How Much Context Matters

Recently, I walked in in the middle of a conversation about microwave cooking, and as soon as I walked through the door, the first words I heard were "microwave food is not good, right?"  That sort of question has a few meanings, but the most common meaning I am used to hearing about is just about how food cooked in a microwave generally doesn't taste as good as other modes of cooking.  To this, I agreed, as I generally find this to be the case as well.  Then it went off on some tangent about "killing everything" and how that supposedly doesn't happen with regular stovetop cooking...  and so I replied that that only happens after you reach a certain temperature (presuming that he was talking about killing microbes).  After some shouting where I couldn't quite follow what people were saying because it was too many people talking at once, I figured we were still talking about taste, so I made the point about being unable to achieve certain effects like searing the outsides of foods, applying dry heat, etc...  and then I got a question about radiation going into the food.  Well, that's technically how a microwave is supposed to work, so that is ostensibly true, but not much of a meaningful question in the context.  It wasn't until much later that I was informed that the discussion was about the safety of microwave cooking, and so I found myself unwittingly agreeing with people who held an absurdly misguided and factually dead wrong position.

A lesson in just how much context makes a difference, and how far off the mark one can go if they make presumptions about what that context is.  It is within context that meaning is derived, and getting that context wrong can really destroy your sense of what people mean at times.

GMO Foods and Prop 37 Malarkey

There is a lot of hullabaloo going on throughout California right now regarding Proposition 37.  This is a measure that will require foods that are made using genetically modified (GMO) crops to be labeled as such.  So I have some mixed feelings about this whole thing.  There are a lot of strong arguments that can be made for or against this measure, but the problem is that no one seems to be making them.  There is very little out there which does not constitute a weak or even sometimes entirely false argument for either side of the equation here.  I can only say that there is a great deal about this whole thing which is just wrapped up in stupidity.

Ultimately, though, the big effect that Prop 37 would have if passed would be a shift away from mass-market products towards the organically-grown products (at least within California where the law applies).  This is why pretty much every supporter of Prop 37 is an exclusively organic food producer and/or an activist group of some sort.  Plenty of companies like Kraft engage in both conventional and organic practices and do not support 37.  However, while you know my position on organic food already (i.e. that it's basically a big fat sham), it doesn't change the fact that people are gullible enough to fall for it.  More importantly, GMO is something that is so poorly understood that it is going to be the subject of fear, which means that people are going to shy away from that fearsome stuff just because they don't know any better.  And this is why I'm not 100% in favor.  People are just going to see it as "Frankenfood" and react in irrational fear.

Transparency on the part of the producers is the only strong argument, but 37 is not that.

How Would Inorganic Food Look?

Being someone who lives in the SF Bay Area, where there is some sort of rule that everybody has to be some sort of activist, it is no surprise that the organic food movement is very big out here.  I find it almost sad to say that organic nuts are probably in the majority in certain regions.  Along with those who argue that marijuana should be legalized, all cars should be electric, beer should always be microbrew, and Pat Robertson needs to die.  Well, let's focus on one brand of activism at a time.

I do find a number of the movements more or less agreeable.  Gay marriage support, for instance, is among those worthy of mention.  But there are certain ones which I can't completely get behind, and that's basically because they're built on foundational falsehoods.  The love affair with organic food is one of them.  It is, unfortunately, a house of cards with very little going for it, and much of what people believe about it is actually just plain untrue.  I'm just going to deal here with a few myths and misconceptions -- if I tried to attack all of them that I could find in detail, it would amount to a volume of books rather than a mere blog post.

If you're looking for the Cliff Notes version without bothering to read past the jump, the summary of it is basically this -- just about everything you normally associate with organic food is simply not true.