I'm not from the US, but from Romania. My grandparents lived on the country-side, working the land and during the communists Romania did not have much access to the vast quantities of pesticides and fertilizer that the US was left with after WWII, due to a large surplus of ammonium nitrate and of various poison gases. Our animals were not fed and grown on cheap, subsidized corn and kept alive with antibiotics. Our diary products were not low fat. Our white flour was given for export. Etc, etc.. And guess what, after 1990, after the revolution, when we started importing food and adopting the "western diet", we ended up with the same shock like everybody else ... people getting fatter, increased rates of type II diabetes, increased rates of coronary artery disease, etc. And most importantly I think - our food is losing its taste, because vegetables grown with pesticides and artificial fertilizers have shallower root systems, grow faster and thus are unable to gather the same amount of nutrients as vegetables grown normally and in season. Same goes for animals, like cattle or pigs or chicken, raised on corn and kept alive with antibiotics.

In regards to your statement, organic food is the conventional way to produce food, and note that I'm not talking about any standard, but about how people have been growing food before we discovered what fossil fuels are good for.

There's actually plenty of evidence to go around, plenty of studies, showing links between the western diet and type II diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cancer, with my father's PhD thesis being one, evidence that has been ignored because it flies in the face of the low-fat bullshit we've been fed, plus it goes against a multi-billion dollar industry. Artificial fertilizers are also known to be responsible for the destruction of our environment, leading to such effects as water pollution with nitrate or acidification of the soil.