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taw comments on Open Thread: April 2010 - Less Wrong
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The famous metaanalyses which has shown that vitamin supplementation is essentially useless, or possibly even harmful totally destroys the basic argument ("oh look, more vitamins!" - not that it's usually even true) that organic is good for your health.
It might still be tastier. Or not.
Do you mean these metaanalyses?
Yes. Even if PhilGoetz is correct that harmfulness was an artifact, there's still essentially zero evidence for benefits of eating more vitamins than RDA.
I thought Vitamin D was an exception.
My experience (admittedly, not double-blinded) is that the food from the farmer's markets tends to be a lot tastier.
Three possibilities: confirmation bias at my end, the theory that local-organic-free range creates better food (and better food tastes better) is correct, and selection pressure-- the only way they can get away with those prices is to sell food which tastes really good.
You should be extremely skeptical of any taste comparisions that are not blinded. One recent story carried out a blind taste comparison of Walmart and Whole Foods produce and found Walmart was preferred for some items. If the taste test had not been conducted blind you would likely have seen very different results.
This comparison doesn't directly bear on your theory since both the Walmart and Whole Foods produce was local and organic in most cases but perceptions of the source are very significant in taste judgements.
My extensive but not blinded at all testing suggests that cheapest brands of supermarket food usually taste far worse than more expensive brands, and quite a number of times fell below my edibility threshold.
My theory is this: it's cheaper to produce bad-tasting food than well-tasting food - and then you can use market segmentation - poor people who cannot afford more expensive food will buy this, while majority of people will buy better tasting and more expensive food. Two price points earn you more money, and as better tasting food is more expensive to make competition cannot undercut you.
One thing I cannot explain is that this difference applies only to some kinds of food - cheap meat is really vile, but for example cheap eggs taste the same as expensive organic eggs, tea price has little to do with its taste, not to mention things like salt and sugar which simply have to taste the same by laws of chemistry.
You can buy fancy salts (mined from different places-- there's a lot of pink Tibetan salt around) these days. I'm not interested enough in salt to explore them, so I have no opinion about the taste.
I've found that the cheap eggs ($1/dozen) leave me feeling a little off if I eat them a couple of days in a row, but organic free range ($3.50 or more/dozen) don't.
Alternative theory: food from local sources (such as farmer's markets) tastes better because it's fresher, because it's transported less and warehoused fewer times. This would imply that production methods, such as being organic or free range, have little or nothing to do with it. This is also pretty easy to test, if you have some visibility into supply chains.
In UK all supermarkets offer both "normal" and "organic" food. Isn't it true wherever you live? You can use this to check if this makes any difference in taste, as both are most likely transported and stored the same.
I want to test a different hypothesis-- whether extreme freshness is necessary for excellent flavor.
That's easy. If you have something very tasty, just store it in a fridge for an extra day, and try it again. I remember some experiments showing that meat got somewhat tastier around its labeled expiration date, which is the opposite result.
Plausible, but hard to test-- how would I get conventionally raised food which is as fresh as what I can get in farmer's markets?
I'd say that the frozen meat is also tastier, and it's (I hope) no fresher than what I can get at Trader Joe's.
Your second possibility deserves elaboration - I believe a fair restatement is: factory farming methods are less responsive than local organic free-range methods to taste and quality (i.e. cannot control for it as effectively).