First, because farmers can't use certain very safe and developed pesticides, they have to use older and much more toxic varieties. Not to mention the actual amount of pesticides residue you eat a year has less cancerogenic substances than a cup of coffee. The thing is, the human body is very resilient and such exposure just doesn't matter.
Care to provide any supporting information for your assertion that organic farmers use "older and much more toxic" pesticides? Talk about pure bullshit...
Here's what the EPA has to say about it.
As for the issue of pesticide residue, I'm sure that the amount of pesticide residue for a given piece of produce usually falls below some FDA threshold, and I'm sure that washing produce helps even more. The point I was trying to make, though, was not that pesticides are eeeeevil. They have their place in agriculture, but there is growing evidence that they are being overused. In short, heavy use of pesticides (and fertilizers) is not sustainable agriculture.
When you need to dose the shit out of your plants (killing pollenating insects and doing other harm to the biosphere) to keep them from being eaten alive, you're doing it wrong. Your crops are too dense. When you need to pour on the fertilizer to make up for the fact that you've pulled all the nutrients out of the soil, you're doing it wrong. It's not sustainable. You're reliant on Monsanto for your engineered seed + RoundUp and Saudi Arabia for your petro-based fertilizers.
My concern is not based in some wooly-headed "o noes chemicals" fear. I would sign up to have a neighborhood-sized pebble-bed nuke plant next to my backyard if I could. I just believe that we can choose better ways to do things.
Actually, organic foods would definitely taste better when you're feeling morally superior. However you cannot taste the difference in a double-blinded test. Especially because YMMV, and the big problem to discerning the difference in taste is that when you *know* you're getting organic you attribute any goodness as organic, and when you *know* you're getting non-organic for all untastyness ou blame the non-organic origin of the food. You don't get better nutritional value, and especially for your money it's quite a bummer. Just buy better beef without regard of it being free-range or not.
If you don't eat junk food, then you'll get 99% of the health benefits of any food switch. Last 1% you can get if you have a local farmer that supplies you with good food every day, but that's practically impossible.
As I thought I made clear in my original post, my motivation for buying Organic food is not specifically for a perceived superiority in taste. High-quality produce is high-quality produce regardless of whether or not it's Organic. Meat, on the other hand, is a whole other ball of wax.
As an example, the "free range" chicken breasts I buy are far and away superior in taste and texture to the premium conventional breasts I buy every once in a while (depending on which grocery I get to). I usually make a chicken vindaloo several times a month (sometimes twice a week if we're fixated), and my wife can always tell when I've bought the Perdue chicken. I'd be willing to believe that it's simply a matter of freshness, but given the consistent discrepancy I'm not so sure. I know that often the factory chicken producers inject their meat with saline to plump it up, so maybe that's it... Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that one set of chickens is crammed into a pen so small they can't turn around and fed growth hormones their whole (short) lives, and the others are allowed to develop somewhat normally. I dunno. I don't really care -- I'm willing to pay more for chicken that tastes good.
As for steak... Have you ever had real grass-fed steak? The marbling is totally different. There's tons more flavor without needing to dress up the meat. If you haven't tried it, try to find some (e.g. at Whole Foods or a real butcher). Anyhow, I'm happy to pay more for the hunks of red meat we get once a month or whatever, knowing that I'm supporting sustainably-produced and local beef (Wolfe's Neck Farm).
My point, again, is not that I think progress is evil or that we should all return to hunter/gatherer society or something. I just think that if more people choose to support sustainable agriculture, it will be better for all of us in the long run. But I know that for some people "sustainable" or "organic" are watchwords for hippy libruls smokin' dope and trying to take away guns or whatever.