I think what the pesticide pushers fail to realize is that, before the 50s or 60s, everything was grown organically, and surprise! even though by the 1940s we’d already come through the industrial revolution with a vengeance, no starvation.

now, of course we’d starve if none of us knew how to cook vegetables or grow things. is it now elite to make soup? I’m starting to wonder.

Same group claims promoting local and organic food will cause obesity! Starvation and obesity. I thought that was what commercial food did...

You do know that the interview with the supposed ACSH rep. was a joke, right?

Look the group up. It is real. It often serves as a front group for corporate interests. The Daily Show just spliced together a few of the outrageous claims these folks make to get humor out of their foolishness.

The Hudson Institute repeatedly claimed that organic food leads to higher rates of food poisoning than conventional products, even though the supposed source of that information, the CDC, does not track such information.

I’ve been in the organic food business since the 1980s. Big Chemical is getting ever more nervous about the growth of interest in organic food. Their spokespersons probably count on the short attention span of the public when they say these silly things in the same interview, but the interviewee was a real rep of the group.

Actually, if you look at a gardening book from 100 years ago (like The Vegetable Garden by Ida Bennett from 1909- free on Google Books), gardeners and farmers used lead arsenate as a pesticide back then. I’m not kidding. When chemicals became available to stave off the bugs, people embraced them.
The elitist thing is quite silly, though- a lot of people in the world grow a lot of their own food out of necessity. Others like the taste of their particular hometown varieties of vegetables over the trucked-in ones. Local food is the way of the world in most places, and was here a few generations ago. It will be again.

Sure, everything on Jon Stewart is a joke ... right?