"organic" food

yeah, so what's the deal with "organic" food, you know? firstly, it's rather ironic that you can have "organic" and "non-organic" apples. how are apples not organic? they're fruit for christssake! you can't get much more organic than that. so while i was in the doctor's office waiting room waiting (duh) to get a vaccine-shot-thing i noticed an issue of Time magazine sitting on the table next to me. the cover was featuring an article about "organic" produce. this is where i finally found out what the hell makes "organic" produce more organic than the rest of it. it's pesticides. people are afraid that they're gonna get cancer and die if they eat produce with pesticides on it. uh, hel-lo! didn't they teach you to wash-your-food before you eat it when you were a kid? and yeah, i know that just washing off your apple isn't gonna decontaminate it, but seriously, why do they care? we've all been eating pesticides for the past at least half a century and just NOW they're afraid of getting sick from it? obviously we've been doing fine so far, seeing as we're not dead or anything. not only that but the article specifically stated that they can't even prove that pesticides will give you cancer. (yeah, sure, maybe if you downed a gallon of straight pesticide a day, but what's been sprayed on your fruit is hardly a fraction of that.)

it all reminds me of this conversation that jessie and i had with our roommate margaret about her organic something-or-other. she said she'd accidentally bought the "non-organic" stuff and we asked what the difference was (i think it may have been spaghetti sauce). she said that since there was a word listed in the ingredients that she couldn't pronounce, so it wasn't organic. jessie and i both agreed that that was no proof. after all, you've got things like sodium penthanol and hydrocholic acid in ORGANIC chemistry. you could also throw dihydrogen oxide in there too, and, hell, that's just plain water!

anyway, so these people are worried about what they'll catch if they eat food with pesticides on it, BUT have they ever stopped to wonder what they could catch from food that is grown without it? all sorts of things that pesticides kill off could grow in them like mold and rot and insect larva or whatever. i think i'd rather chance the light spray of pesticides (seeing as it hasn't killed me yet) over eating fungi.

if you ask me this is yet another case of people overreacting and getting into some paranoid craze like so many other things lately. things like "don't spank your kids" (so they'll turn into rotten little brats!), "keep children completely sanitized" (so they'll grow up with no immune system), "vaccinate kids agains chicken pox" (so they'll catch them as adults and possibly die from the more severe strain that adults always catch), and the list can go on and on. all these things that our generation and older have grown up with and we've obviously turned out just fine! seriously, all this crap does is piss me off.