Why I Don't Buy Organic, and Why You Might Not Want to Either
forbes.com
forbes.com
To read it yourself, go to https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensavage, then click on "Full bio"
Plenty of articles say that organic is not worth it due to no nutritional value. That is not the reason I've ever heard anybody say they purchase organic fruits and veggies. It's the chemicals.
I don't want to eat food that has been sprayed with chemicals over and over again to kill the various predators to that plant. I also don't want those chemicals to be in the water supply or ground.
It's more than just nutrition.
That would be a good reason to consider conventional. Both organic and conventional farms use pesticides. But, by restricting themselves to only pesticides that a program within the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service has deemed are sufficiently "natural" (not safe, not effective, not environmentally friendly, just natural), they're often limited to using chemicals that are less specific, don't break down as well, or rinse off more easily than the best available options.
Less specific means they're more capable of harming you (and wildlife in general) instead of just the target species. Breaking down less well means they're more likely to remain in the food. And rinsing away more easily means that they're more likely to pollute the soil and groundwater, and also that they may need more frequent application.
The crux of the problem is, the basic idea behind organic standards tacitly bans engineering. And by banning engineering, you ban all engineering, including engineering things to be safer, cleaner, or more effective.
I don't want to get into whether our current standards governing the safety of agrichemicals are perfect or not. What I want to suggest is that the USDA Organic program doesn't effectively improve on that situation. Conventional and organic products both have to meet the same bottom line. By introducing an additional restriction that has nothing to do with safety, though, organic farming hasn't self-imposed a higher minimum standard. It's unnecessarily self-imposed a lower maximum standard.
Organic marketing works because decision makers lack the critical thinking to question the efficacy difference. This being said, there is a difference in taste between and organic red delicious and conventionally grown red delicious.
Whether a 'chemical' is harmful to humans or not has nothing to do with how it is manufactured, so there is no reason to believe a 'natural chemical' is safer than a synthetic one.
I don't have any sources to cite, just my memory from past reading. If I'm off-base, please let me know!
The incredibly successful media campaign waged by the Organic industry should be held up as an example for the rest of the marketing industry. DeBeers should take notes.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/httpblogs...
The EU article is called "Human health implications of organic food and organic agriculture", I recommend peeking it. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2016/58192...
I will say though that an underappreciated benefit of organic foods is their probiotic content. Organic fruits and vegetables contain many more species of bacteria than the those grown with pesticides. So Organic produce is actually a great underappreciated probiotic source, especially considering the diversity of probiotics is superior to any store-bought probiotic (provided you have a diet of diverse fruits and vegetables).
And know the ones with the least residue as well, the 'clean fifteen.' [1]
[1] https://www.foodsafetymagazine.com/news/2018-dirty-dozen-and...
If organic wasn't a thing, groceries would find a way to price discriminate, and the most likely way would be to sell tastier varietals raised with practices known to increase taste (like waiting till it's ripe before picking).
So deliberately tastier rather than accidentally tastier.
In my anecdotal experience, algae blooms downstream from organic manure fertilized farms are far worse than from conventionally fertilized farms.
I've had more than one person tell me that organic foods taste better & they have higher nutritional value.
Related but talking to those people about the all natural label is just a lost cause.
Of course though it all depends on where you shop. If you're just comparing two identical apples organic vs non-organic, then you'd almost certainly not taste the difference.
While this doesn't pertain to organic food directly it does suggest that the industrial food system may be optimizing for different things than a consumer may want.
Nothing can be further from the truth. Most (in fact all) pesticides used are designed to kill biological cells. So pesticides do not distinguish between a caterpillars cell or a humans. All pesticides are harmful to humans, some in tiny doses, some in large doses.
FYI - Landmark lawsuit claims Monsanto hid dangers of cancer caused by its weedkillers. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/may/22/monsanto-tr...
You can make pesticides based on hormones of the target insect. Those pesticides do not kill cells.
Insects are kind of like little biological state machines, with hormones controlling the state transitions. A pesticide based on those hormones can mess up the timing. For instance, suppose you have in insect the munches on your crops all summer, then when it gets cooler and wetter lays its eggs and dies, leaving the eggs to repeat the cycle next year. A hormone-based pesticide might be able to make them lay the eggs early, when it is too warm and dry for the eggs to survive and when things that might eat the eggs are active.
