Vox Populi
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Video: Are Organic Foods Actually Healthier?
In these two short videos, Dr. Michael Greger examines the latest scientific research on the health and safety of conventional food versus organic.
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Vox Populi 
P. S I doubled spaced Rachel Carson’s quotes and they all came together when printed.
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Thank you, it’s extremely important information. You know, we are just not trained by our society to understand food as substances that sustains life, not as much as it should be done. The pleasurable aspect of the problem is what is mostly promoted, and many times it creates a problem. Many people in our advanced society, thoughtlessly and even hurriedly pick a food item that is filled with taste and bulk to eat rather than nutrition, and at that rush hour, “who cares about the pesticides” So that eventually when the results of such bad eating manifest themselves, taste can factor in as a negative; as a temptress/tempter paving the way to hell. But should we eliminate the pleasurable aspect of eating out of our food, as did the Calvinist around the 17century. Because perhaps the pleasure of eating seems like a bonus given to us from nature. But it may not be, because in most cases when nature provides a product for our needs, the essential parts of the product are necessary, especially since nature has concerned itself too much with distributing pleasant taste in foods which humans have selected to eat in abundance. So that to be careful when we say that a food which is good tasting, is insignificant to the nutrition needed to sustain life. But don’t we have other aspects of being human that we must develop, such as our mind, and in it, we need to nurture and develop our capacity for esthetics etc. So that if we say that if taste or the good taste of food were eliminated from human foods, and only nutrients were present, human kind would still be doing fine. But I don’t think we would be, something would eventually change in our character of being human. I think tasty foods are in the family of humans receiving love, kisses, support acceptance. So that for eating correctly, I think that striking a balance between taste and nutrition is the way to go. BUT IT’S IN STRIKING THE BALANCE WHERE OUR BIG PROBLEM LIES. . So that in one of the most advanced societies in the world, where the best knowledge is known of what the balance is ( in more than just nutritional concerns) we have difficulties choosing what is right and applying it correctly. It seems the “esthetic thing in our mind” which I mentioned above which also needs nourishment, eventually has gotten in the way, BIG TIME, such as in the fantasies, and the great plans and in some folks the many visions of grandeur entertained by their imagination. Esthetics can become magnificent, the most obvious ones, are the lofty GLOBAL ECONOMIC ones we are managing right now. These come to us embellished with personal greed, like those of our food producers. So that it seems that the pleasurable esthetic properties in our brains, seem to raise great obstacles for most of us. And perhaps to such an extent that it is difficult for any simple folk across our land, to sit and eat a very basic nutritious meal without running the risk of eating poisons, which in most cases are the unnecessarily by-product the arise from the plans and production of some CEO’s inflated imagination.
I thought I’d offer some quotes from Rachel Carson. I think they still apply to our current problems we’re having with pesticides.
“It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged.” ― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring“As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life – a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no “high-minded orientation,” no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.” ― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring“Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. Thus he undoes the built-in checks and balances by which nature holds the species within bounds.” ― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring “We are accustomed to look for the gross and immediate effects and to ignore all else. Unless this appears promptly and in such obvious form that it cannot be ignored, we deny the existence of hazard. Even research men suffer from the handicap of inadequate methods of detecting the beginnings of injury. The lack of sufficiently delicate methods to detect injury before symptoms appear is one of the great unsolved problems in medicine.” ― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring“All this has come about because of the sudden rise and prodigious growth of an industry for the production of man-made or synthetic chemicals with insecticidal properties. This industry is a child of the Second World War. In the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects. The discovery did not come by chance: insects were widely used to test chemicals as agents of death for man.” ― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring“As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life – a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no “high-minded orientation,” no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.” ― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
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