Less exclusively, not less. And let me be more precise about what I (tentatively) believe: I am sure that all four quadrants of {organic, not organic} x {care only about max profit, care about other things too} are occupied; but I suspect that there is some correlation between being in the “organic” row and being in the “care about other things” column.
Why? Well, some of the reasons why people might choose to produce organic food rather than not-organic food are ones that involve caring about something other than profit margins. For instance, empirically it looks to me as if people who care about animal welfare are more likely to think that there’s something icky about more-industrialized food production processes, and that people who think that are more likely to want to produce organically. (I make no comment on how rational it is for them to think that.) In general, people operating in a niche of any sort are (other things being equal) more likely to care about non-standard things.
(The following aren’t exactly answers to your question but are other reasons for thinking that organically produced food may tend to be better. I am not very confident about any of them, and they are in rough decreasing order of how sure I am that the effect in question is real and goes in the direction I think it does.)
Producers of premium-ish products may be less likely to engage in practices that would look bad if they were disclosed, on the grounds that they are more dependent on customer goodwill, positive attitudes to their brand, etc., than if they were competing solely on price.
Organic food production is (I think) inevitably less efficient in various ways, which may mean that the relative benefit of any given cost-saving measure will be less for an organic producer than for a not-organic one, so that when there’s a tradeoff between cost and quality choosing quality will be slightly more favourable on average for organic producers.
There are many cost-reducing measures available to food producers. All else being equal, such measures should be expected to reduce the quality of the food (perhaps not by much). Some of them are presumably not available to organic food producers. -- There’s a possibly-equal and opposite pull in the other direction: There are many quality-increasing measures available to food producers, and presumably some of them are likewise unavailable to organic food producers. My hazy impression is that the things restricted by organic food production are mostly of the cost-reducing sort rather than the quality-improving sort, but that may well be wrong.
Cookery books by pretentious chefs fairly often advocate buying organically produced food. This gives two reasons for thinking organic might on average be better. Firstly, the chefs may know something about food. Secondly, people who read such books may (1) be more discerning about food quality, (2) tend to buy organic food and (3) be less price-sensitive than average, which might lead organic food producers to pay more attention to quality in order to keep their business.
These things were probably all more true in the earlier days of organic production, when it was more niche-y.
Well, I would say that there is a simple way to evaluate the taste aspect: do an experiment. My dad used to swear to me that brown-colored eggs taste better than white eggs. I was skeptical, so we did a little taste test. He couldn’t tell the difference at all. Also, note that the most highly praised wines often do poorly in blind-taste tests against super-cheap wines from New Jersey.
Yup, but it’s easier for some foods than for others. You can easily take two eggs, cook them exactly identically, and try them both side-by-side. Similarly for wines, which don’t even require cooking. It’s a bit harder with, say, a chicken for roasting. Even if you have an oven that’ll take two chickens and don’t have a spouse who’ll object to roasting two when you only need one, it’s far from trivial to avoid (say) overcooking one a little and undercooking the other a little, and that difference could easily swamp the subtler one you’re looking for.
I’m not disagreeing that the question really ought to be answered empirically, but I’m not convinced it’s so easy to do in practice.
Of course, what’s hard for me with my small family and ordinary-sized kitchen may be easier for (e.g.) a restaurant or a consumer advocacy organization or whatever. I had a look on the web to see if anyone else has done this sort of testing. I found a small number of small-scale tests with inconclusive results. Enough to rule out “organically produced food is almost always much better”, but I never believed that in the first place. (And enough to reduce my confidence in “organically produced food is a bit better on average”, but not very much because of the low power of the tests.)
You want to buy organic food to give your money to organic producers, who are more likely to care about causes you also care about, and invest some of that money in those causes.
But it might be more efficient to buy the cheapest food of a given quality, which is not organic, and donate the remaining money yourself to those causes. Have you done an optimal philanthropy calculation?
Unless, of course, your goal really is to support people who support those causes, not the causes themselves. Which is also a reasonable and laudable goal.
If the opening paragraph (“You want”) is intended to be descriptive of my goals, rather than merely addressing some hypothetical person, I’m afraid it doesn’t describe them at all accurately.
I want to buy organically produced food (in so far as I do) not in order to get certain causes invested in, but in order to get better food. I don’t think it’s obvious that “the cheapest food of a given quality [] is not organic” (though I’m sure it’s sometimes true) and in any case I don’t have ready access to an accurate food-quality-ometer and have to rely on heuristics to some extent; preferring organically produced food is one such heuristic.
(Of course it might turn out to be a rotten heuristic. That’s a separate issue.)
As far as optimal philanthropy goes, I’d be shocked if marginal improvements in the gastronomic life of middle-class Westerners came within three orders of magnitude of optimality for any reasonable person, no matter how efficiently pursued. Improving the welfare of the animals eaten by middle-class Westerners might do (it depends on the priority one gives to the welfare of non-human animals, and of course “philanthropy” would no longer be quite the right word) but indeed buying organically produced food seems like an inefficient way of pursuing that goal. Anyway, philanthropy has very little to do with my organic purchasing habits.
I see that both this [EDITED to add: I mean the parent of this very comment right here] and its grandparent have been downvoted. If that’s because I’m being stupid then I would be grateful for some information that goes beyond “Someone didn’t like this”, so that I can try to repair my thinking (or improve my prose style, or whatever) as appropriate. Regrettably, even after rereading both it’s not clear to me what the downvotes were for. Thanks!
