I haven't taken the need to buy organic that seriously before but this is rather terrifying.
Moreover, it demonstrates that at any point, you might up with "conventionally grown" food that has been grown with this year's innovative chemical addition which uncertain implications.
I agree. I had mostly preferred organics in recent years because I wanted politically to avoid Monsanto, et al. and support a more regional food system. I didn't believe that industrial-scale organics were demonstrably healthier than conventional crops. But this research and a handful of other studies that have appeared on HN recently have changed my thinking. There seems to be more and more evidence that conventionally grown crops are essentially bathed in chemicals that are at best questionable with regard to human health.
The same thing applies to milk. Organic milk regulations disallow water and powder mixtures while conventional milk is anywhere upwards from 5% stale milk mixed with fresh milk.
What organic was originally labeled for is now just a shadow. Buying organic is just precautionary to avoid the everchanging regulations that are not made with individuals in mind..but instead, industry..
Organic farming enhances soil microbial abundance and activity—A meta-analysis and meta-regression [1]
> we integrated data from 56 mainly peer-reviewed papers into our analysis, including 149 pairwise comparisons originating from different climatic zones and experimental duration ranging from 3 to more than 100 years. Overall, we found that organic systems had 32% to 84% greater microbial biomass carbon, microbial biomass nitrogen, total phospholipid fatty-acids, and dehydrogenase, urease and protease activities than conventional systems. .... In summary, this study shows that overall organic farming enhances total microbial abundance and activity in agricultural soils on a global scale.
Anecdotal I know, but a friend in the crop spraying business told me that plenty of food sold as "certified organic" (at least here in the UK) has been dessicated with glyphosphate too.
Best anecdote I heard on the practice: a distant cousin of mine told me about the time he was driving down I-80 and saw them harvesting something off in a field, and there were two bins, one labeled "ORGANIC" and one labeled "REGULAR" and they were feeding the harvest into them both equally.
(editing for clarity: I didn't believe my cousin. I think it's a load of hogwash. I also think people make a lot of stuff up and pass it off as anecdotes because we're a very polite society for that sort of thing.)
> I didn't believe my cousin. I think it's a load of hogwash.
What's in a bin at one moment in time is not necessarily the same crop at another moment in time. While physically labelling bins, rather than keeping record in the office, is not a practice that I see as being very common, conceivably a bin could have been labelled for organic crop at some point in the past and repurposed for non-organic crop (or vice versa) during the harvest your cousin witnessed without putting effort into removing the previous label.
So, the story could be completely true, but doesn't really tell much even if it is.
There's no real regulation of the organic label, at least in the US. So buying organic just means a larger price tag for dubious quality of produce. You may be getting something totally organic or something using 60 year old pesticides. There's no way to know based on the label.
It's not true that there's no real regulation of the organic label in the US. Regarding the things that it actually regulates, the USDA organic label is strictly enforced. Your concern may be that people expect USDA organic to mean things that it doesn't. The relevant document is the [National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances](https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2012/01/25/organic-101-allow...).
Moreover, it demonstrates that at any point, you might up with "conventionally grown" food that has been grown with this year's innovative chemical addition which uncertain implications.