Over the past few months there have been many articles and “news” coverage regarding organic food. Many people covering the topic for the mainstream news have an obviously slanted agenda against organic food. Viewing some of the articles headlines will suffice to expose this agenda: “Does organic food turn people into jerks?”, “Drug Resistant Bugs Found in Antibiotic-Free Meat”, “Antibiotic-Free Meat Not Free of Drug-Resistant Bacteria”, “The Problem With Organic Food” just to list a few.

Let us explore for a moment just what Organic and so called Conventional foods are.
Wikipedia provides a good starting point with their definition of organic food as: “… foods that are produced using methods that do not involve modern synthetic inputs such as synthetic pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Organic Foods also do not contain genetically modified organisms, and are not processed using irradiation, industrial solvents, or chemical food additives. (wikipedia.org)”

Mankind’s food legacy

Basically, organic food consists of meat, fruit, vegetables etc… that are grown naturally without artificial or synthetic manipulation in any stage of the planting, cultivating, harvesting and production processes. To state it even more simply, so called organic food has been the agricultural method throughout human history, until the invention of synthetic and artificial manipulation processes.

If we count organic or natural food only through the time frame of the advent of agriculture; then mankind has consumed organic food for approx. 10,000 years as evident with ancient Chinese/Taoist rice cultivation. If, however, we consider even earlier time periods and take into consideration the vast time frames that mankind survived by hunting and gathering, we are faced with a daunting fact that “prehistoric” man was eating not only organic/natural meat & vegetables, but also free range, grass fed, cage free, humane and ethically grown as well, for hundreds of thousands of years.

What is conventional food?

For the most part, conventional food did not exist until the 1940’s with the conclusion of WWII. The large chemical companies that were created for mass production of chemical warfare campaigns were no longer needed on the same massive production scale. With millions of dollars in lost revenue quickly approaching, these mega companies shifted their focus from chemical warfare on human enemies, to the Great Enemy of agriculture: pests, parasites, mold, fungi, bacteria etc…

All without making any changes to the factories; requiring just a simple change of labels and reduction of potency, some would argue if this reduction actually occurred.

Genetically Modified Organisms or GMO is another major component of conventional food, especially in the United States. This has the potential to be the most dangerous component of conventional food, so dangerous in fact that dozens of countries have banned GMO food and some have gone a step further and are moving towards banning non-organic or conventional farming all together.

Is there even a need for a debate regarding Organic versus Unnatural food?

The answer will vary of course depending on who is asked this question; however, the facts cannot be disputed. What we are faced with, is a method of either growing & hunting for food that has existed for over 10,000 years, compared to a new and unproven method that has only 60-70 years of experience that is rapidly and constantly changing. The long term effects of which no-one can answer with any certainty. What we do know, is that over the same time period (last 70 years) there has been an incredible increase in disease, illness and infection, the likes of which has not occurred in recorded history.

Where is the controversy coming from?

Clearly, the same companies behind the unnatural chemical and GMO movement are the same parties funding the “research” and propagating the stories under the guise of scientific data that is trying to usurp and replace Organic and natural food.

Better questions

• Instead of asking “Does organic food turn people into jerks?” perhaps, we should ask: does lobbying, promoting and producing unnatural and harmful food full of dangerous chemicals make you evil?
• How do the unnatural/conventional food practices reflect on our society?
• What does our continued consumption of this unnatural food say about the consumer and society?
• Is conventional food, a further sign of the moral decay of modern societies? If so, where will it end?
• What will come of mankind if we allow our food to become completely synthetic, void of all energy, nutrition and life force?

From a Taoist perspective; the greater question is not how can man improve the food, rather how can man return to simplicity and naturalness and live as a part of the world. How can we return to our original state, our original nature? Surely, Adam and Eve were not eating GMO/conventional food in the Garden of Eden. Does modern man really think that Adam and Eve would have been better off if the forbidden fruit was a GMO apple full of pesticides and herbicides? Perhaps, in that regard they would be correct, for they surely would have resisted and refused to eat it. Now that is worth pondering!

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