[fnordsensei]

Weird thinking. While I agree that it's a sensible null hypothesis, I'm not sure I agree that the burden of evidence automatically should be on proponents of organic food.

"Organic" food is what we've eaten since the beginning of time. It'd make sense that you'd have to show that the alteration you're introducing to the natural state of affairs isn't detrimental to health of the consumer. I.e., I'm making the same argument as you, I just consider unaltered food to be the baseline.

Also, "organic" is a weird name. Organic as opposed to what? Bananas made out of mineral oil?

[fnordsensei]

Selective breeding is a comparatively slow and safe process. You're altering a species within its own parameters. It has little resemblance to the frankensteining we're doing right now. I'm not against it, I'm just not sure we've a developed a proper test suite to secure the process.

[blacksmith_tb]

Selective breeding has allowed humans to transform wolves into Chihuahuas, an inedible wild grass called Teosinte into Corn (Maize), and many other drastic modifications. But those aren't "frankensteining", apparently. To paraphrase Stewart Brand, inserting the DNA to express a protein that a mammal cell normally does into a plant cell does not mean it will be furry.

[serf]

I took 'frankensteining' to mean a rapid progression and skip over many states which would have been encountered via selective breeding.

To take your example, the wolf -> chihuahua would have been frankensteining had it been over the course of a singular or very small amount of generations.

[fnordsensei]

It's still comparatively slow and safe, however. Even though we make some really weird alterations that way to suit our needs (which is well and good in and of itself, why shouldn't we?), the time spans are usually waaay longer than what i refer to as "frankensteining". It's not like you have a wolf, then a chihuahua, and in step 3, all wolves are suddenly chihuahuas. But that is effectively what we can do when we use more artificial methods.

[zo1]

I take it you haven't listened to anyone pro-organic speak? Just a few short sentences with them and you would have been aware that they make outrageous claims regarding the health benefits of organic food. And it's precisely because of that that the onus is on them to prove it. And you can't just say "we don't have to prove it because we've always eaten organic and that's natural", err or whatever argument they use. That's a prime example fallacious logic.

[vobios]

> "Organic" food is what we've eaten since the beginning of time.

Actually, we have not been eating organic food since the beginning of time. Most of the crops we consume today have been developed fairly recently in evolutionary terms (farming began only 12,000 years ago). Humans did not evolve exposed to fruits and vegetables we see today. Any farmed crop is not natural.

[JoeAltmaier]

I agree - the whole 'natural food' thing is a confused mess. Nothing natural about the foods we eat - and a good thing too! Nature doesn't care about our health. Organisms have been competing for millennia for advantages. If a tree's seed sprouted better from your warm dead body, then that tree would happily poison you.

In fact foods we eat in nature can be regarded as those that kill us too slowly to notice - we avoid the others.

And cultivated crops are those we've bred to have less and less of the undesirable parts. We've inserted ourselves into the plants' genetic path for mutual benefit - we plant millions of them, and they feed us.

To eat truly 'natural' you'd have to eat things like crab-apples (grainy and bad ph - eat more than one and get a stomach ache) or tiny barely-sweet melons etc. Melons a thousand years ago were barely larger than an orange, with a couple of tablespoons' worth of edible parts. Thank the Arabs for breeding the mutant freaks we enjoy today!

[dekhn]

It is false to claim 'organic' food resembles what humans have been eating since the beginning of time. It bears little resemblence. That's kind of like saying maize and teosinte are the same plant.