Why I Don't Buy Organic, and Why You Might Not Want to Either
forbes.comFrom the author's bio: "Since April of 2016 I work part time for the non-profit, CropLife Foundation communicating the benefits of crop protection agents"
To read it yourself, go to https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensavage, then click on "Full bio"
Great find. No bias at all...
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.
> 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.
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.
Does anybody really think the organic marketing makes sense in the first place ? I hope not, but I guess you're mostly right and people don't see this for some reason.
Organic marketing is the result of our education system failing to properly educate our populace on chemistry and the marketing taking advantage of the failure. When you go to a conventional farm you can see the exact chemicals sprayed onto the crops in a precise manner, there are GPS programs to correctly allocate based on prior science efforts. Then someone noted that isolated chemicals were not natural and stated that natural was better for you; not questioning why spreading manure instead of the chemical necessary was better (which the manure now runs off and causes issues like when we did not have the agri stewardship we have today).
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.
But organic farms still spray 'chemicals' on their fruits and veggies, they just use 'natural' chemicals.
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.
As far as I understand, the synthetic pesticides may actually be safer since they're designed with human consumption in mind and are able to be synthesized in such a way to limit negative effects on the body. Also, they can be designed to eliminate pests that are harmful to crops while doing little damage to other fauna in a way that organic pesticides can't.
I don't have any sources to cite, just my memory from past reading. If I'm off-base, please let me know!
Very good point. As far as I know, Latrotoxin [1], is a fully organic product. It's also much more deadly that most "chemicals" you could name. Hell, Polonium is on the periodic table of elements.
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.
Given that all "chemicals" used before, say, 50 years ago were natural, I would go further and say there is no shortage of utterly horrible ones.
Nassim Taleb makes an interesting argument in Antifragile that the natural stuff is still better assuming it’s been in use longer, since new stuff could have disastrous effect we don’t know about yet, and won’t know about for 50+ years. In the same way that some option investments look safe until they blow up.
FWIW: "Organic" != "Pesticide Free". Rather it means that the compounds sprayed on the crops are "organic" in origin.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/httpblogs...
An interesting EU study about organic farming clarifies this further. I find this image to be a nice way to summarize the use of pesticides in organic farming. https://imgur.com/a/WjRHpk9
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 wonder how the EU regulations for organic farming compare to the US regulations.
Yes, it's mainly avoiding pesticide residue that's the health benefit for organic foods. That's why it helps to know which foods have the worst residue issues (e.g. the dirty dozen), buy organic for those ones while buying normal produce for foods that don't have bad residue issues.
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).
> That's why it helps to know which foods have the worst residue issues (e.g. the dirty dozen)
And know the ones with the least residue as well, the 'clean fifteen.' [1]
[1] https://www.foodsafetymagazine.com/news/2018-dirty-dozen-and...
Honestly, in a blind taste test for most fruits and veggies I generally prefer the flavor of the organic one, and that's enough for me. Maybe it's because of pesticides, maybe it's because of harvesting schedule, maybe it's because of other practices at the organic vs non-organic farm, but the fact is the organic fruits/veggies usually have a noticeably better flavor (not always, especially outside of the dirty dozen). This applies even more so to milk.
What annoys me is that organic is the "premium" selection for fruits & veggies at the grocery store.
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.
He addresses safety and chemicals at length in the article. Natural chemicals do not mean they’re non-toxic. Organic does not mean no pesticides.
"I also don't want those chemicals to be in the water supply or ground."
In my anecdotal experience, algae blooms downstream from organic manure fertilized farms are far worse than from conventionally fertilized farms.
Organic crops use organic pesticides in the US. That is, the lobby of big agra has the regulatory framework for "organic" changes to suit their purpose. It's not what you think ir is.
> That is not the reason I've ever heard anybody say they purchase organic fruits and veggies.
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.
Many times they do taste better. The spoilage rate is higher so only the healthiest foods survive, and also farmers who are expecting a higher price point recognize that they need to also taste good (I.e. there is a market for bad tasting $1/pound conventional vs good tasting $2/pound conventional, not so much of a market for bad tasting $4/pound organic vs $5/pound good tasting organic)
A lot of organic foods are different strains than typically sold at grocery stores, and they do tend to taste better simply by virtue of being a strain likely chosen more for its taste than transportability.
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.
One interesting point. When watching the Netflix series Chef's Table, one of the chefs worked closely with genetic engineers to make better tasting GMOs. The researcher interviewed said it was the first time in his long career that anyone had asked for him to improve flavor rather than yield or size (sometimes at the detriment of flavor).
