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Comment by elblanco | Hacker News Reader

> When I was growing up in the 70s, we had a food pyramid that was based on carbohydrates

Any wonder that America's obesity epidemic started around that time?

20/20 hindsight. Remember this when you feed your baby an "organic" meal, treat your cold with echinacea, or drink bottled water.

Yeah, eating plants produced without pesticides is going to kill us all.

Yes, they certainly can and frequently do kill. Multiple vectors, the most common of which is animal born E. Coli.

I don't know if anyone has done a toxicity study on organic vs non-organic vegetables, but, I think it would be a great area of research. Keep in mind, that if you aren't spraying on pesticides, you need to rely on "organic" methods to reduce crop loss to things like Fungi/insects/disease, etc... One of those "organic" methods is to breed (naturally) a hardier strain that is more resistant. That, in itself, can be dangerous - these new strains defend themselves with toxins. There are certainly records of amateurishly bred potatoes killing people.

See http://www.fao.org/docrep/T0207E/T0207E08.htm for some useful data on organic toxins found in vegetables.

There is something to be said about toxins that have a well documented and well-defined behavior versus whatever is being randomly grown in the organic farm.

Regardless - It would pay not to come to any conclusions before the traditional double-blinded statistically valid scientific studies are done, which was the point of the grandparent-post.

A good point.

I know this is not a good reply, but I have to say it. Why didn't humanity die off between when we discovered agriculture and before we invented pesticides?

They did not die off, but for several thousand years, they were barely able to sustain themselves, and quite a lot of them did die off. Where we have single-digit percentages growing our food today, they would have single-digit percentages not growing food.

Humanity didn't die off, but, life spans were shorter, it was _really_ hard to get enough calories to keep yourself alive, and there was a lot of starvation and hunger in the world. Even into the 20th century, not all countries were making effective use of pesticides, and some countries had starvation, not because of civil war or unrest (the major cause of starvation today) - but because they didn't know how to grow food efficiently. Then, in middle of the last century, we had the Green Revolution, and the quartet of artificial fertilizers, mechanization, high-yield varietals, and, yes, pesticides changed the equation and pushed Malthus back a while.

From a cost-benefit perspective, I'd be willing to wager that pesticides have saved on the order of 1000x more people than they've killed.

Best case scenario, I'd wager, is no toxins in our food at all. Most people aren't willing to pay the price for that type of low yield crop.

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