My Organic Dissonance
If you were to open my refrigerator door, you would see organic eggs, organic milk, organic half and half, organic cheese, organic yogurt, organic lettuce. Organic. Organic. Organic.
You get the picture.
Truthfully, I never bought into the whole organic foods craze until my kids were born. I’m no health nut. I hide my box of Froot Loops cereal and only slurp it up in my traditional, hunched-over caveman style when the boys have gone to bed. My wife castigates me for bringing back the occasional 12-pack box of Entenmanns donuts. I sneak out for Kit Kat bars and Dr. Peppers. There is no junk food rehab program that could save me. I’m a lost cause.
But my two young boys are purity personified. I won’t let them poison their developing bodies with processed and pesticide-laden foods. So we have a mostly organic household. I know this is an expensive luxury.
I also know that the saintly organic movement is not all its cracked up to be.
And now Charles Kenny at Foreign Policy is messing with my head:
Why ditching your fancy, organic, locavore lifestyle is good for the world’s poor.
I have pretty much the same relationship with my 5 year old daughter. Other than her disturbing addiction to all things gummie, she is a dietitian’s dream come true. Dad on the other hand has a well documented love of beer, salt, sugar, and generally everything else that usually comes with a ‘in moderation’ warning….
Back to the topic at hand, I think that if you really care about the world’s poor you should first focus on reforming the distortionary agricultural trade policies of developed countries and then worry about unintended consequences of organic food.
BTW, Kenny’s cherry pick of the New Zealand lamb example makes me a little suspicious of his objectivity on the issue….
My father never managed to bring home a 12 pack of entenmann’s donuts. By the time he got home the only thing left was the box. 😉
He is in his 80’s now, only on one medication(I guess that is how our seniors measure their health status..by how many medications they are taking) and still devours anything chocolate and has 2 scoops of ice cream every evening. (Except when the Yankees beat the Red Sox, then he’s not hungry)
See this comment in response the SciAm post:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/2011/07/18/mythbusting-101-organic-farming-conventional-agriculture/#comment-21
Those were some of my thoughts when I read the piece. There wasn’t much of an attempt to distinguish between pesticides used. I buy organic on occasion but am not set on it. Certain foods, like apples, I always buy organic. They taste better. I’ve even done a taste test putting 2 side by side to just make sure I wasn’t imagining things. Maybe it’s the lack of synthetic pesticide residue, which apples tend to have a lot of. Something seems weird when I bite into a non-organic apple. Can’t say for sure. But I don’t find the SciAm post convincing.
Yeah, Christie took a lot of assaults for that article. And it was bizarre because NPR had just covered some of the same ground but I didn’t see any drama.
Organic Pesticides: Not An Oxymoron
@harrywr2 :My 80+ dad also has the same response to Red Sox losses. And a freezer full of Hoodsies for the wins.
@NewYorkJ: Unless you are comparing identical strains, grown in identical fields, you can’t really even compare apples to apples… There’s a lot more to apple composition than just what’s on the surface. But you do know there are sprays they can use on organic apples to battle fungus problems, right?
I worked on an conventional apple farm in Tasmania many years ago. They were spraying all kinds of crap on them. I was sure I was getting sick because of all this stuff that was being pumped on them. But then it could have also been all the port we were drinking at nights in our tiny cabin out there in the middle of nowhere. Incidentally this is where I got to view in realtime the aerial bombardment of Afghanistan, on a tiny black and white television in a tiny cabin. I was sick and the world was mad.
I eat lots of organic stuff these days…
KK,
If you are interesting in these things you should read Naturally Dangerous by James Collman; I rhink you’ll be the first journalist covering these issues to do so.
A while back you wondered why Matt Ridley asked why there was no outcry in Europe about the deaths & sicknesses this summer from the E-Coli outbreak; it is a valid question……..
I’ve found a lot of organic produce just tastes better, enough to make it worth it. With soft-skinned products I definitely consider organic less of a risk, but that’s not the only factor.
The article makes a few good points, in terms of energy efficiency and pressure from the EU to grow organic, but it meanders among concerns and should be read carefully. Yes cheap produce is important so that people get enough to eat, but low prices do not help producers. The effect of subsidies is thrown in at the end like an afterthought.
My organic food binging is seasonal and hardcore: only wild game (grouse, deer, moose) and totally organic king boletes, chantarels, lingonberries, blueberries etc.
