gjm comments on Organic food, conventional food - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (55)
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 instance, empirically it looks to me as if people who care about animal welfare are more likely to think that there's something icky about more-industrialized food production processes, and that people who think that are more likely to want to produce organically. (I make no comment on how rational it is for them to think that.) In general, people operating in a niche of any sort are (other things being equal) more likely to care about non-standard things.
(The following aren't exactly answers to your question but are other reasons for thinking that organically produced food may tend to be better. I am not very confident about any of them, and they are in rough decreasing order of how sure I am that the effect in question is real and goes in the direction I think it does.)
Producers of premium-ish products may be less likely to engage in practices that would look bad if they were disclosed, on the grounds that they are more dependent on customer goodwill, positive attitudes to their brand, etc., than if they were competing solely on price.
Organic food production is (I think) inevitably less efficient in various ways, which may mean that the relative benefit of any given cost-saving measure will be less for an organic producer than for a not-organic one, so that when there's a tradeoff between cost and quality choosing quality will be slightly more favourable on average for organic producers.
There are many cost-reducing measures available to food producers. All else being equal, such measures should be expected to reduce the quality of the food (perhaps not by much). Some of them are presumably not available to organic food producers. -- There's a possibly-equal and opposite pull in the other direction: There are many quality-increasing measures available to food producers, and presumably some of them are likewise unavailable to organic food producers. My hazy impression is that the things restricted by organic food production are mostly of the cost-reducing sort rather than the quality-improving sort, but that may well be wrong.
Cookery books by pretentious chefs fairly often advocate buying organically produced food. This gives two reasons for thinking organic might on average be better. Firstly, the chefs may know something about food. Secondly, people who read such books may (1) be more discerning about food quality, (2) tend to buy organic food and (3) be less price-sensitive than average, which might lead organic food producers to pay more attention to quality in order to keep their business.
These things were probably all more true in the earlier days of organic production, when it was more niche-y.
I see that both this [EDITED to add: I mean the parent of this very comment right here] and its grandparent have been downvoted. If that's because I'm being stupid then I would be grateful for some information that goes beyond "Someone didn't like this", so that I can try to repair my thinking (or improve my prose style, or whatever) as appropriate. Regrettably, even after rereading both it's not clear to me what the downvotes were for. Thanks!