Over at Eco Women: Protectors of the Planet! you can find eight resolutions for 2012. A few of them make sense: turn off any unnecessary appliance; choose tap water over bottled water; cut down on meat. These are, if not necessarily environmentally sensible, at least economically sensible. I have quibbles with their list but it has modest merit.
#4 on their list “Start buying the locally grown organic version of one thing you consume…Choose one product off your shopping list and commit to finding the locally grown or produced organic alternative” is wrong on all levels. Here are 10 reasons:
- There is no difference in nutritional value between organically grown and conventionally grown food. (see this by the Mayo Clinic)
- There is no difference in taste or texture between organically grown and conventionally grown food.
- There is no difference in food safety between organically grown and conventionally grown food. (see this by the Mayo Clinic).
- While some studies indicate similar safety, some studies indicate organic may be less safe than conventionally grown food. A UK Independent story notes, “Large studies in Holland, Denmark and Austria found the food-poisoning bacterium Campylobacter in 100 per cent of organic chicken flocks but only a third of conventional flocks; equal rates of contamination with Salmonella (despite many organic flocks being vaccinated against it); and 72 per cent of organic chickens infected with parasites.” And a post on the Scientific American site notes, “Between 1990 and 2001, over 10,000 people fell ill due to foods contaminated with pathogens like E. coli, and many have organic foods to blame. That’s because organic foods tend to have higher levels of potential pathogens.”
- Both organic and conventional systems use pesticides. Organic farming is allowed to “natural” pesticides such as calcium hypochlorite, chlorine dioxide, sodium hypochlorite, calcium polysulfide, copper hydroxide, copper oxide, soluble boron products, copper oxychloride, lignon sulfate; silicates of zinc, iron, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, selenium, and cobalt, and host of other items. (The full list is available here in PDF)
- The pesticides used by organic farming can be worse for the environment. Whereas conventional farming can use synthetic pesticide that targets specific pests, organic farmers are left with choices that don’t discriminate and kill a broader spectrum of species. We know how this worked out for antibiotics.
- Studies show that eliminating pesticides diminishes yields. Eliminating pesticide use could cut corn yields by 30 percent, rice by 57 percent, soybeans by 37 percent, and wheat by 24 percent. That means to maintain our current level of food, it needs more land (forest or grassland) to be plowed up.
- Organic farming needs more land to grow its food and fiber.
- Organic farming needs more energy. More land takes more energy to cover. And, since they don’t use herbicides, organic farmers needs to plow more. Farmers plow to primarily control weeds (plowing harms wildlife, earthworms and such, in the soil).
- “Locally grown” is an arbitrary boundary. Why not eat only food that you produce in the window sills of your apartment if you want really local food? We’ve covered local grown before here. Buy stuff that makes sense. If someone is selling locally grown bananas near my place in Northern California, we know from the outset that it may well have taken lots of energy to produce—much more energy than growing it in its native habitat and shipping it to me.
Watch the video where Penn& Teller explain organic food. This is a piece from their show, Bullshit! (R-rated language)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhBKtjDtTVk&w=420&h=315
Suggested reading:
- Organic Food Myths (skeptoid.com)
- The great organic myths: Why organic foods are an indulgence the world can’t afford (The UK Independent)
- Attention Whole Foods Shoppers (Foreign Policy)
- Mythbusting 101: Organic Farming (scientificamerican.com)
Nullius in Verba 
Much of what you write here is indisputable. However, item 2 above is so far removed from my experience as to be laughable. When is the last time you got a tomato at the grocery store that tasted anything like the tomato you grow in your backyard? Or, the peaches, pears, strawberries, broccoli, lettuce, etc grown in your yard and picked fresh as compared to grocery store bought.
That statement really makes me question other parts of this post. For instance I checked out skeptoid.com and read his writeup on GMO. That guy was just pulling stuff out of the air trying to dispute greenpeace’s website. It was almost crazy-like.
I eat as much local grown produce as I can because it DOES TASTE DIFFERENT. Do you really think all these restaurants utilizing local fresh produce that became hugely successful in California to start and now all over the world, became successful through mass hypnosis? People taste the difference of food that was growing in the ground or on the tree or bush this morning and is now sitting on your plate this evening.
What about fish? The difference in a fish caught today and eaten today is huge! Waiting for something to get transported half-way around the world and saying there is no taste difference is just nuts.
Now, I know this post said there was no difference in taste between organic and non-organic and am I deliberately mixing them up in my argument above. I am! Why?
Because that is what people trying to denigrate the local food growing movement do. They talk about no difference in taste between organic and non-organic. But they never talk about the difference in taste between fresh and not-fresh. And, someone cannot tell me that people are going to die in Africa because I am eating most of my food from my backyard and my friends small farms. That land would just lay there idle so why not have a garden on it? We have plenty of water here. We are at the headwaters for 5 rivers which is the water the big cities all want to water their lawns with. So, take that argument away. And, me and my friends don’t use any chemicals on our garden, so the arguments above about what commercial organic growers do does not apply.
