Is organic sustainable?

Given several insightful responses to this post, I have corrected my misconception that organic = humanely raised. Most often it does not and I shouldn’t use the terms interchangeably.

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The other day I had a very heated conversation with an individual who found the concept of eating humanely-raised animals hypocritical and stupid (I’m paraphrasing, as his choice of words was much more colorful and much less appropriate).  It was akin to another angry conversation with a chef at a German restaurant in San Jose, who furiously berated my choice to choose humanely-raised and just like the German chef, this individual had two basic points:

  1. Organic farming (i.e. humanely raised animals) can’t feed the world
  2. If you care so much about animals then don’t eat them, but if you’re going to kill them anyways, who cares how they lived

I strongly disagree on both!

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