Organic Food

Organic Food

Throughout the last few decades the kinds of food we ingest has become a major concern due to the increase of serious diseases such as cancer. With the health care costs at unbelievable prices, more and more people are turning to organic and healthier food even though organic products are up to three times more expensive than conventional products. The main reason why people are willing to pay that much is organic farmers use natural products, like manure, and compost. They spray pesticides from natural sources, mating disruption, insects and birds or traps to keep pests and diseases away while conventional farmers use synthetic insecticides to reduce pests and disease. On a non-organic farm, their agrochemicals are all synthetic, and farmers use antibiotics and growth hormones to produce rapid growth.” The next absence, or set of absences, are pesticides or rather what organic growers and farmers call “artificial” pesticides. These are also the products of the chemical industry and they are used to kill insects, but we could also include fungicides and herbicides (aimed at weeds), which weaken or kill the intended crop or animal. The most infamous of these agents DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane), first developed for use during the 2nd world war when the allies wanted to kill mosquitoes and lice with it. The idea of treating plants with chemicals to protect them and kill pests is hardly new.

The organic movement argues that this technology is a step-change in that it kills so effectively it leads to ecosystems that are unbalanced. In addition, they point out that these chemicals persist in wider environment, including in the human body (Beamont 1993). Controlling pests and weeds can have a pronounced effect on the operations of a farm allowing greater concentrations of plant to be grown, improving the yield of some plants and making harvesting and storage easier. Organic farmers and growers were the first to argue that they were also...