organic food

[piccadilly]

I've strted to buy organic milk and veg and fruit, what are the advantages of doing this?

[WoWo]

Essentially you're not eating the cemicals used in intensive farming. I won't go into the nasty details but there is some pretty grim stuff in a dairy cows diet and they get a pretty rough life, if you buy Organic milk the cows at least eat fresh natural food which doesn't turn them into milk machines (well not zombie milk machines).

The same with veg and fruit, this has all kinds of chemicals sprayed onto them, mainly to kill bugs, if it does a good job of that i.e. killing things imagine what the cumlative effect of eating them is.

The general rule is it aint't doing you any harm and is better for the environment. The only down side is the cost.

[jake-the-peg]

Last stuff I saw on it was that you personally derived very little benefit from organic produce with the exception of milk.

Very few products had any significant residue of chemicals by the time you bought them.

Ecologically they're much better although this is debatable if they've been transported great distances.

The ideal from an ecological perspective would be local organic produce. There are a number of box schemes where you can get local in season produce deliverred each week. If you're interested in that you can have a look here:

http://www.gustoguide.co.uk/boxmenu.asp

or here if you're in the South

http://www.riverford.co.uk/en/find/index.php

or just search box scheme in google

[Chessman]

So far, and am still alive and well, I don't go out of my way to eat organic, but the best milk I ever tasted, was on a farm in Denmark, the farmer gave us some milk straight from the cow, still steaming, absolute nectar.

[kaktus]

We have very nice cows Chessman :)

I buy organic milk, eggs and meat mostly because of animal welfare.

Veg, fruit and sugar I buy organic because of the chemicals and for ecologically reasons. When I buy bananas, sugar and other exotic things I try to find fair trade products so the farmer actually (hopefully) makes some money and works under better conditions. It is much more expensive but that just means I get four bananas instead of eight.