Also requires loads of exercise 🙂
“…But in Huntington we kept meeting people like Betty Jo. Alma Keeney, for instance, who also grew up on a farm, is baffled by her daughter-in-law Shelly’s decision to launch a goat-cheese business. Shelly runs the fledgling Yellow Goat Farm with her friend, Dominique Wong, and together they tend their Nubian and Alpine dairy goats on a small plot in Proctorville, Ohio, just across the river from Huntington. The eighty-seven-year-old Alma, Shelley told us, prefers individually wrapped American slices of cheese, not “farm food,” which brings back memories of hard times. Jane and I started thinking about the uncritical, even simplistic way that our agricultural past””and our kitchen-table past””are referenced in American society generally, and in the conversation about food reform specifically.”
From a great article in Lapham’s Quarterly about the “bourgeois nostalgia” that pervades the food reform movement.
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/pastoral-romance.php?page=all
Thanks for the link, Menth, and to all of you for your sharing your thoughts and experiences
I think that Menth @9 is getting to the heart of the discussion. We’ve been framing this in terms of definitions of processes, when what we mean is attempts at articulations of values.
To a chemist, the field of organic chemistry is the study, and frequently the synthesis of carbon containing compounds. This is usually done from a petroleum feedstock. Crude oil, is of course, natural. A chemical synthesized in a laboratory , could be exactly the same as one from extracted plants. Still, this definition of organic is the antithesis of the definition of “organic” as used in organic farming.
But what we mean is: Is it safe? Is it sustainable? Does it provide us with nutritious and tasty food? And beyond that, do the practices support healthy communities?
Isn’t organic just a new religion for a affluent liberal women, like new age?
(All caveats apply and exceptions implied.)
I’ve nothing against Organic believers, and what people put into their own bodies is their own business. As crazy unscientific fads go, it’s a lot less damaging than the catastrophic global warming one. 😉
Still, because we like talking about science here…
The Organic food fad is a variant on the Naturalistic fallacy – the belief that “natural” is good and “artificial” is bad. In fact, all plants contain pesticides naturally, as a self-defence mechanism, and about 99.99% of all the pesticides you eat are natural and inbuilt.
It’s similar to the case of people worried about “chemicals” – where they only classify the artificial products of the chemical industry as such. Of course, all mundane matter is made of chemicals, and there is no objective difference in the substance or its effects because of the way it was made.
Very few of the natural pesticides have been properly tested for safety, although of those that have, about half proved carcinogenic to mammals in standard tests. And give the rate at which pests evolve resistance to artificial pesticides, we can expect the natural ones to be taking part in the evolutionary arms-race, too. So don’t bank on our having adapted to them in our food. Selective breeding for pest resistance has been known to turn food crops toxic, when it turned out the resistance was achieved by means of changes to natural inbuilt pesticides. Long-term health effects are unknown.
If they made the producers of salads put on the label a complete list of the actual chemical ingredients, just as they do for artificial additives, it would be frightening. (You would also need bigger packaging.) It would be very educational, though, and perhaps if they did, then after a while people would learn not to be so silly.
Taste, of course, is a different matter. Prefering the taste of Organic is perfectly reasonable. I suspect that’s more down to how fresh it is than the chemical content – you certainly can’t taste artificial pesticide residue.
I’m not even going to get into what the hell “processed” means in terms of food. Cooked? Cut up? More naturalistic fallacy. But if you’re happy believing in it, then don’t let me dissuade you.
http://www.pnas.org/content/87/19/7777.full.pdf
KK,
Mainstream science tells us that organic food is bunk. Is this the source of your dissonance ?
Why can’t you lefties admit that – like everyone else – your ideas come from your own instincts and worldview. Sometimes they coincide with a rational analysis (“science”) and sometimes they don’t.
Pretending your ideas flow from science may be a good debating point on occasion but be careful about overuse or you may end up believing it.
Jack,
Mainstream science tells us that AGW is real and something to be concerned about…why can’t you skeptics admit that–like everyone else–your ideas come from your own instincts and worldview…
You good with that?
#15,
I can’t speak for Jack (he may have been a bit tongue-in-cheek?), but I am. Everybody has their biases, including climate sceptics, which is why we need to debate with people who disagree with us, who will ask awkward questions and challenge our assumptions, in order to help us reject anything with insufficient evidence. That means sharing data with opponents whose only desire is to find something wrong with it, letting them publish, answering their questions with patience and respect, etc. Opposition provides a valuable service, and science cannot progress without it.
We gain confidence in scientific theories not through the arguments amassed in their support, but through the failure of all opponents to knock them down. If you give your full cooperation to well-motivated, well-informed opponents, and they fail to find anything wrong in circumstances where you would expect if there was anything wrong it would be found, then it gives you a much bigger boost than getting agreement from people with the same biases as you. You play people’s opposing biases off against one another.
