems to me you'd be able to inspect grain genome looking for known GMO sequences
> Certification costs vary depending on the size of your production operation and on the accredited agency you choose to use. In general, organic certification costs run between $200 – $1500. Your costs will include an application fee, site inspection fee, and an annual certification fee.
I humbly suggest you might have taken a moment to check if your hunch was correct rather than leaving that to others.
Also its not possible for tests to confirm if produce is organic, but it possible to confirm it is not - if it contains traces of prohibited pesticides which are routine in non-organic produce then its not organic.[2]
[1] https://blog.quicklabel.com/2010/10/how-to-get-a-certified-o...
The "appropriate sentence" is coming for the bigger guys too, but it may not be paid by them, but definitely their ancestors… and definitely not by some court diktat…
"Technically, you can, but you’re not likely to get a positive result unless the inspector hits it just right and collects a plant sample before the residues wash away."
Yes. See this Forbes article. By the time it reaches retail, you can't tell.[1]
Non-organic food is probably healthier. Less insect residue. Also cheaper.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensavage/2016/02/08/inconve...
Consumers have been misled - cattle's natural diet is grass, not grains.
Chickens will opportunistically eat grains and seeds, but if given the opportunity will eagerly eat a blend of greens and insects & worms.
In either case, forcing an exclusively grain-based diet on either of these animals is anything but natural and consequently, unsurprisingly, extremely bad for their health.
It's only that they're typically slaughtered before the effects of these decisions properly manifest that growers get away with this.
Intriguing? On what planet of pretend do I need to live on, in order for a statement like this to not sound like a dystopian sci-fi story where autistic serial killers who go to church, for the networking benefits, are the ones writing newspaper articles?
.... it gets worse
“I know Randy was deeply ashamed of his conduct,” his widow said soon after his passing.
Yeah. No kidding. Also sounds like your marriage to him was just splendid.
“Despite Constant’s faults, former business partner Glen Borgerding remains sympathetic and remembers him fondly.
“The reaction you get from people after hearing of his suicide is that he deserved what he got,” he said. “But I don’t feel that way. There was a lot of good in Randy and the real tragedy is that he went down this path.””
Most people think he deserved suicide... what world do we live in ?
Was his business partner the only human being with a functioning soul in the entire town?
Uh, no - the only people scammed by him were consumers. All the middlemen and downstream producers unwittingly resold the product as organic. They didn't really lose anything.
They lost trust.
Not the same as money, but it will cause them lower profits in the future.
While the case may of hurt the image of the organic re-sellers as a whole, how many people in the organic marketing space are advertising this?
Since the label has been there, I’d argue that customer didn’t really lose anything either. Their emotional need is fulfilled by that label.
===
Edit: point taken. The above serve as previous opinion.
I suggest you should have qualified with 'in my opinion', rather than 'tbf'.
There's significant behavioural and environmental differences upstream with many practices that come under the organic umbrella, even if you don't agree (for example) that pesticides are profoundly bad for bees, or residual pesticides in food are bad for us, etc.
Also, the article is very hyperbolic. It's pretty standard in the industry to fudge when it comes to organic.
Which is why small farmers who really care have taken to calling what they sell something else completely: pastured eggs.
I can't find it but think I saw on The Land.
"Field of Schemes" coming 2021 from Michael Bay.
Does this include selective breeding?
Makes me wonder - who is the victim of this fraud?
Just because there's no proof that organic is healthier doesn't mean it isn't healthier. And people buy organic for reasons other than health, such as the idea that it's better for the environment (e.g. no pesticides seeping into the ground).
USDA certified cringey statement.
That said, I completely understand the skepticism. Who's to say that those farmers aren't trying to get their yields up via non organic methods as well? (Of course, if they were, why would they have turned him in? But you never know.)
Farmers have known for years that the label is only as good as the word of farmer, and with economic pressures to cheat, it’s not surprising to find cheaters.
Consumer Reports (and others) did studies that showed non-organic food have lots more pesticide residue than organic food. That of course doesn't mean they are better for you or that they are tastier.
That's over and above the Soil Association regulations and inspections. SA is the organic standards body in the UK.
So it sounds like the US problem is lack of oversight. Of course thanks to the deliberate under funding of the state, particularly of local councils, by recent Tory governments the UK is rapidly catching up to that lack of oversight -- Trading Standards are severely underfunded currently as councils are forced to fund more urgent needs first.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/organic-produce-tests-and-inspec...
