MYTH #1: ORGANIC FOOD IS ALWAYS BETTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT.
Organics don't contaminate soil and groundwater with pesticides and chemicals like regular farming does, but there's a surprising downside: Since organic farming is only about half as productive as conventional farming, it requires far more land to produce the same amount of food. Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues estimates that modern high-yield farming has saved 15 million square miles of wildlife habitat, and that if the world switched to organic farming, we'd need to cut down 10 million square miles of forest. Less-productive farming could also lead to even less food for the world's undernourished.
I bold that last sentence because it's the most ridiculous part of the whole thing. Are they really trying to play on people's fears of a potential food shortage? You've seen the Average American lately. We all know how fat they are. The fact is, "the world's undernourished" aren't starving because there isn't enough food to go around. They're starving because of three things:
1) Totalitarian regimes that would rather see their people supplicated and docile through starvation, so they deny any foreign relief programs to enter their countries and feed their people.
2) The generally shitty state of foreign relations around the world. Everybody's building walls and circling wagons. Everybody hates everybody else. And until we can all talk to each other like civilized monkeys, no progress will be made to get food to people who need it.
3) Like Audrey 2, fat fucking Americans are eating anything put in their path.
There's no food shortage. There's no threat of a food shortage. There's just an obscene disparity in the distribution of food. Bertha, the 348-pound housewife in Danvers, Massachusetts, is eating a 182-ounce bag of Doritos everyday because she can get the damn things in bulk at the Costco. Food is the new Manifest Destiny. Which is to say it's a retarded idea perpetrated by those in power to keep the ignorant masses from asking too many questions about the more important issues. Bread and circuses, fer chrissake. Bertha's not going to care about Darfur or Tibet when she can get a quintuple bacon cheeseburger off the dollar menu at Wendy's.
Maybe if we didn't have as much space to grow food, the food we did grow wouldn't be turned into edible garbage, and that food would be considered a little more precious. I remember when I was a kid steak used to be like "treat" meat, which is to say something we ate maybe a couple times a month or on special occasions. And I hardly grew up poor. Now it's about as affordable as iceberg lettuce (and probably about as nutritious nowadays). What does it say about this country that beef has turned into a discount item? And if meat is a so cheap, ya think maybe we could pass a little of that on to the starving kids around the world?
Stop me before I start sounding like a USA for Africa song.
The only thing I can comfort myself with is the fact that Bertha will be dead by 45 from a massive coronary.
Who am I kidding? Bertha's insurance company will drop $750k to get her a spendy new heart to keep her alive another thirty years and then pass the bill on to me and all the other people getting sucker punched.