Maybe this post is for city people who think they are do-gooders and saving themselves and the world by shopping at Whole Foods. If that is who this is directed at, I can understand and even be in agreement with most of it. For people living in small rural communities it does not make sense.
Sorry if I sound a little strident but this whole subject is getting under my skin today in spite of the fact I enjoyed a 50 mile bicycle ride through ranch land looking at Mount Eddy, Mount Shasta, Shasta Valley and the edge of the Trinity Mountain range. I guess these arguments feel like an attack on our way of life here and I don’t understand these city-slicker types telling rural people how they should live. It just is so far away from what I know is true and right it strikes me as grossly mis-informed and like people form Mars telling me how to be human.
Hello Michael,
Well I’m glad I could at least make you laugh. Your visits here keep me on my toes. By your commenting and holding me accountable, you are making me a better writer. Thank you.
But I think you’re being unfair to compare tomatoes and fruit grown in your backyard to tomatoes and fruit bought anywhere else—farmers’ market or any grocery store. Fruit and vegetables picked at the peak of ripeness and carefully carried into the kitchen will, of course, be tastier than any fruit or vegetable that has to be shipped whether by freight car or pickup truck. I agree with you that you cannot beat the flavor of homegrown, and I agree that homegrown tomatoes, especially, cannot compare with organic or conventionally grown tomatoes. It is for this reason that my wife and I put in at least tomatoes in our own backyard garden. And, this year we’ll be trying our hand at growing some hops—Cascade and Centennial.
I took #2’s ‘no difference’ from a 2002 study published in Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition (source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11833635). What they said in their abstract was this, “While there are reports indicating that organic and conventional fruits and vegetables may differ on a variety of sensory qualities, the findings are inconsistent.” In other words, they found mixed results: some experiments indicated that conventional tasted better and other experiments that indicated organic tasted better. Within the report the researchers, who were doing a review of research, wrote,
And no, because you choose to eat your food from backyard gardens and local producers, I don’t think you’re taking food out of some poor African’s mouth.
But, it is meant to point out to people who think it’s better for the planet to buy local and organic that it doesn’t help when taken in toto. If all 7 billion (9 billion by the end of the century) of us want to eat organically grown food because it’s ‘better for the environment,’ then we can kiss the rainforests goodbye. Organic cannot match the yield of food grown with synthetic fertilizers. It might come closer if organic farmers embraced genetically modified seed but I’m not holding my breath for that one.
Far be it from me, Michael, to tell you, or anyone else, how to live. I do not intend my writing to give that impression. I am not a city-slicker handing down edicts—I live in a community of 1,000 people. I have a garden in the backyard and I compost in a worm bin.
The thesis of the post is that, in aggregate, it’s actually worse for the environment to pick locally sourced organic food. They are ecotists; sure that that picking locally sourced organic food is environmentally correct. I only point out what it means to take this idea (that of course everyone should buy locally source organic food) to its logical conclusion. In colder climes in takes more energy to grow things in a hothouse. Guess which European country is the leader in growing bananas—Iceland. Organic farming takes more land. If all farmers decided to grow solely using organic we would need to use the equivalent area of South America. In addition, by buying food from far-off places, we often raise their standards of living. Many of these places are developing countries where they live in deprivation and cannot afford niceties like fuel, and so strip timber from their forests for heating and cooking.
As for city slickers telling you how to live, do you perhaps mean Alice Waters or Michael Pollan? Both live in the Bay Area. Waters has developed “The Edible Schoolyard at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Middle School: a one-acre garden, an adjacent kitchen-classroom, and an ‘eco-gastronomic’ curriculum.”
Rob Lyons in his review of Anthony Bourdain’s book, Medium Raw, says that Bourdain “notes that the labour-intensive, pastoral vision that Waters promotes means that either lots of the citizens of wealthy countries like America and Italy are going to have to take up farming again – unlikely – or ‘we’ll revert to the traditional method: importing huge numbers of poor brown people from elsewhere – to grow those tasty, crunchy vegetables for more comfortable white masters. So, while animals of the future might be cruelty-free… what about life for those who have to shovel the shit from their stalls?’”
As for not using chemicals, I need to call you on that one. Of course you and your friends provide chemicals to your plants. Plants need, among other things, nitrogen and phosphorus for photosynthesis. You need to supply them with their needs somehow; in organic farming that’s often through compost or manure. Slightly off topic, you might find this 1990 report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dietary pesticides (99.99% all natural) by Bruce Ames of interest.
Thank you for your civility in discussing this issue. Your comments have helped clarify the point.
Oh, and all my friends who garden and farm actually try not to plow because that destroys the good bacteria in the soil and causes more weeds to germinate. The soil is so healthy we don’t need to apply ANY chemicals to our plants.
@Timberati We definitely are in agreement on most of the major points you make in your response and the original post especially regarding feeding the majority of the population and the amount of acreage required in a purely organic world. A bit off-topic but germaine to this is a conversation I had with a friend who is a nurse down in Redding about this subject. His comment was that maybe not having as much cheap food available in a mostly organic world might be a good thing to reduce the obesity rate in the US. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek but food for thought…..