Mainstream vegetables and fruit are optimized for looks and for shelf life (which measures in many months for much of produce). Taste takes the back seat.
Organic produce is expected to have a shorter shelf life, smaller size, and some visual imperfections, because of how it's marketed. It can compete on taste, though. And noticeably tastier it is.
Organic produce does cost a bit more (sometimes quite a bit). But eating untasty vegetables and plastic-feeling fruit is unpleasant, so I just avoid it, missing all the health benefits. Tasty organic produce does not have this problem :)
For example, non-organic oats are often sprayed with roundup at harvest time, so cereals made from them routinely have unsafe levels of carcinogens in them:
https://www.ewg.org/childrenshealth/monsanto-weedkiller-stil...
Organic oats have less than 1/10th as much roundup in them on average:
https://gimmethegoodstuff.org/pesticides-in-organic-oatmeal-...
Also, the more farms go organic, the less contamination there will be in the organic crops.
The appeal of organic is (at least in part) that it is better for the environment and the farm workers... that isn't something that shows up directly in the end product, because they are externalities. That doesn't mean it isn't important.
Not a foregone conclusion.
Reading the Forbes article, I wonder if the studies took organic food fraud into account, possibly even from Randy Constant.
Also, there are a lot of interests - very well funded interests - downplaying glyphosate and other herbicides/insecticides. The net effect would be to make non-organic food seem costly with fewer benefits.
Let's not pretend that "organic" is simply synonymous with altruism. It's a huge, huge industry.
Sorry, is "insect residue" a term of art? Any why would a bug's "residue" be unhealthy, exactly? (In particular in a way that would survive routine washing in a way that a pesticide would not?) I'd ask for a citation, but... yeah. You just made that up, right?
None of that should be taken as a particular defense of the US organic food regulation regime, which is indeed a big mess. But what you wrote was just silly.
Also, why is it important that non-organic produce be just as healthy as organic produce?
This doesn't detract from the fact that feeding them as much grains as they can eat -- not too dissimilar from the pate gooses -- is highly questionable.
Beef cattle historically have started on milk, and then moved to pasture.
In industrialised countries, beef cattle are fed on grains for most or all of their lives. Perhaps for marketing reasons, I'm not sure, in some places, for some percentage of the herd, they're finished on pasture.
Most CAFOs, as others have noted, are primarily started and completed with grain.
They are visually distinctive (they tend to be smaller than a supermarket “large egg” and dirtier for sure) but after cooking are entirely indistinguishable from the eggs at the store.
Of course I’m very grateful for the eggs, but even they will admit it’s not for quality and quantity, but mostly a fun hobby and something to help get the kids involved with.
I'm assuming here that you mean species that have come into being since humans stopped being hunter gatherers -- let's say 10k ya.
For me, natural means what they evolved to consume. So for cattle, and their genetic ancestors, it'd be grass, with perhaps some shrubby plants and trees.
It certainly wasn't grains, for obvious reasons.
And never commenting again
That just leaves the pesticides...
GMO is a different story. The fraudster in this story got caught early on co-mingling GMO with non-GMO.
If for some reason a lot of customers want to pay extra for milk that's hand-milked by a milk maid standing on her head, we can of course talk about how funny those "head-standing milk is better" folks are. But that doesn't make it okay to lie and defraud them.
> Appeal to ignorance—the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g., There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist—and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we're still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Carl Sagan says we should be comfortable with ambiguity. We should say "organic food might be healthier, or it might not, we don't know".
But I already linked one study that seemed to indicate a health benefit.
I don't see how "The Dragon in My Garage" is relevant here. In that story, the goalposts are constantly moved until the idea is untestable. But the idea of organic food being healthier doesn't seem to have moving goalposts, and it doesn't seem untestable to me.
I wasn't claiming that nobody pays for certification. I was specifically questioning why it's a government agency that they are paying. "Organic" is clearly a marketing term (as discussed in the first link you provided). It's not a safety-related term as (at least in theory) all produce that's sold should be safe to eat. I don't see the reason for a government agency to be involved there.
To weasel out slightly, I did say:
" ... beef cattle are fed on grains for most or all of their lives."
AIUI, CAFO-destined cattle are moved into feeding lots as soon as they're weaned -- say at a couple of months old. They're mostly on milk, with some grass, up to that point. But from that point on they're on grain-only.
