Nothing starts a food fight like 'Organic'

 

When I wrote a column recently about my questions about organic produce, I expected that I'd get a lot of mail. Especially after I started with the statement: "I don't believe in organics."

Organics is an article of faith for a lot of people, and what I had to say was pretty far from the accepted dogma. Still, it was something I thought really needed to be said, and if, after more than 20 years of covering farming and food issues for The Times, I wouldn't say it, who would?

So when I opened my e-mail the morning the column ran, I had donned my asbestos undershorts, as we kids say. But a funny thing happened on the way to the firestorm.

There was plenty of mail, to be sure -- probably more than I've received for any story that didn't involve salt and turkeys. But the amazing thing was: Most of it was positive. I mean an overwhelming majority -- like by a ratio of 5 or 6 to 1.

Turns out, it seems like this was something a lot of folks have been thinking, but they were just waiting for someone else to be dumb enough to say it out loud first.

 

-- Russ Parsons

 

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Comments

[Mike]

The so-called “new” study supported by the UK Food Standards Agency was nothing more than a literature review. “An independent review commissioned by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) shows that there are no important differences in the nutrition content, or any additional health benefits, of organic food when compared with conventionally produced food. The focus of the review was the nutritional content of foodstuffs. “

So how did the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine do this? Their protocol was “Systematically to review and compare the composition (nutrients and other substances) of organically and conventionally produced foods.” At least they note that “Increased sales (of organic food) “have been linked, at least in part, to increased consumer confidence in the safety of organic foods, and their perceived benefits to human health and the environment”. The flip side of this is presumably that consumers might otherwise NOT be confident in the safety of food or the integrity of the agencies that are entrusted in ensuring it. So does their study look at safety or benefits to human health and the environment? Of course not – that would be silly.

They start by stating that “Little research has been conducted on the potential benefits of organic foods for human health, and there is no consistent underlying hypothesis for the mechanisms of action of any putative health benefits.” Their report went on to focus only on nutrients and other nutritionally relevant substances. They “did not address differences in contaminant contents (eg, herbicide, pesticide, or fungicide residues) or the possible environmental consequences of organic and conventional agricultural practices because this was beyond the scope of our review.” Ah, and that’s the problem!

But it gets worse: “Production methods, especially those that regulate the use of chemical fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides . Certified organic regimens specify the production of foodstuffs with the strictly controlled use of chemicals and medicines. The of these actions would certainly warrant further systematic review, but .”

But where was the scope defined? The authors note that “The funding organization had in study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, or writing of the report.” So the authors themselves limited the scope and excluded the broader implications of chemical content or environmental consequences?

So what was their systematic review of the composition? Did they collect food and analyze anything? Not at all – it was a desk-bound literature review of what other people had done.

So overall, what about crops? Nitrogen contents were significantly higher in conventionally produced crops, and contents of phosphorus and titratable acidity were significantly higher in organically produced crops. Differences that were detected in crops were … most likely due to differences in fertilizer use (nitrogen and phosphorus) and ripeness at harvest (titratable acidity). Quite so.

Their broad conclusion is that “there is no evidence to support the selection of organically produced foodstuffs over conventionally produced foodstuffs to .” But that’s not the point!

[Fred]

Organic didn't start with media buzzwords like 'carbon footprint,' or higher nutrient value. It's about pesticide application. It's about pesticides showing up in ground water, oceans, stream, the food chain, in your urine (which is only the stuff your body didn't filter out and then store in soft tissue). It's about insects developing immunities so that even more pesticides need to used, which becomes a cycle. It's about farmers becoming burdened with a seed and chemical culture that are dictated and controlled by large corporate entities.

[Steve Savage]

I agree. There are a lot of people who actually know something about farming who know that the marketers and NGO advocates of Organic make ridiculous claims and present a distorted picture of the 99.3% of farms that are not Organic. I recently posted a blog describing how fertilization with compost (as in Organic) has a carbon footprint 14x as high as for synthetic nitrogen. So much for that "better for the planet" claim