Until a few weeks ago, my attitude on organic food is that it's certainly not cheap to produce in any massive way to feed the entire population, but if small pockets of consumers were willing to pay the extra money for it, and a small industry was sustained because of it, no big deal, it's their money and their food. However, after we received a group of organically raised sheep on our farm, my attitude has changed dramatically. I now think it's just plain cruel, and unsafe. We received the sheep because we're not an organic facility (not by a longshot), the sheep had been attacked by coyotes (horribly...I actually had nightmares the first night after seeing them), and needed medical treatment. They were on the organic farm several days before someone finally insisted that if they wanted the sheep to live, they needed to be brought in for veterinary treatment. As long as they were on the organic farm, they could not receive antibiotics, you would not believe the parasite load in these animals because they can't use drugs that are commonly used to prevent parasite infections (I don't know about you, but I want my food to be parasite-free, and consider that an improvement in modern agriculture), and even the pain medications were not permitted. The only way to humanely treat those animals was to remove them from the organic farm and not treat them as organic, or just euthanize them on the spot. I wonder how the reality of organic farming would sit with all those who think it's a more healthy source of food, and better for the animals and environment, etc. I was not even aware of how extreme it gets, and I was absolutely nauseated by the idea.
This has nothing much to do with the topic at hand, but it was a very shocking wake-up call to me. I didn't realize they couldn't even use drugs to de-worm the animals. I guess it does get at the issue of the challenge of determining what is a healthy food or unhealthy food to decide which would get taxed if someone were to start taxing food based on its health-value.
