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Showing posts from May, 2013

Beauty in decay?

The Truth About Organic Farming - by Christie Wilcox

The Truth About Organic Farming Here’s the thing: there are a lot of myths out there about organic foods, and a lot of propaganda supporting methods that are rarely understood. It’s like your mother used to say: just because everyone is jumping off a bridge doesn’t mean you should do it, too. Now, before I get yelled at too much, let me state that I’m not trying to say that organic farming is bad – far from it. There are some definite upsides and benefits that come from many organic farming methods. For example, the efforts of organic farmers to move away from monocultures, where crops are farmed in single-species plots, are fantastic; crop rotations and mixed planting are much better for the soil and environment than conventional monocultures. Instead, I only want to point out that not everything is as it seems. So here are some of the myths of organic produce, and the realities behind them. http://nutritionwonderland.com/2009/12/the-truth-about-organic-farming/
GMOs: Does Regulation Ensure Safety? "Let me just share my two cents on this mode of thinking: first off, nothing about our lives is “natural”. We build things out of reinforced steel and other metals that never occur naturally. Houses never form in the wild, nor do clothes. X-ray machines don’t occur spontaneously, nor do heart transplants. So if you’re really dedicated to living naturally, you’ve got to rethink a lot more than GMOs. Secondly, we have been messing with creatures’ genetics and “playing God” for centuries. Over 50 million of us worldwide proudly own the products of this genetic manipulation – you might call them pets. Dogs, for example, have more physical variation within their species than there is in the entire rest of the order of carnivores. In other words, a pug’s skull is more different from a pit bull’s than a mouse’s is from a bear’s. If that’s not some serious genetic manipulation, I don’t know what is. We’ve bred not just different varieties of one spe...