DISQUS

Aerik · 1 year ago

HA!!

That's great. As usual, "organic," "natural," and "free-range" don't really mean anything.

Something doesn't have to be organic to be food. Even so, about everything we eat is organic anyways, if you go by it's actual chemical definition. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid.com points us to how all a producer has to do to earn his "free range" badge is to let turkeys or chickens walk a certain amount, even if it's still not a humane amount. Californians just voted to let chickens turn around in their cages. But they still urinate and defecate on each other enough that they get skin infections and eye infections that end up closing them with scarring.

Some people into "organic food" or "raw food" insist that cooking food makes it inorganic, showing that most people, especially organic foodies, don't know what 'organic' means.

Let's review what an organic compound is. Ever take o-chem in college? Organic chemistry is the study of carbon compounds, and organic compounds are those formed by living organisms, with molecules containing two or more carbon atoms, linked by carbon-carbon bonds. These can be double bonds, where the carbon atoms share 4 electrons, or in the case of saturated fatty acids, they can be single bonds, where the carbon atoms share two electrons, and the other electrons are shared with bonded hydrogen atoms. Breaking these bonds would, in effect, make an organic compound non-organic.

So really, the claim being made by the raw food people is that cooking breaks those carbon-carbon bonds. You would have to really, really cook your food to break these bonds. Carbon-carbon bonds will begin to break at temperatures above 750 Fahrenheit, or about 400 Celsius. So if you cook your food in a ceramics kiln, then yes, it is possible to chemically change it into a non-organic compound. But if you're looking for it to happen at regular cooking temperatures, well then, you need to retake your o-chem.

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4019

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4030

As for "natural," well hey, plenty of poisons and venoms are natural. Are they still good? What isn't natural would have to be supernatural. Are you into ghost livestock?

What really saddens me is that a lot of fellow feminists I know are into woo-woo and the organic food industry. It's pretty hard to talk to them about it as a skeptic as most Skeptics are total misogynists.

Sigh.

There are only two reasons for the better treatment of animals: to stop feeding bloodlust for the torture of other animals and act humanely, and to make it possible to cut down on antibiotics so that we don't render them useless too soon. The only other thing wrong with our food industry is our ludicrous dependence on corn. Anything manages to wipe our corn or bees and this country is in big trouble.