Ars: Birds turn their beaks up at organic food

Soo... What do birds instinctively understand about organic that we don't?

Okay repeat after me: Organic doesn't automatically = good, or better, and non-organic, conventional or even GM doesn't automatically = bad.

Better living through chemistry!

Birds turn their beaks up at organic food: "

Is organic food everything its advocates claim to be? A new study published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture
describes an experiment in which the subjects were free from human biases.
The authors found that wild birds preferred 'normal' bird food to the organic
option.

To study this burning issue, the researchers set up pairs of identical
bird feeders in over 30 locations around northern England. The feeders
contained two types of the same variety of wheat seeds, one organic and
one conventional. The researchers then monitored the rate at which each
seed was eaten over the course of a few weeks.

It was found that the birds preferentially ate the conventional
seeds. To make
sure that there wasn't something about the relative placement of the
feeders, the researchers switched each pair, and found that the birds
learned the new location of the conventional seeds and continued to
prefer eating from that feeder.

The experiment was repeated over a subsequent winter with a
different type of seed, but produced the same results. More controlled
laboratory trials with canaries found similar preferences for
conventional over organic. In an attempt to explain this disparity, the
researchers analyzed the seeds and found that the conventional seed
contained upwards of 10 percent more protein per seed, most likely due
to the use of inorganic nitrogen fertilizers used in conventional
farming techniques.

Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, 2010. DOI: 10.1002/jsfa.4025 (About
DOIs).

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