I grew up on a relatively low-tech farm, so I have a better idea of what it takes to grow food the old fashioned way than most organic food junkies. While I do appreciate that a lot of organic food is of a better quality, that quality comes from the extra care taken in growing the crops (and the fact that they're usually more fresh, or of a tastier but less productive breed) rather than the fact that they're "organic." I've grown some great tasting heirloom tomatoes that were better than anything organic you could buy at Trader Joe's or wherever, and we sprayed the hell out of them with whatever pesticides we could get our hands on. Maybe I'll die a few years earlier than you from cancer...but one the other hand, you're a heck of a lot more likely to get E. coli from lettuce grown in organic cow shit than you are to get it from something grown in a good nitrogen fertilizer.

The problem is that people are too far divorced from where the food that goes in their mouth actually comes from - so everybody gets all squeamish when they realize that growing stuff isn't pretty. I think it's because it reminds us of death, and that we're no more able to escape the life cycle than anything else. Everything grows and everything dies, and even plants feed on the dead, in a sense. The attempt to get away from that is what drove us to the super-sterile supermarket model in the first place - but now that the brutality of even "modern" farming is again becoming relatively common knowledge people think that they can somehow sanitize it by going "organic." Face facts - when you eat, you're killing something. Get over it.

Ce n'est pas une pipe. C'est une signature.

The article misses the point.  It's not just about these things being more environmentally friendly: There's a suite of reasons behind eating things.  For one, as the first commenter noted, oftentimes organic stuff tastes better.  It may not be 100% of the time, but it's very often the case.

Second, I think it's important to have an investment in "the little guy," something the writers at The Economist surely know nothing about.  If variety is the spice of life, then getting all my mushrooms and spinach from Aunt Mid, who, as a boardroom full of old guys, is neither an aunt nor named Mid, would make my life pretty dull.  I shop at small, local wine shops because they give me better stuff to buy.  They're the ones who sell wine made from tiny Loire producers or under-priced burgundy and so on and who give me choices other than Sam Adams in the beer aisle.  I buy tea at small shops because I can drink good loose leaf.  I may not have the 500 varieties of fake fruit-blended tea to choose from like I would from a larger place, but it's all quality, and the choice is plenty diverse -- especially if you go to multiple stores.  And I buy from local farmers when I can because the food not only tastes better and seems fresher and better treated, it's a guy growing stuff in my neighborhood, supplying great vegetables directly to top restaurants.  If I only support corporate farmers, that guy might not be around next year, and we need him around just like we need the wine shop and the tea store.

Variety and choice and a general sense of quality being paramount, going with "the little guy" who cares about what he's selling or growing is appealing.  The article seems to ignore that.

Third, the environmental benefits aren't just measured in dry statistics like soil readings.  It's hard to support companies that grow their animals in pens the size of my laptop and keep the lights on all night, et cetera.  And it's hard to justify sucking down chemical pesticides.  I don't want to eat that stuff.  Even ignoring the "food miles" and pollution and all of that, it boils down to a simple principle: Putting fake chemicals into something natural has never been a good, consequence-free way to do much of anything.

There are trade-offs to everything, but the local, organic beef I get is cheaper and tastes better.  And while I'm hardly an animal rights activist, I do like to know that the cow wasn't royally abused to bring me my delicious burger.  I couldn't do it any other way.

I was not impressed with some of the circular logic of the article.  Organic foods means more land for crops; current agribiz produces more food than we shall ever need.  Hmm....

Then factor in that agribiz fields are so drained of nutrients that current cultivated land requires more and more chemicals to produce less and less crops....

Sometimes The Economist eds are right on, and sometimes they just miss the boat, and this is a case of the latter.

We buy mainly organic.  Especially milk and butter.  I mean, hey:  if a human mom eats broccoli while nursing, her baby will get gas.  So what goes into a cow (or goat) gets passed on to us in a pretty concentrated kinda way.

The good news is that agribiz is catching on - they know where folks are spending their money, so now we have organic Heinz ketchup, etc.  The irony is that as the big boys move into this new market, the brave farmers who started to answer the market for organic food are now being squeezed out of the game.

Thought some of you might find this informative:

http://cornucopia.org/index.php/who-owns-organic/

Now with caps!