I didn't want to leave Bill Duesing's comments about the advantages of growing and consuming organic potatoes unchallenged.
There are many, many people who do not have the space it takes to grow a garden at all -- or, for whom vandalism would be a very real threat (these are among the reasons I do not live in a city). In addition, many people do not consider gardening to be recreational. Even someone making a very modest wage could buy a whole year's worth of potatoes for a few of hours of working versus many more hours tending a garden plot. Relatively few people have the wherewithal to store several hundred pounds of potatoes for a year.
I suspect that a lot of people consider it an advantage that commercially-grown potatoes are fairly uniform in size, texture, flavour, etc. -- this is particularly true of the frozen products where consistency is a virtue: when you are buying a product, you like to know exactly what you are paying for each time you buy it.
I am not aware of any hard evidence that the chemicals used in raising "commercial" potatoes are harmful to consumers. The greatest risk is to the producers themselves, followed by the immediate farm ecosystem (which, I'll readily admit, is pretty screwed up). Nearly all of these modern chemicals are designed to have an extremely short lifespan in the environment AND their breakdown products are relatively benign (compared to the old, banned [in North America, anyway] chemicals like DDT).
Finally, I'd like to point out that there are a lot of people of Irish descent in North America who would not be here if it weren't for the failure of organic potato production methods in Ireland in the late 19th century. It makes me shudder to think of potato growers spraying fungicides on their crop every 5 to 7 days for two whole months, but the alternative (in certain years) may be complete loss of the crop to blight -- as happened in Ireland. I know of several organic farmers who lost most or all of their potato crop to blight this year. Also, many home gardeners lost their backyard plots (and frequently their tomatoes, a close relative of the potato, too).
Having said all that, I want to waffle: I do agree that commercial agriculture has drifted too far from nature. I think that much of North American agriculture is on a path of dangerous dependency on petroleum and petro-chemicals. I do not believe the greatest danger -- at least in North America -- is from chemical residues, however. Certainly, there are localized contamination problems. Certainly, soil loss is a problem -- on and off the farm -- in some locations. I think the conventional agricultural production system is not economically sustainable because of the ultimate reality that fossil fuels (and their derivative chemicals) are limited -- in the case of liquid petroleum, very limited. Eventually (ten? fifteen? twenty year?), prices will start to rise dramatically to reflect this increasing scarcity. This may seem a long way off, but development of more sustainable farming systems is a slow process supported more by dedicated, private individuals than by public institutions -- and certainly not by the big agricultural multinationals (what do they have to gain from it, after all).
There is room -- need -- for visionaries who pursue their vision with messianic zeal. There is also need for a lot of drudgery in the fields to winnow through the myriad of technological choices to find what works and what doesn't work. We need to temper our enthusiasm for a more benign agriculture with realism; evaluate these alternatives with caution and skepticism, but NOT reject any out-of-hand because of prejudice or irrational fear.
Sorry for the rant. Sometimes the glow from articles like Duesing's
"Consider the Potato" is too rosy for me....
Bob