Sanity check - organic food?

[Guest MormonGator]

2 minutes ago, Carborendum said:

Hey, HEY!!  only half a bottle of gin.

LOL! My bad. 

 

[NeuroTypical]

 

 

Organic gin.  I wonder if I ran another poll, if I could get someone to agree that organic alcohol isn't against the WoW because of all the health benefits and natural farming methods used.

Edited July 5, 2016 by NeuroTypical

[Guest]

And as long as we smoked "organic tobacco", that would be ok.

[NeuroTypical]

Oh man did I ever have something good happen today.  I discovered two new words:

Biophile:  One who seeks or has a profound connection with the natural world, the sense of which brings great emotional satisfaction.
Chemophobe: One whom experiences a reflexive, illogical rejection of modern synthetic chemicals.

The first word isn't that bad of a thing.  I really, really, really get a huge breathtaking kick out of some of the sunsets out here in the middle of nowhere where I live.  This is my favorite season - when the purple of the stormclouds meet the green of the new spring growth, and the orange of the dirt road I'm on perfects the scene.  

But an extreme form of biophillia is chemophobia.  When you start thinking organic is better than non-organic, for reasons that are spurious or factually incorrect.  (We've seen plenty of both on this thread.)  When you are against GMO, because it "isn't natural".  

Here - have a really, really cool link.

Quote

In reality, ‘natural’ products are usually more chemically complicated than anything we can create in the lab.
[...]
The distinction between natural and synthetic chemicals is not merely ambiguous, it is non-existent. The fact that an ingredient is synthetic does not automatically make it dangerous, and the fact that it is natural doesn’t make it safe. Botulinum, produced by bacteria that grow in honey, is more than 1.3 billion times as toxic as lead and is the reason why infants should never eat honey. A cup of apple seeds contains enough natural cyanide to kill an adult human. Natural chemicals can be beneficial, neutral or harmful depending on the dosage and on how they are used, just like synthetic chemicals. Whether a chemical is ‘natural’ should never be a factor when assessing its safety.
[...]The scientific community describes chemophobia as a ‘non-clinical prejudice’ like homophobia or xenophobia – that is, not a medical phobia but a learned aversion.

Edited July 9, 2016 by NeuroTypical

[Guest MormonGator]

22 minutes ago, NeuroTypical said:

Oh man did I ever have something good happen today.  I discovered two new words:

Biophile:  One who seeks or has a profound connection with the natural world, the sense of which brings great emotional satisfaction.
Chemophobe: One whom experiences a reflexive, illogical rejection of modern synthetic chemicals.

 

I like the natural world too, in particular the miles and miles of my states gorgeous beaches. 

But in reality, the "profound connection" to the natural world is garbage. The "natural world" is incredibly violent. We think kitties are cuddly pets, but that owl in the backyard thinks little Snugglebuns is "lunch". Mommy animals eat baby animals at a pretty high rate. What's more, if you are casually walking in the woods, fall and break your leg-nature doesn't life you up with it's sunshine and rainbows. Instead, it does nothing as you die. 

Don't get me wrong-I love my dogs (Jaina is on my lap right now) and I like walks in the woods, beaches and swimming in oceans too and I used to climb mountains when I lived up north-but I'm unromantic about nature being "peaceful". 

So yeah, I'll stick to civilization.  And my wi-fi connection, iPhone and air conditioning. 

Edited July 9, 2016 by MormonGator

[anatess2]

I'm into holistic stuff because that's how I grew up (Filipinos are holistic because they can't afford not to be... same thing as Filipinos eat fish, crabs, shrimp, etc. because they can't afford chicken... wierd, huh?).

So, migrating to the US, among the culture shocks is being lost in a grocery store.  Produce section that spans an entire side of the store, what the what?  But with fruits only a small section.  I've never heard of most of the green leaves and herbs on there and it's wierd to see a red fat mango instead of the lean, yellow one I'm used to... and then you see labels on them... Mexico, Honduras, etc... I mean, you are in Florida eating a mango from Mexico.  Wild!

I don't know about other states but in Florida, the Orange Juice spans the entire refrigerator... and that's just Tropicana... there are other brands too.

And then there's the cereal aisle... an ENTIRE aisle.

And then there's the salmon.  Yeay!  Something I recognize!  $8.99 a pound... WHAT????  Whole Chicken... 99 cents a pound.

And then I see eggs... first of all, it's refrigerated (we don't refrigerate eggs in the Philippines!), and choices make your head spin... regular eggs, vitamins loaded eggs, brown eggs, cage free eggs, organic eggs, vegetarian-fed chicken eggs (what? why is your chicken vegetarian???).

Anyway, I went with a hybrid thing where I buy most of our stuff from the local farms  - we have a great natural food store type of thing here that gets their inventory from the small local farms around here that don't mass produce for the country, so the eggs (still refrigerated) comes from chickens running around some farmland close to where I live... etc.  Most of their stuff is organic but a lot is not organic (don't pass the organic requirements from the FDA) simply because the FDA requirements are not really good indicators of what is healthy...

Then I get the cool stuff like sugary cereals (we love these, hah hah) from Publix.