Less exclusively, not less. And let me be more precise about what I (tentatively) believe: I am sure that all four quadrants of {organic, not organic} x {care only about max profit, care about other things too} are occupied; but I suspect that there is some correlation between being in the “organic” row and being in the “care about other things” column.
Why? Well, some of the reasons why people might choose to produce organic food rather than not-organic food are ones that involve caring about something other than profit margins. For instance, empirically it looks to me as if people who care about animal welfare are more likely to think that there’s something icky about more-industrialized food production processes, and that people who think that are more likely to want to produce organically. (I make no comment on how rational it is for them to think that.) In general, people operating in a niche of any sort are (other things being equal) more likely to care about non-standard things.
(The following aren’t exactly answers to your question but are other reasons for thinking that organically produced food may tend to be better. I am not very confident about any of them, and they are in rough decreasing order of how sure I am that the effect in question is real and goes in the direction I think it does.)
Producers of premium-ish products may be less likely to engage in practices that would look bad if they were disclosed, on the grounds that they are more dependent on customer goodwill, positive attitudes to their brand, etc., than if they were competing solely on price.
Organic food production is (I think) inevitably less efficient in various ways, which may mean that the relative benefit of any given cost-saving measure will be less for an organic producer than for a not-organic one, so that when there’s a tradeoff between cost and quality choosing quality will be slightly more favourable on average for organic producers.
There are many cost-reducing measures available to food producers. All else being equal, such measures should be expected to reduce the quality of the food (perhaps not by much). Some of them are presumably not available to organic food producers. -- There’s a possibly-equal and opposite pull in the other direction: There are many quality-increasing measures available to food producers, and presumably some of them are likewise unavailable to organic food producers. My hazy impression is that the things restricted by organic food production are mostly of the cost-reducing sort rather than the quality-improving sort, but that may well be wrong.
Cookery books by pretentious chefs fairly often advocate buying organically produced food. This gives two reasons for thinking organic might on average be better. Firstly, the chefs may know something about food. Secondly, people who read such books may (1) be more discerning about food quality, (2) tend to buy organic food and (3) be less price-sensitive than average, which might lead organic food producers to pay more attention to quality in order to keep their business.
These things were probably all more true in the earlier days of organic production, when it was more niche-y.
Well, I would say that there is a simple way to evaluate the taste aspect: do an experiment. My dad used to swear to me that brown-colored eggs taste better than white eggs. I was skeptical, so we did a little taste test. He couldn’t tell the difference at all. Also, note that the most highly praised wines often do poorly in blind-taste tests against super-cheap wines from New Jersey.
Yup, but it’s easier for some foods than for others. You can easily take two eggs, cook them exactly identically, and try them both side-by-side. Similarly for wines, which don’t even require cooking. It’s a bit harder with, say, a chicken for roasting. Even if you have an oven that’ll take two chickens and don’t have a spouse who’ll object to roasting two when you only need one, it’s far from trivial to avoid (say) overcooking one a little and undercooking the other a little, and that difference could easily swamp the subtler one you’re looking for.
I’m not disagreeing that the question really ought to be answered empirically, but I’m not convinced it’s so easy to do in practice.
Of course, what’s hard for me with my small family and ordinary-sized kitchen may be easier for (e.g.) a restaurant or a consumer advocacy organization or whatever. I had a look on the web to see if anyone else has done this sort of testing. I found a small number of small-scale tests with inconclusive results. Enough to rule out “organically produced food is almost always much better”, but I never believed that in the first place. (And enough to reduce my confidence in “organically produced food is a bit better on average”, but not very much because of the low power of the tests.)
You want to buy organic food to give your money to organic producers, who are more likely to care about causes you also care about, and invest some of that money in those causes.
But it might be more efficient to buy the cheapest food of a given quality, which is not organic, and donate the remaining money yourself to those causes. Have you done an optimal philanthropy calculation?
Unless, of course, your goal really is to support people who support those causes, not the causes themselves. Which is also a reasonable and laudable goal.
If the opening paragraph (“You want”) is intended to be descriptive of my goals, rather than merely addressing some hypothetical person, I’m afraid it doesn’t describe them at all accurately.
I want to buy organically produced food (in so far as I do) not in order to get certain causes invested in, but in order to get better food. I don’t think it’s obvious that “the cheapest food of a given quality [] is not organic” (though I’m sure it’s sometimes true) and in any case I don’t have ready access to an accurate food-quality-ometer and have to rely on heuristics to some extent; preferring organically produced food is one such heuristic.
(Of course it might turn out to be a rotten heuristic. That’s a separate issue.)
As far as optimal philanthropy goes, I’d be shocked if marginal improvements in the gastronomic life of middle-class Westerners came within three orders of magnitude of optimality for any reasonable person, no matter how efficiently pursued. Improving the welfare of the animals eaten by middle-class Westerners might do (it depends on the priority one gives to the welfare of non-human animals, and of course “philanthropy” would no longer be quite the right word) but indeed buying organically produced food seems like an inefficient way of pursuing that goal. Anyway, philanthropy has very little to do with my organic purchasing habits.
I see that both this [EDITED to add: I mean the parent of this very comment right here] and its grandparent have been downvoted. If that’s because I’m being stupid then I would be grateful for some information that goes beyond “Someone didn’t like this”, so that I can try to repair my thinking (or improve my prose style, or whatever) as appropriate. Regrettably, even after rereading both it’s not clear to me what the downvotes were for. Thanks!