On Fri, 7 Jan, Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
> "Organic" food is just
> a consumer scam like premium gasoline--an excuse to charge
> more for a product that doesn't have any benefits.
I think those people buying more-expensive and lesser-quality ''natural''
foods are not primarily misled by the businesses selling them these things, I
think these consumers are primarily misleading THEMSELVES. They really want
these things, they really believe that these things are ''better''. It is an
irrational belief exactly like religion.
This customer demand is a force impelling farmers and businesses (who, I
suspect, themselves do *not* feel very sanguine about how ''natural'' or GM
their products are) into selling also these things like ''natural'' foods. If
people want to pay a lot for poor-quality shriveled ''natural'' food with
worms in them, then it is rational behavour for farmers to produce and sell
also these types of food, isn't it ? Exactly like it probably is rational
behaviour for a publicity-loving actor to become a TV priest and so make money
out of people's passionate and incorrigible desire for stupid mindless
religious bullshit.
It is astounding how entrenched people can be in arbitrary irrational beliefs.
But luckily, our tolerant society leaves these ''natural-food believers'' in
peace; and luckily, the free market allows people to make money out of
providing consumers who feel a desire for these religious nonsense messages
and for unhealthy food with the things they want. This creates a money
flow from religious self-deluded people to clever open-minded un-prejudiced
people, making the first poorer and the latter richer, thus improving the
survival chances of the unprejudiced people; i.e., this is a mechanism that
does slowly [and 'humanely' :-):-)] dampen down the strength of the entrenched
irrational-belief part and strenghtens the open-minded part of the population,
i.e., a mechanism that increases extropy. The clever people making money out
of it probably do not fall for irrational sloppy religious stuff themselves,
and therefore probably themselves do not eat bug-ridden ''natural'' tomatos
but eat GM tomatos instead.
Let those who want to buy expensive ''natural'' foods expend a lot of money to
buy these things; as demonstrated in other recent mails on this list on this
subject, people religiously believing in ''natural'' foods are NOT scared off
by high prices of their preferred foods, on the contrary, it is a martyr
effect only causing them to feel better about themselves (''look how much I
can afford to spend on shriveled rotten worm-eaten apples !''). But all of
this can only benefit the people who do *not* believe so strongly in
''natural'' foods (and who can do the mental trick of not getting worked up
over the stupidness and irrationalities in other people).
> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
> are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
> for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
That's a great meme, I like it ! (I'm also stealing and copying it :-).)
Best greetings, Menno (rubingh@delftnet.nl)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:02:08 MDT