Take this as some sort of tangent to Melissa’s recent post about why modern tomatoes taste like cardboard: Research coming out of the University of Barcelona shows that organic tomatoes have higher levels of antioxidants than chemically-grown ones.
The Daily Mail sums up the research:
The team behind the latest study analyzed the chemical structure of the Daniela variety of tomato. They detected 34 different beneficial compounds in both the organic and conventional versions…However they found that overall the organic tomatoes contained higher level of the polyphenols. The scientists says this difference between organic and conventional tomatoes can be explained by the manure used to grown them.
Let’s All Stop Using the Phrase ‘Conventional Agriculture’
And another tangent, this time into language use. If you’re not already, let’s together make a pact that we will never use the word ‘conventional’ to describe non-organic agriculture. If you have on one hand organic agriculture, and there’s actually a legal definition of that specifying what is and isn’t organic, then conventional is not the opposite of that. Conventional doesn’t actually describe the agricultural practices themselves, except that today they are the norm. Non-organic works, as does chemical agriculture (sort of). Use whatever descriptor you like, but use one that actually describes the agricultural practices, not just their frequency of use.
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