Pranksters troll food experts with "Organic" McDonalds

[Leferd]

I've always been more under the impression that organic implies a lack of pesticide use, compared to your typical crops in fields.  Of course the trade off is you might get a few bugs in your artichoke.  

 

Not just the pesticides. Take your normal tomato from the supermarket. They've been modified in a lab to produce not only a shiny red color (despite being unripe) and a firm, tough outer wall to withstand the rigors and abuse of shipping and transportation, so they don't become tomato paste by the time they end up on your cutting board.

[Zoraptor]

I've always been more under the impression that organic implies a lack of pesticide use, compared to your typical crops in fields.  Of course the trade off is you might get a few bugs in your artichoke.  

 

Not necessarily. There's nothing precluding lots of pesticide use, you're just limited in the pesticides that can be used. Garlic sprays, plant oils (neem etc), derris, pyrethrum, btk (Bacillus thuringiensis var Karstaki) and copper sprays are all available. They all except copper have the advantage- from the consumer pov- of being non persistent, short lived and non toxic, withholding period on pyrethrum for example is 1 day which for some non organic pesticides it can be up to a month.

 

And that's why one of the big complaints about GMOs is that when they create insect resistant plant strains that manufacture things like the cry proteins from btk they are giving a purely short term advantage, like engineering penicillin production into chickens or pigs would be it's only useful until resistance develops- at which point both the new strains and the original chemical are redundant.

[Gfted1]

 

 

I've never had horse meat, but I would like to eat 1 of every animal eventually.

 

 

You have, I assure you, unless you are a vegetarian. Even in Europe, where food regulations are harsher than in the US, a pretty large percentage of meat packaged as beef was horse meat, mostly from old neigh-sayers that were lying dumped along Romanian roads like road kill.

 

Oh, and all food is organic. I've always thought that this term is so misrepresentative.

 

 

Not that I dont believe there can be some percentage of horse meat inside beef, but why? While horses die every day I cant imagine there is some kind of industry to sell off a few carcasses a day. It cant possibly be cheaper than a cow. Whats the advantage?

[Zoraptor]

There are a lot of safeguards and precautions required when slaughtering meat legitimately, it isn't just that it is old, worthless hence very cheap horses being slaughtered and labelled as beef- that is after all what happens to the equivalent boner cows once their time dairying is up- it's also that if they are killed for mislabelling purposes they are often killed in circumstances where few of the hygiene etc costs associated with legitimate slaughter are present. After all, you're breaking laws and regulations by mislabelling anyway, so why abide by hygiene regs as well? So you have a cheaper meat usually used for petfood (or glue) being prepared more cheaply and then sold as a more expensive product, if you can sell at $2 premium you make several hundred extra dollars per carcass.

 

Particularly in Eastern Europe horses are still used quite a lot in agriculture, so there are more available for slaughter than here or in the US.