Without better regulation there is no way to be sure if your organic tomatoes are better for the environment let alone for you (assuming you wash your non organic produce). Certainly it is better not to use pesticides for the environment, but if produce has to be trucked across the country the transportation is still going to add up to pollution. Buying local is certainly a good option, but aside from knowing it’s local you still don’t know much about that tomato. Because an organic label doesn’t give you much information organic is essentially an unquantifiable buzzword and more likely an exercise in slacktivism than actual positive improvement. Sorry.
There isn’t some sort of innate unhealthiness associated with modifying food. People have been genetically engineering food since before they knew about genes. Anyone that thinks nature can’t be improved on needs to stick to wild bananas and leave all of the bananas people bred to be delicious to me. But dramatics aside, both GMOs and the GMOs you don’t think are GMOs (since they’ve been around so long that you don’t remember them being modified) can be healthy or unhealthy. It’s the content of the food that counts, not how it came to be. The only difference is that the GMOs you don’t consider GMOs have been around so long we are sure of their safety. We’ve been eating them for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. The new GMOs need to be tested to assure their quality and safety where the old GMOs have already been tested and approved countless generations ago, albeit in a less formal and academic setting.
Certainly some new GMOs won’t be good to eat, that’s why their production and testing is regulated to ensure unsafe GMOs aren’t approved for sale. Their safety (or lack of it) comes down to the molecules, proteins and amino acids in each individual food. Each needs to evaluated individually to really judge the safety of a food. And that is something you and I are not able to do—unless you’re chemist with knowledge in this field and the appropriate resources at your disposal. Most of us aren’t. Fortunately for those of us that don’t have PhDs in chemistry GMOs are regulated and evaluated before they get to our supermarket shelves. Unless you have good reason to suspect that your country’s food regulatory agency is not doing their job you shouldn’t have to worry.
@casheroo—thanks for posting the dirty dozen, that is the best reason I’ve seen for purchasing organic.