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.
That kind of mirrors Monsanto's insistence that GM foods without roundup are utterly 100% proven safe, neglecting to mention that the reason they're modified is so that they are more resistant to roundup.... which is not exactly proven safe.
Enjoy your environmentally-wasteful famine-enhancing feel-good food.
US has about 3x the farm land under cultivation vs what it actually needs. Ethanol production a perfect example of this.
Don't worry. Global warming will open up incredible amounts of farmland in Canada and Russia. :)
Interesting. CropLife Foundation is funded by the major companies that make pesticides. https://croplifefoundation.org/about/funders-corporate-suppo...
Thanks. Just in case anyone still wants to read the article but couldn't: https://outline.com/gswB27
Most of the authors for opinion pieces that get posted here have backgrounds that would imply they're less than impartial. Nobody ever checks when they agree though.
The author says .... "and the actual pesticides used today are mostly relatively non-toxic to humans."
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...
> Most (in fact all) pesticides used are designed to kill biological cells
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.
I can't state how wrong you are. Believe it or not, different classes of life have different cells with different DNA. They use different pathways for almost everything.
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.
> So pesticides do not distinguish between a caterpillars cell or a humans.
Maybe not all of them, but many, such as Bt-derived toxins, are famous for it.
This is the key point Don’t get distracted if author is biased or not...he is making sone goood points.
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. ”
"However, many consumers believe that the Organic label means ... 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."
If the label is wrong, how do you know something is actually organic? His point is that it's just a label you can practically slap on anything.
There are certification processes. My family farm did periodic inspections, interviews, and lab tests on soil samples.
The author does a fantastic job arguing against a straw man and distracting the reader.
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?
This guy completely (intentionally) misses the point to mislead the reader. He does nothing to address actual concerns of organic food enthusiasts like:
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.
> the actual pesticides used today are mostly relatively non-toxic to humans
Love this! "mostly relatively" won't kill you... maybe...
Not to mention the damage those pesticides are doing to the environment and other species, e.g. bees.
DDT is mostly non-toxic to humans too. One of the DOW salesman used to drink a cup of it to prove how safe it was.
But the companies that make these chemicals assure us they are!
Although I agree that buying everything organic is irrational there are certain products where the organic version is quite different. A good example are tomatoes where market bought often taste like plastic. This is my personal taste and opinion but i've validated it in my circle of friends.
Indeed. My own example is garlic. In the EU today, most garlic sold is from China and presumably grown through standard modern industrial techniques.. It just isn't very good: almost no juice, a strange bitter tang.
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.
While a reduced amount of, and possibly different type of, pesticide is often at play in our organic choices, the striking thing we’ve found is that a lot of organic produce tastes better, often times significantly.
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.
The organic milk I've tried is also quite different and better. Usually, that is, like Costco adds fish oil to theirs to get the omega 3 because the milk itself is ultra-pasteurized.
I keep trying all the fancy/expensive organic/free range eggs, I can't tell the difference at all. This is just a comment on taste. It's funny, they kind of look and feel different somehow, but I can't taste any difference. I assume they must be different nutritionally or in some way, and must be better for the chickens, I just hoped they would taste better somehow.
Wish the article also mentioned: - food supply: Generically Engineered crops are the only way we're going to feed the estimated 11 billion people at our estimated peak population. Heck, it's providing a significant part of the boost that allows us to have 8 billion. If the planet went "all organic" today, billions of people would starve to death. Another billion or so would be sentenced to deadly food supply uncertainty.
- 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.
Everyone's welcome to eat whatever they like. It's about choice.
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.
>If the planet went "all organic" today, billions of people would starve to death.
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
Pesticide industry shill has "an ethical problem" with eating organic due to the tactics used by that industry. Is this satire?
One thing I make sure to not buy organic is couscous. Every time I've gotten organic versions, there have been worms roaming around in it.
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.
USA and EU guidelines allow a certain percentage of grain products sold to contain eggs or larva. This will naturally happen regardless of whether the product is organic or non-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?
Instead of the focus on organic and the label, I'd prefer a focus on sustainable/regenerative agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_agriculture
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.
>The reality is that modern agriculture employs an integrated suite of non-pesticidal control measures, and the actual pesticides used today are mostly relatively non-toxic to humans.
Well that watered-down endorsement sure inspires confidence!
Farmer here, currently engaged in Integrated Production.
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.