Cognitive bias makes systematic and organised scepticism an essential part of the scientific process. Motivated sceptics are a valuable resource, to be nurtured and encouraged. So if you can find anything wrong with the scientific mainstream position on Organic foods, I hope you will say so.
I know you’re good with that. But is everybody else?
One of the things I always found hilarious about the local foodies at my CSA pickup was that they would exhaustively dwell on possible pesticide residues in produce. And then put their kids in the car. Anyone with a rudimentary grasp of statistics will see the absurdity of this.
I can’t speak for Jack, but I agree that AGW is something to be concerned about. What I disagree with is the level of concern that the mainstream is trying to impose on us.
I don’t think the statement “your ideas come from your own instincts and worldview” is meaningful. The worldview that we have didn’t come out of nowhere. If you want to explain something you need to dig deeper.
What Gaythia said. It’s not called organic chemistry for nothing, but somewhat to the point, the local Saturday market has farmers trucking stuff in from WVa, Md and VA and they bring ripe fruit and veggies, which taste miles better than the Safeway stuff. The local Korean supermarket sell ripe fruit and veggies, which also beat the pants off Safeway’s best (caveat, you gotta eat ripe stuff fast or it over ripens). This could account for a lot of people feeling that organic food tastes better. It is simply riper.
To a degree I have to agree with Nullus above.
Regardless of the type of pesticide sprayed there is a secondary point that is often ignored. Why is a plant “hardy” or “pest resistant”? Because it has natural fungicides and pesticides inside them.
So when we breed plants to be more pest resistant what we are doing is massively increasing the amounts of natural pesticides contained in the fruit. Now one could argue that since the natural pesticide is natural it is therefore not dangerous but I doubt that people would want to put that to the test with high levels of natural pesticides from say, almonds.
I think that we need to take a situational approach to food purchases that takes into account rules other than just whether or not they fit the official rules for “organic”.
Versions of those “Fruit Loops” and “Entmann Doughnuts” could be made out of all organic ingredients and that wouldn’t do anything towards them a nutritionally sound addition to one’s diet.
Sustainable farming practices can take place on both sides of the organic/conventional divide.
Almonds are edible, but not peach pits. Jared Diamond, in Guns Germs and Steel has an interesting discussion of humans figuring that out.
But I don’t think that the existence of natural toxins, pesticides and herbicides can be used as a justification for synthetic ones. I believe everything needs a case by case evaluation. Obviously most of us are not going to do this sort of investigation ourselves, every time we purchase a food item.
This is why it is so crucial that we have effective and honest governmental agencies, to do this work for us.
@21 Gathia:
But, much of this work has been done, led by Bruce Ames back in the 1990’s. The conversation hasn’t progressed much since then. Here is the start of a 1994 article in Reason Magazine:
http://reason.com/archives/1994/11/01/of-mice-and-men
In the 1970s, Bruce Ames was a hero to environmentalists–the inventor of the Ames Test, which allows scientists to test chemicals to see whether they cause mutations in bacteria and perhaps cancer in humans. His research and testimony led to bans on such synthetic chemicals as Tris, the flame-retardant used in children’s pajamas. A world renowned cancer researcher with a calm, reasoned manner, Ames was an ideal witness in the case against man-made chemicals. As science writer John Tierney aptly described him in Hippocrates, “He has a quiet, kindly tone of authority as he patiently explains why things are the way they are….He sounds so sensible. which is one reason he made such a good witness for the environmentalists in the 1970s.”
But it’s a scientist’s imperative to change his mind when the data change– and recent data have made Ames deeply suspicious of high dosage chemical testing and especially of the notion that man-made chemicals are uniquely dangerous. We are, he has discovered, surrounded by mutagens–not only synthetic chemicals but also natural ones–and blindly banning suspicious modern substances can do more harm than good.
<i>”But I don’t think that the existence of natural toxins, pesticides and herbicides can be used as a justification for synthetic ones.”</i>
That’s true, but nor is such a justification needed. Natural and artificial pesticides are both capable of being safe or dangerous. The existence of natural pesticides does not mean any particular artificial pesticide is safe. The existence of artificial pesticides does not mean any particular natural pesticide is safe.
The distinction, however, is that artificial pesticides have been <i>tested</i> for safety and effectiveness, and the dose is controlled. Natural pesticides are generally not tested for safety (except to the extent that people eat it and don’t immediately die), and the dosage is not controlled – but can vary wildly depending on growing conditions.
