We hear it everywhere these days. Green construction, green grocery bags, organic veggies, organic farming, Organic Beer, organic this, organic that!
Is it really needed or is it just a marketing gimmick for corporations to charge us a premium on products Is it really for the Earth or is it intended solely to fatten corporate wallets and give us the illusion that we are being better human beings
Well, I am not an expert on much beyond beer. But here’s the truth when you really get down and dirty with this stuff. There’s some truth to it. Plastic sucks. Period. We need to get rid of it from Earth. So reusable bags instead of plastic bags is certainly very very valuable. Plastic pollutes the earth, NEVER goes away. The millions of tons of plastic products that we’ve made over time will NEVER degrade, and that’s super unnatural. We are messing with mother nature, so needs to stop.
But that’s not true about everything we see and hear. Whether we use organic veggies that were not cultivated on fertilizers or not is more of a preference call. Are you OK with farmers increasing yield with manure Then what’s wrong with fertilizers Chemicals are everywhere, so why pay the premium only to avoid them from veggies
Now, if you think they taste better, than that’s a different issue. But several taste tests have proved that organic veggie don’t taste much better than regular ones. And I am not just saying that. MNN.com did a test comparing the taste of organic egg, cheese and carrots like many others. They had New York’s top chefs come out and taste a regular one first and then an organic one later. The chefs each own restaurants that specialize in the ingredient that they were tasting. The egg tasteoff wen with the organic egg – which did not have the sulphury taste that the regular supermarket egg had. Lack of that additional chemical taste was a plus. For the carrots and the cheese though, that did not turn out to be the case. The supermarket carrot actually tasted sweeter so ranked higher and the supermarket cheese tasted huskier and better also.
The conclusion was that with cheeses, the culture used to produce the cheese and the ageing make a bigger difference on taste compared to whether they were organic or not. With carrots, sweetness, which is often more to do with the soil and area that the carrot came from, temperature conditions, Etc. made a bigger impact on taste.
So the next time someone tells you they bought organic ONLY because it tastes better, feel sorry for them. But if they truly believe in sustainable living and that’s why they do it, envy and copy them!
Tags: fertilizers, green construction, grocery bags, organic beer, organic farming, organic foods, plastic bags, reusable bags, supermarket foods, taste tests