Follow-up on Organics

I’m so excited about this comment that I had to pull it out of the post and paste it here. A DC reader and friend of mine, Maggy, just commented on Edwin’s post from last week – “Do Organics Taste Better.” Maggy says,

“This is my favorite conversation to have in general. I think it’s not so much the ‘organic’ as the way it’s grown and also, especially with fruits and vegetables, the variety. Both Clark and I come from families where the same tomato (and potato, and everything else) plants have been passed down from house to house and family to family, and because they’re bred to taste good, rather than to pack well in a box or to stay ripe-looking for two weeks, they taste much more incredible and different, even as sauces.

You can see the same thing with meat, too. Heather knows I’m into the beef thing, but a few years in the past we had identical cuts from beef raised on Clark’s farm and beef from the grocery store; we did blind taste tests and everyone could tell the difference.
The whole subject fascinates me, especially since we’ve started a garden and we have tried raising different varieties of the same thing (i.e. sweet corn).

Oh, and on the eggs…it’s not that they are organic, it’s what they eat. One of my dad’s employees has four daughters who, as a 4H project, separated their chickens and fed them different things to see how the yolk colors were affected…the darker yolks came from higher-protein diets.”

Maggy’s fiance and his family own a cattle farm. Boxwood Farm is currently accepting orders for winter beef delivery – check it out!

One Response to “Follow-up on Organics”

  1. Grace says:

    I’d definitely agree with Maggy! Organic vs. conventional doesn’t mean anything to me as far as taste goes, but you can taste the difference that heirloom crops and care in raising make.