I would advise people not to be worried about either – vegetables do far more good than harm according to the statistics – but if you’re <i>going</i> to worry, then it is more rational to be worried about the natural pesticides, rather than the artificial ones. Organic crops are at risk of increasing their pesticide load dramatically (and invisibly) when attacked by pests that an artificial pesticide would have safely prevented. If you want to avoid potentially dangerous levels of pesticide, steer clear of Organic.
But I would hope people might also see the opportunities here for a deeper understanding of how scientifically untrained/uneducated people can reasonably come to hold beliefs that are against the scientific mainstream.
Assuming you accept my point, you might also like to consider what persuaded you. You have, I am sure, always known that scientists have said artificial pesticides at the permitted levels are safe. But without being given reasons or evidence – only the word of the authorities – you have listened to the wide range of voices raised against
(Sorry, hit send too soon.)
But without being given reasons or evidence ““ only the word of the authorities ““ you have listened to the wide range of voices raised against and chosen Organic, just to be safe. In the absence of knowledge, politics and worldview hold sway. But with understandable and verifiable reasons for belief, people can change their minds.
Might be worth thinking about.
I believe that both Matt B and Nullius in Verba are overstating their cases.
We do have evidence that some synthetic pesticides have been harmful. Even though it is true that there are natural pesticides, believing that “If you want to avoid potentially dangerous levels of pesticide, steer clear of Organic.” seems over the top to me.
For the good of the overall environment we need to foster sustainable ecologically sound practices that support resilient biological systems. Eating foods produced with broad spectrum synthetic pesticides might not harm me, but might harm wildlife or agricultural workers. Antibiotics used in meat production might protect me now, but if not done carefully might breed resistant bacteria that attack me later.
As I was just in my local grocery buying deli meat, a story with an interesting twist involves nitrates and nitrites. “Natural” brands frequently advertise no nitrates or nitrites, but contain celery juice or celery seed powder. They do this because they actually know that preservation is important, and they know that celery juice or celery seed powder contain nitrates which convert to nitrites in processing. The two forms of meat companies are in dispute with each other and with the USDA. The natural meat companies would like to say that their products are cured. The conventional producers would like the natural companies to stop saying their products contain no added nitrates or nitrites. See for example: http://www.applegatefarms.com/resources/nitrates_and_nitrites.aspx#uncured In this case, since I am going to make sandwiches for a picnic, I chose the conventional lunch meat.
On the other hand, the beef in my freezer is a “split side” of free range beef purchased directly from a rancher in Wyoming. And I’ve also been purchasing cases of Organic Peaches from a Colorado orchard, which are the best peaches ever.
“We do have evidence that some synthetic pesticides have been harmful.”
True. I didn’t say otherwise. We also have evidence that some natural pesticides have been harmful. So?
“Even though it is true that there are natural pesticides, believing that “If you want to avoid potentially dangerous levels of pesticide, steer clear of Organic.” seems over the top to me.”
In what sense? Is the argument incorrect?
“For the good of the overall environment we need to foster sustainable ecologically sound practices that support resilient biological systems.”
Use of pesticides enables the same amount of food to be grown on less land, reducing the environmental impact. Non-organic farms can produce 25% more food for a given area of land than an organic farm. Natural pesticides have an effect on the wildlife/ecology, too – there would be little point in them if they didn’t. Resilience is encouraged not by sheltering the ecology from change, but by imposing continual small changes to be adapted to. (Shelter birds from predators on remote islands and you get the Dodo.) What constitutes ecologically sound practice is not necessarily what it is claimed to be.
Some of the worst ecological disasters going have been caused by environmentalists, trying to put their erroneous beliefs into practice. I’m not saying environmentalists are always wrong about everything, but their claims have to be tested like everybody else’s. And the pervasiveness of the Naturalistic Fallacy in their thinking requires particular attention in this regard.
All of which is besides the original point, of course – which was whether Organic is more “pure” and healthy.
Well done on the lunch meat, and fair enough on the peaches. I think liking the taste is a much better reason for selecting food than worrying about its contents, anyway.
There was a fuss made about food waste, the food that is bought and never eaten. Due to some study or studies, the picture was distorted regarding the burden of responsibility due to the consumer.
Wastage is not desirable but discredit were discredit is due. The majority of food waste is reported to be prior to purchase.
Estimates of total wastage vary but are high in all societies including the poorest, if this is a fair summary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_waste#Causes
It would be interesting to know if the wastage of organically and non-organically grown food differ. I can think of reasons wht it could go either way, I do not know the answer.
It seems a great pity, a waste, and an environmental impact to use land, fertilisers, and pesticides, and a goodly amount of oil in the production of waste.
Alex