+ As RussH said the quality of fruit and veggies has absolutely nothing to do with them being organic or anorganic. And I mean NOTHING. It has been proven countless times. And it is starting to get really boring. http://www.food.gov.uk/multimedia/pdfs/organicreviewappendices.pdf
Quality and taste depend on:
a) The product being grown locally
The quality starts to deteriorate as soon as the plant is picked. Imagine what you get after weeks of transport and storage
b) The product being seasonal
Sorry, but greenhouse grown lettuce and tomato in winter always tastes like crap.
c) The cultivar/breed used
This is something that most people have an enormous problems to understand. A tomato is not simply a tomato. There are countles different varieties of tomato and the taste and overall chemical composition vary considerably among different varietis. So instead wasting your money on organic Empire apples just buy anorganic Fujis. http://www.nutritionj.com/content/pdf/1475-2891-3-5.pdf

Whoa, I’m back. Sorry,I just found this discussion too irritating and juicy to quit.

Copper is not only still in use, it is also the stapple. Just checked the local Agriculture and Forestry Institute guidelines for organic farmers for 2011 – yep still there. Can’t find the EU regulation, but I found this short recap from 2009 -> http://www.ecpa.eu/news-item/agriculture-today/pesticides-used-organic-farming

Agree on the welfare standards concerning cattle, as for the chicken, “free-range” regular chicken breeding more or less equals organic chicken breeding regarding living conditions. I read somewhere (a long time ago) about that problem. Basically you can’t keep more than 100 animals really free-range (that means outside), because they start to behave in a weird way or something like that. And 100 chicks is NOTHING.

I cant say anything about the hormones, since I never interested myself in the problematic nor tasted the “hormonised” meat, but I think it is more an ethical than a health issue. People obviously don’t realize that meat is stuffed with hormones anyway (natural or not) and that said hormones would have to be administred intrvenously to really do anything. Ingested growth hormones (of any kind) should not be a problem because a)their low concentration, b)they are basically digested just as any other protein.

As for organic beef being environmentaly friendly… Here’s a recap. It is a bit biased because the author is a vegan, but the basics are solid
http://www.youtube.com/watch? organic beefv=3Nrl8zAvTNU&feature=related
Basic logic tells you the same thing anyway. For me it is again more or less a matter of ethics.

Tatianna, what I mean is that organic vegetables don’t taste better because they are organically grown, they taste better because they are a premium product. It is perfectly possible to grow non-organic vegetables that taste good – it is down to growing methods and storage. It is the intensive growing and storage methods that make the vegetables taste so bland, not whether artificial fertilizers have been used. For example. non-organic tomatoes tend to be intensively grown under lights, often hydroponically, giving huge yields but horrible, bland fruit. The organic tomatoes are a premium product and ripened on the vine, and is is this that makes them taste better – you can do just the same thing with non-organic tomatoes and they taste fine. Some supermarket apples have been in cold storage for a year before they reach the shelves – no wonder they taste so bland.

I agree that organic eggs, milk and meat taste better.

The biggest difference I have noticed is between farmed salmon and wild salmon. Even organic farmed salmon tastes nothing like wild salmon.

Personally to me I can completely tell the difference between organic produce and non organic. I don’t eat breakfast at restaurants because I can taste the difference in eggs, they have a weird flavor to me. Same goes for veggies and most fruit. Organic apples are so different in taste, but I also tried non organic apples that tasted the same.

As far as meat and chicken goes, to me it’s organic all the way, the taste is in the pudding 🙂 or in this case it’s in the meat. Strangely I can also smell the difference between organic meat and the conventional, but I think I just have a very sensitive sense of smell.

Band3, copper has been banned from organic farming in the EU since 2002.

I read that organic food costs 15% more to grow but the supermarkets charge 45% more because it is a premium product – it is the supermarkets who are ripping people off.

I am sceptical that organic vegetables have any better taste or nutritional value, but for me organic farming is better for the environment – intensive farming is destroying the land.

Organic animal husbandry (in the EU at least) has much better animal welfare standards, and that is enough for me to buy it. Organic farming also has stricter standards on what the animals can be fed. I would be worried about growth hormone contamination in the US, although thankfully this is banned in the EU.

Well, I wanted to say western world. I prefer not to imagine what they do with their animals in China etc.

Just one more thing and I quit this useless discussion. I’ve been working (indirectly – sorry, too long to explain) for years in the field of agronomy and I can assure you that is a an extremely dirty business and the organic farming is just the pinnacle of the scum. If it were for me I would ban the idiotic label. I fidn it offensive on so many levels:
a) As a consumer.
They make this false generalising claims like organic food is automatically better, which is not (see grains above, but it is not exactly the only example). Plus fraud is extremelly common. Just recently they found out that the most popular Italian brand of organic food sells 1/3 of anorganic food. Produced in China. No joking. And it just hurts me when I see organic kiwis, persimmon or figs that cost the double than the regular ones. You practically don’t need chemistry to raise those in the first place!
b) As an environmentalist
It is difficult to find anything more delleterious for the environment than organic vineyards. They skip the common pesticides, but they use copper compounds. You know what copper is? A heavy metal. And while pesticides hava a cadence of a week or so, copper stays there forever and basically kills the soil in the long term. No way back. Ever wondered why coins are made of copper or contain a significant amount of it? It is antibacterial. And , yes of course, since local anorganic food is toxic we buy organic food that comes from the other side of the world. Especially supercrap magic food like acai, chia, goji and so on.
b) As a person who knows a thing or two about economy
Organic food costs me too much even if I don’t buy it. Besides the doubled price at the supermarket, organic farments receive an indecent amount of subventions. A regular cow receive more subvention money a day than a regular African poor earns a day. The organic one is therefore likely to receive a family/small village worth sum. You think organic farmers do it for the sake of the environment? Think again.
d) As a scientist
Don’t let me started…

So, just go on and enjoy the melodies. After all “the sole purpose of the sheep is to be trimmed”, as they say.

Actually they do that in Russia as well.

The Youtube only has the preview of the movie. It is a documentary called ” Food Inc “, which you have to rent.

Well, USA are more or lesst the only place in the world where they do that and I guess they won’t do it much longer. Same goes with injecting beef with hormones to get more milk and antibiotics to make them grow faster. Yet you get to read the hormone bullshit in just any European health magazine. Go figure.

Plus, as I already said, organic has nothing to do with the living conditions of the animals. Saddly. Even if it says free range it only means they are not in cages, it doesn’t necessarily mean they see the sun or eat a grass in their whole life. BTW, EU puts a ban on battery faming next year. One good thing.