Edited July 11, 2016 by anatess2

[NeuroTypical]

They tell me the best eggs are those that have never seen a refrigerator.

(And by 'they', I mean the folks who buy eggs from my wife and daughters' chickens.)

[Guest Godless]

2 hours ago, anatess2 said:

I don't know about other states but in Florida, the Orange Juice spans the entire refrigerator... and that's just Tropicana... there are other brands too.

And then there's the cereal aisle... an ENTIRE aisle.

One thing I've observed in my line of work is the marketing power that comes with the ability of large food and beverage companies to monopolize shelf space. That's why the soda isle has several square feet of Coca Cola products that could easily take up a small fraction of the shelf space with the same amount of product (but at the cost of visibility), while I usually have to make multiple passes before I can find my precious Vernors Ginger Ale. The same is true in the cereal isle, the juice isle, and the beer isle, among others. Companies like Coca-Cola, Kellogs, and ABInbev have the purchasing power to demand ridiculous and unnecessary amounts of shelf space for their products, as well as the product range to fill that space with 20 different variations of the same thing (Coke, Coke Zero, Cherry Coke, Vanilla Coke, Cherry Vanilla Coke, Diet Coke, Diet Cherry Coke, etc).

2 hours ago, anatess2 said:

 vegetarian-fed chicken eggs (what? why is your chicken vegetarian???).

What do Filipino chickens eat? 

[LeSellers]

33 minutes ago, Godless said:

What do Filipino chickens eat? 

If they're like chickens anywhere else in the world, they're omnivorous: they eat bugs, grubs, worms, insects, dead "stuff", grains, grass, fruit, vegetables (especially when either of the latter are in a garden), and whatever else looks tasty to them.

Lehi

[NeuroTypical]

Heh - unless they're raised to be "vegetarian" or "vegan" chickens.  Those chickens are guaranteed to have never been outside or seen the sun, because that's where you find bugs.  So cruel.  

But yep - chickens are omnivores.  We routinely feed their eggs back to them, and our table scraps, and basically anything that isn't an onion (because it makes their eggs smell).  

More than that, they are the descendants of deadly predator dinosaurs.  They remember their noble ancestry, you can see it in their eyes.  They loathe their current fallen state, and the God that willed it to be so.

They get together and plot their rebellion and re-ascension back to the top of the food chain.  But then they are foiled by the existence of a fence, and distracted by something shiny.

Edited July 11, 2016 by NeuroTypical

[Guest Godless]

1 hour ago, NeuroTypical said:

Heh - unless they're raised to be "vegetarian" or "vegan" chickens.  Those chickens are guaranteed to have never been outside or seen the sun, because that's where you find bugs.  So cruel.  

But yep - chickens are omnivores.  We routinely feed their eggs back to them, and our table scraps, and basically anything that isn't an onion (because it makes their eggs smell).  

More than that, they are the descendants of deadly predator dinosaurs.  They remember their noble ancestry, you can see it in their eyes.  They loathe their current fallen state, and the God that willed it to be so.

They get together and plot their rebellion and re-ascension back to the top of the food chain.  But then they are foiled by the existence of a fence, and distracted by something shiny.

Who came first the chicken or the egg? The egg, laid by an animal that wasn't a chicken. 

I can't believe it never occurred to me that chickens eat bugs. I guess I was just thinking of what they're deliberately fed by the farmers, which I would hope is generally a vegetarian diet. I think those labels simply mean that the chickens weren't fed the remains of their slaughtered kin, as some animals on industrial farms allegedly are.

[LeSellers]

14 minutes ago, Godless said:

what they're deliberately fed by the farmers, which I would hope is generally a vegetarian diet.

Your hope is vain.

There's all sorts of stuff in commercial feeds, including ground up carcasses of farm animals. And, because there are squeamish folk out there, I won't get into the other things.

But, as we've seen, chickens are omnivores, and they'd eat exactly the same thing in the wild. And people have been eating eggs for millennia without any problems.

Lehi

[NeuroTypical]

Oh Godless, chickens are the ULTIMATE omnivores - they are also cannibals.  But while many species avoid such things, a chicken doesn't care.  Protein is protein.  One way a flock can get out of control, is they'll start killing and eating themselves.

Truth: If you drop dead out feeding your chickens, they will reciprocate all the care and love you've given them, by using your corpse as a food source.  

Look deeply in those eyes.  You know it's true.

[anatess2]

Okay, talking about chicken...

I have to say, chicken in Publix doesn't taste like chicken.  It tastes bland.  Eggs from Publix also tastes bland.  And it has that sickly yellow color.  Pork or beef is also wierd - besides the bland taste, the fat that is essential in a lot of Filipino dishes has a weird texture.  There is no coconut juice - any brand you can find - in Publix that tastes like coconut juice.

So, I try to find places that sell stuff that tastes like the stuff from back home.  And that's how I got into that Natural Food Store place that sells stuff from the local farms.  I can't really tell you if it's healthier or not.  All I know is that it tastes more like the food I grew up on.

Edited July 12, 2016 by anatess2