As such, they are not equal. Specifically, insect cells are generally "more advanced" than ours (have more recent "basic" genes, more accurately adapted to their environment, tougher, ...), a lot smaller, ...
Bacteria are far more different from us than that, as are spores, other plants, ...
So yes, there are a LOT of compounds that throw a wrench into, say, insect procreation but have no known effect on humans.
Maybe not all of them, but many, such as Bt-derived toxins, are famous for it.
I was not aware of this..”The USDA, which oversees the foods labeled as “Certified Organic”, states quite clearly on its website about its role in organic, that “Our regulations do not address food safety or nutrition.” Foods labelled “Certified Organic” must adhere to certain rules and regulations but aren’t endowed with any particular nutritional or safety features. However, many consumers believe that the Organic label means the food has superior nutrition and is safer, especially in regard to pesticide residues. This is not true. ”
He is correctly stating that consumers erroneously believe the label means. But the sentence is brilliantly constructed that the final words left me with the sense that it is a statement about organic food, not consumer's misunderstanding of the label:
"... the food has superior nutrition and is safer, especially in regard to pesticide residues. This is not true."
Hey, sometimes conventional farms actually use reasonable techniques! That means they're just as good, right?
Hey, look at my cute granddaughter. Those conventional raspberries must be great, right?
We can use a little less land to grow most crops if we do it conventionally, that makes it okay, right?
Some big bad marketers work for companies selling organic products, which makes organic bad, right?
1. GMO food is a monopoly owned by a couple of megacorps who claim rights on the seeds of their food and charge farmers "royalties" for growing them, even if they themselves didn't plant them. This is exploitative, ethically dubious, and the result of intense lobby by the genetic engineering industry.
2. Conventional farming usually doesn't give a damn about soil erosion, crop rotation, or any kind of sustainability beyond year-over-year profits. This creates harmful environmental externalities that organic farms have to avoid in order to get their label. While some conventional farms might TRY to do SOME things better, organic foods must do all of them in order to be certified organic.
3. GMOs homogenize crop genetics and provide a vector for a dystopian future of agroblight, where one crop affliction could cause billions of people to starve.
4. The conventional farming industry makes every attempt to lie, mislead, and control the conversation through power and influence (e.g. this exact article). They have an incentive to discredit organic foods as tin-hat woo, to hire scientists to produce whatever kind of study they want, and to inject authors into the public conversation to shape people's perception of the industry. While organic foods companies often resort to equally crappy measures (scare mongering), the end is considerably less bad than the harms of conventional farming as we know it today.
Love this! "mostly relatively" won't kill you... maybe...
But my local supermarket also offers a brand of organic garlic from Spain that is out of this world by comparison. I rave about it to friends. It may seem weird to be this enthusiastic about a minor ingredient, but I find the difference really so huge.
Now, the fact that this garlic was grown through organic farming techniques may be incidental to its quality; maybe it was some other factor that makes the difference. Nonetheless, I will continue buying this organic brand, because when the market only gives me these two options, I am going to prefer the better one.
Part of it is probably the correlation between organic produce and smaller and/or more local production. Part of it is probably the stores that have extensive organic stock tend to charge more, and presumably are more proactive about disposing of less desirable items.
I feel like part of it is probably a more holistic approach to growing the food, as opposed to trying to maximize yields and/or profit.
- nutritional value: GE crops are the best way we have to compensate for diet diversity issues in many poor areas of the world. Golden rice is a famous example, but not the only one. There are similar stories for cassava, bananas, and many other staple foods. Banning nutrient enriched crops sentences millions of children to malnutrition and its effects.
- land and resource use: "organic" farming requires much more land, water, and energy to produce per calorie. Can you say "deforestation"? How about "pollution"?
- food safety: GE foods undergo (required) enormous safety testing before they reach market. Testing that would fail and block many "frankenfoods" created by "organic" cross breeding, such as kiwi. What's more, "organic" blocks the possibility of creating hypoallergenic peanuts, wheat, shellfish, etc etc .
- organic foods require more, and more damaging, and more lasting, pesticides than their GE sisters.
