Thanks for your thoughts---which came rather quickly.  I prefer to avoid
point-by-point responses as they confuse lurkers, but this one is too
complicated.  Your questions have a ">" marker...

> Hm, I wonder if the Brix can tell if a fruit has been stored after
> harvesting. It doesn't seem so.

I honestly don't know.  Clearly the mother plant cannot put additional
nutrition into a detached fruit or uprooted vegetable.  This is a big
problem with commercial fruit that is picked green.  One of my first posts
talked about how the mother plant removes or neutralizes toxicity (generally
astringency) once the seeds are mature.  That is the signal, in the wild, or
orchard, that the fruit should be picked, but others on this list have
pointed out that the breeders have mangled the process until the programming
doesn't always work.  Also, certain produce tends to convert starch (two
sugars linked together) to plain sugar when stored (or is it the other way
around?).  Bananas come to mind.  Several people have told me that tree
ripened bananas taste dramatically different than the organic green
nail-drivers currently in my kitchen.

> Some people say, that every food carries an information that it sends
> out in the form of biophotones. This is an irradiation of very low in-
> tensity and can be measured. It's no joke!
> The fresher a food, the more biophotones. The better the agriculture,
> the more photones again. Eggs from commercial chicken have less
> photones than eggs from free range chicken. Processed foods have much
> less (if at all) photones than raw foods.

You could discuss this for quite a while, perhaps till the cows come home,
before I would say, "enough."  My personal experience has been that high
Brix=high life force.  I choose to measure it with a refractometer.  Was
there a story in "The Secret Life of Plants" about a French official who
gained fame for being able to detect cheese quality by measuring some factor
similar to what you are describing?

> BTW: Rex, are you using compost heaps? If yes, how high are they?

Mine tend to be about 5 feet high when made, but they "cook" down to 3
feet.  This listserver won't allow photos, but if you'd like a scan that
will give a perspective, sent to your e-mail, just say so.

> Yeah, foods overloaded with artificial fertilizers spoil much faster
> than good organic ones!
> I can hold Orkos' tomatos for    m o n t h s    in my kitchen without
> refrigerating them. They just lose water.
> Also I guess that it is possible to detect organic farmers who recently
> have changed from commercial to organic production. Their products are
> very good but they have a tendency to spoil faster than truly organic
> products from farms which practice since years. Can you confirm this?

Well, almost---think quality and you'll be closer to the truth.  I know some
commercial growers who produce very high quality.  I know some organic
growers who produce poor quality.  Consider letting the produce speak for
itself.  "Very good" and "spoil faster" are contradictory in my mind.  Ask
your prospective grower how they deal with insects.  If they say, "Gosh, I
don't know---I don't seem to have many," you're in the right place.

> The only exception to the rule so far seem to be citrus. They spoil
> relatively quickly even if from Orkos. "Relatively quickly" means I
> can hold them 7..10 days. I guess this is a lot already, compared to
> commercial citrus.

Hopefully, you've seen the Brix numbers I've posted earlier.  Typical 10-12
Brix commercial oranges will often turn blue with mold.  OTOH, I once
brought some 17 Brix prizes back from Florida and left 4 sitting in the
corner.  A few months later I noticed they had dehydrated so that they were
nothing but pretty, although empty, dry husks.  For fun I took them out and
wedged them into various parts of a landscape bush.  Then, for most of a
year, I teased visitors about my "orange bush."  Thanks for answering my
question about the quality of the citrus that Orkos is currently buying.  My
guess is that you'll buy more tomatoes, and less citrus, after reading this
post.

> Insects seem to be nature's public garbage collection, together with
> bacteria, fungus, etc. Whatever is considered waste by MN is eaten up
> by those little critters. Very wise and funny, sometimes surprising.

Repeating this unshakable truth means you're joining a very politically
incorrect crowd.  I tend to use Dr. Arden Andersen's "nature's censors"
label for the process.  The "funny" part is the foolish, and neverending,
search by the scientists to find some way to defeat a process that so wisely
tells us so very much.  There's not much to be surprised about once you
realize that sickly low-Brix plants are a veritable magnet for insects.
Perhaps you've read Dr. Phil Callahan's work.  Understanding the role of
bacteria, mold, and viruses comes easy once you see the true relationship
between plants and insects.

> To be fair, one should add "farmers" and "farmer associations" to the
> list, he he. ;-)

Farmers run into a lot of problems.  It's hard to work one's way past all
the university and extension service *advice* that happens, almost
miraculously, to always agree with the current offerings of the toxic
technology makers.  Few are able to resist the Pied Piper of Poison.  Those
that do often economically fail because the people that need their
production opt for cheapness instead of paying a little more for a lot more
value.

> Don't take this as an offense. I just want to keep up
> an objective point of view, if this is possible.

Thank you.  I tend to find all points of view palatable, save one: I refuse
to be sucked into any part of a discussion that accepts it is OK to douse
one's food with poison---no matter how dilute.  Having said that, understand
that I am no organic fanatic because there is a place for NPK fertilization
(as an extra) if the plant signals a need for it.

> As an instinctive eater who uses only best quality organic
> products from Orkos I can say, that endive (which I called chicoree in
> an earlier post) is unbearable bitter when my instincts don't want it.
> And when I have a need, it becomes attractive, the bitterness decreases
> and I enjoy it. So there's attractive bitterness and offending one and
> the degree varies. It depends on your bodily state. Sounds complicated,
> if you're not familiar with instinctive eating, right?

Quite complicated.  And it makes as little sense to me as using a nutrition
chart that *assumes* any particular fruit or vegetable has a certain mineral
content.  It just ain't so.  There can be a thousand-fold variation.  I'll
trust your trust in instinctive eating when I know the Brix value of the
item you're eating at that time.

Regards,
Rex Harrill

PS: ask Orkos if they feel like they're able to always get the quality they
would like to have.