I'm interested in your reasons for believing that people who grow food labelled "organic" care less about profit margin than people who grow food not so labelled.
Less exclusively, not less. And let me be more precise about what I (tentatively) believe: I am sure that all four quadrants of {organic, not organic} x {care only about max profit, care about other things too} are occupied; but I suspect that there is some correlation between being in the "organic" row and being in the "care about other things" column.
Why? Well, some of the reasons why people might choose to produce organic food rather than not-organic food are ones that involve caring about something other than profit margins. For ins...
I've been wondering whether there's any solid evidence that organic food is healthier than conventionally produced food-- the arguments I've seen on the subject have been theoretical/aesthetic.
I'm interested in anything in the range from personal stories to scientific studies, but would prefer to avoid extremely general arguments or claims that people who prefer one or the other are demonstrating character defects.
Edited to add: Thanks for the replies. I'm hoping for experiments which test the effects of food produced in various ways on organisms, especially multi-cellular organisms. It was interesting to find out that plants which have to fight off insects for themselves have more mutagens.
The mutation experiment is very cute, but it leaves out the possibility of damage that isn't related to mutation-- for example, hormonal effects. Also, if it's done on a standard bacteria acquiring the ability to make a particular nutrient, this might not be a test for mutation in general.
I realize experiments on organic vs. conventional would be difficult, especially if you're tracking human health. It would be very hard to avoid confounding factors like other lifestyle factors and income.
"Conventional food" is actually a large blob of a concept-- different pesticides, fertilizers, etc. are used on different foods at different times, so finding out what people are actually exposed to would be difficult.