- I don't like radiation in my food. The "organic" method of cross breeding involves radiospermatogenesis. That's where you bombard seeds with x-rays to promote mutation. That's genetic engineering, but randomized. - "organic" cross breeding selects crops based on phenotype (how they look). This causes problems, like the famous extra large bananas in the 30s, which were extremely popular until it was discovered that they also produced an extra large dose of cyanide. They poisoned people who ate too many.
There are lots of reasons to reject the naturist fallacy vision of "organic" food as better. These are some of my favorites. I don't want my money to support mass starvation, illness, and food insecurity.
It's way off base to accuse people that want to eat food without antibiotics or pesticides of supporting "mass starvation, illness, and food insecurity".
This isn't about us vs them, or finding the one true way to produce food. Natural and engineered approaches will continue to exist, and that's great, because food is too important to only have one option.
I don't understand your accusation about radiation in organic foods. Are you suggesting that organic foods are radioactive because the seeds have been engineered with x-ray bombardment and selection? Organic farming is not about engineered seeds, nor would that process result in radiation in the eventual fruit.
I heard someone say the other day that if you want to spot a trend look for what rich people are doing.
People that are starving will eat out of garbage cans, doesn’t make it right
I'm not sure I agree with the article's conclusions as I generally favor organic in the US, but having reasonable debate is healthy. In Europe I don't bother about organic since the regulations are much stricter regarding crop treatment.
In my own vegetable garden I currently have tomatoes and many types of fruit berries, but I'm not doing the organic thing. The thing is, between organic and total overdose on pesticides, there's a wide gamut. I spead weedkiller under my blueberries so technically they aren't organic. Tomatoes will uptake many types of herbicides so I don't use any lingering ones on that part of the garden, however my fertilizer is not always organic.
Also, I have never seen visible worms in organic couscous and I buy it within the EU a few times a year. What brand was this that you bought?
The current mass farming practices (both for meat and non-meant) don't work for the long term as they deplete and cause other resource issues.
Having them work together to continue to enrich the soil is the only way we can continue farming. That's why going vegan isn't sustainable also. People argue meat takes more resources, but you actually need both in the farm.
Well that watered-down endorsement sure inspires confidence!
In my opinion, there are many misconceptions about the practices, advantages and disadvantages of both conventional and organic farming.
First of all there are currently three modes of production that are worth of mention: 1) "conventional" farming, 2) integrated production, 3) organic farming.
Conventional farming can mean many things, depending on the country we are farming, but mainly we should interpret it as non-illegal farming in general: anything that is within regular agronomic practice for a given location and crop.
Organic Farming (OF) is the practice that, fundamentally, prohibits the usage of synthetic agrochemicals. Moreover, GMOs are also prohibited and some natural occurring fertilizers. The aim is to minimize ecological impact and respect biodiversity, and the means of achieving that goal is to radically change agricultural practices.
Integrated Production (IP) is somewhat half way between the two. The idea is to leave the usage of agrochemicals for the last case scenario (and when above the the economic threshold), when all other alternatives are not available. Pests and diseases have to be monitored and auxiliary species levels measured and maintained. The list of acceptable substances and respective dosages is regulated and depends on the crop. Soil analysis is also mandatory. There are soil maintenance practices that have to be respected. A practice register has to be filled with each year crops, and given to certification authorities along with pesticide and fertilizer stocks registries. The bonus is that whatever one is allowed to do in OG one can also do in IP, generally speaking.
Currently, in the EU, the standards of conventional farming are being raised towards IP, so that in a few years there is only either IP or OF. In other terms, conventional farming of the future EU will be what we call today IP.
The single most important aspect of either practices is that none can go without regulation and official certification. I don't really trust the way regulation is enforced these days, because it's being delegated to private companies that provide the certification for their customers.
My only issue with organic farming is the misconception that there is something wrong with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that doesn't come with so-called organic or natural pesticides and fertilizers, and that the produce of OG is healthier in general. This is not true, although many companies benefit from this reiterated confusion. Greenwashing works better if there is a OG logo somewhere.
My second issue with organic farming is that by avoiding some means of protection, produce quality can decrease significantly, and whole crops can and will sometimes be lost without need, which comes with costs to producers but also economical consequences to food security and price volatility.
In my opinion, organic farming is only feasible in the long term with very specific crops and for medium-small scale areas.
Other than these aspects (certification, purported health benefits and insecurity) my advice to anyone is by all means eat organic whenever you want. But remember there is always Integrated Production.