You said:
> I’m not aware of farms using an “exclusively grain-based diet”
and subsequently
> My understanding is that these feedlots are where cattle are housed for the last few months to gain weight before slaughter.
This doesn't align with my understanding.
Once within a CAFO, the cattle stay there until slaughter -- say at age 18 months or less. During that time they're fed exclusively grain, as this ensures maximum growth / minimum time / best ratio of input cost to sale price / etc.
Some may be finished on pasture, as this is an increasingly profitable market, plus it drastically reduces pathogens within the animal, and improves the flavour (so I'm told).
I think the USDA info I read was that the “typical” cattle are pasture raised for around 4 months before going to a feedlot. Once there, the feed may be as high as 90-95% grain. At that point it almost feels pedantic to claim they are anything but grain fed, but a purely grain diet can cause them to founder like horses on grass as another commenter said.
Free range chickens will produce eggs with varying colour throughout the year.
Some consumers have been told that dark orange equates to healthy / free-range chickens -- so some farmers use colour additives to the feed to adjust the colour of the yolks.
The taste is identical, to me at least.
The meat is totally different, though.
I can personally feel the difference both when cooking schnitzels (I use the same meat, but the "crust" tastes different depending on the eggs used) and when making pancakes (I use the same milk and flour).
The often unspoken truth however is that many chemicals aren't tested for. For example copper sulfate, used as organic fungicide.
In other words conventional agriculture uses far more substances that the USDA tests for, a vast majority of them, whereas organic agriculture uses substances that aren't covered by USDA tests. Which should be obvious.
This doesn't mean that:
1. Organic agriculture uses less pesticides (bullshit, unless you're talking about GMOs, another hot subject)
2. Organic produce is in any way healthier
Both of these statements lack credible evidence. And we might actually find instances in which the substances used in organic agriculture are more unhealthy than their conventional equivalents.
Scientists should evaluate chemicals on a chemical-by-chemical basis. I found a study that talks about how using certain chemicals on the farm can lead to cancer for farm workers: "In summary, the epidemiologic evidence from a number of different studies now more convincingly shows that prostate cancer is related to pesticide use." This makes me think that, at the very least, organic produce is healthier for farm workers.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6276799/
edit: forgot a word.
Do you have any decent sources for your declamations ?
Why would one need to test for copper? The trace amounts of it that one would find are good for you. I mean, it's used for water piping in homes even.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper(II)_sulfate#Toxicologic...
CAFOs are objectively horrendous, and I don't want an 'uninitiated reader' thinking they're anything less than a woeful embarrassment for our species.
These are animals that have evolved to digest various grasses, and get sick (to various degrees) when they eat any amount of grains.
Feeding them almost (is that okay?) exclusively grains makes them extremely sick - but happily (?) the high-grain diet ensures they put on fat (the bad kind, btw) fast enough that we can slaughter them before they have the opportunity to die from this diet.
People that find this acceptable only because they dispute a few percentile of grain quotient in the feed are unlikely to be swayed in any case, I suspect.
The easy choice is for someone to side with their confirmation bias ("what I'm doing is already ok"). As soon as they sniff out some misinformation in the counterargument, I think the arguing party loses credibility and any hope of convincing them otherwise. ("If you're willing to fudge the facts on that, what else are you misrepresenting?") It's not a matter of being pedantic, it's a matter of trust.
You see this with all kinds of controversial topics. Agriculture, nutrition, climate science etc. People will latch on to any misrepresented information as use it to discredit an otherwise well-reasoned argument. I just think it's best to clean up the point to avoid that risk.
I'll continue to blend my understanding of reality with my opinion of same. If it's insufficiently compelling in comparison to someone's desire to believe something demonstrably wrong or bad, as I said earlier, I'm doubtful those last few eggshells will make a difference.
That's not really what I said though. I know there's some people who think this (ahem Peter Attia) but it flies in the face of my own experience and what limited reading I've done in behavioral psychology.
I don't think people act as rational agents objectively assessing each piece of information. Which is all the more reason to believe they will dismiss any of your points if you give them reason to maintain their confirmation bias. When we aren't accurate with our statements of "fact", it opens the door to exactly that.
There's lots of people who do that. While it may fuel their feelings of self-righteousness, I have doubts as to whether it actually changes anyone's mind. To the contrary, I tend to believe it just makes the other side more entrenched in their own ideas.