Why Organic

Its a good thing to eat foods raised without chemical fertilizers and pesticides. By definition, that's what makes something "organic." Avoiding those toxins is a good enough reason to choose organics, but it is not the only one--There are possibly even better reasons to choose organics.

Organic foods (usually) taste better and are more nutritious. They taste like they have come out of your backyard garden. The lack of chemical residue might be part of that. However, you may know from your own gardens that you have used pesticides and still yielded great tasting foods.

The reason has to do with the way the crops are raised. Most of the food you buy at the grocery store has been raised on the same fields for decades. This by itself is not a problem, except for the fact that modern agriculture depletes the soil. Tilling lays the land vulnerable to erosion. Oil-based fertilizers give an injection of nitrogen but little else. Then you tack onto that the effect of crop after crop, year after year. As a result, some of the vegetables today have a nutrient content that is--believe it or not--up to 40 times less than vegetables grown in the 1940-50s! (the linked article gives a number at the lower end of that spectrum (15%), but I have heard it as high as 40% from other sources which I can't find right now).

Organic farming cannot use oil-based fertilizers. They rely on natural compost--yard clippings, tree leaves, kitchen scraps and animal manure from naturally-raised animals. This kind of farming builds up the soil and replaces lost nutrients.

There is a debate as to whether or not organic foods are really more nutritious than conventionally raised ones. In theory, there may not be a difference on an apples to apples comparison. Let's say you grow two sets of carrots. They are both the same breed, grown in the same soil in the same climate with the same methods of farming. The only difference is that one batch is sprayed with pesticides and the other batch is not. Pound for pound, are the organic carrots really going to be any more nutritious?

I don't know, but I would imagine the answer is "no." Furthermore, the yield per acre is probably higher for the pesticide-sprayed crop. The trick is that a situation like that is probably rare. The seeds used to grow organics are generally from heirloom or natural species, not genetically modified ones (the linked article above shows how some of these genetically modified species are less able to absorb nutrients from the soil). The soils and farming practices are rarely the same, considering what I've written above about soil maintenance and composting.

The lack of pesticides may have little to do directly with nutrition. However, the whole story is that organics are raised in a vastly different culture than conventionally farmed crops. The earth is better maintained--you can taste it, and your body will know.