During my 45 years of life, I have eaten all kinds of food you could probably think of. So after reading "Should You Buy Organic," by Geoffrey Cowley, I'll continue to eat the way I do and continue to try foods that I have yet not tried.
             There were points on both sides that I agreed with and disagreed with on eating organic verses conventionally grown foods. Take the taste of home grown vegetables like the kind mother use to grow in the back yard, they always seemed to taste a little sweeter. I would side with the organic food proponents for vegetables if they could grow them like my mom did. As far as using chemical fertilizers and pesticides to grow and keep down insects, I find myself in a quandary. On one hand, I know that the use of all these chemicals tend to harm the environment away from where they are intended, such as ground water from run-off. But the other hand, the amount of food required to feed the masses is extremely large and some areas may need fertilizers in order to produce a suitable crop. Add to this the damage to crops from pests; one may see the need for pesticides. I feel that as a whole, this country uses too many chemicals and underutilizes safer alternatives. But the danger of E. coli scares me. In the United States, you have a few hundred to a few thousand people die each year from complications from E. coli bacteria. Tens of thousand or perhaps millions have small bouts from this bacterium every year. Outside the U.S., the number that die from E. coli probably range in the hundreds of thousands. Our low number of deaths are probably due to inspections, regulations and from methods associated with conventionally grow foods. I have had an E.coli exposure and became very ill and felt like I was going to die. If given a choice between using chemicals on the crops and another illness from E coli, I'll take the chemicals.
             The choice today between eating organically grown food and conven...