Consumers who spend big bucks on organic foods naturally want to know what they’re getting for their money, and at first glance, a report this week by Stanford University health researchers seems to say, not much.
The report looked at dozens of previous studies on the health and nutritional effects of organic food, and concluded:
“The published literature lacks strong evidence that
organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional
foods. Consumption of organic foods may reduce exposure to
pesticide residues and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.”
This would seem to pose a threat to an organic food industry that the report pegged at $26.7 billion in 2010, up from $3.6 billion in 1997. Then again, the reaction among consumers seems muted or nonexistent, several organic farmers and advocates told me this week.
They are perturbed but not alarmed. Perturbed because the Stanford report looked at health effects far too narrowly, and, anyway, missed the whole point of the organic movement — it’s not about better nutrition, it’s about a healthier planet and a sustainable food system.
“One of the major things about organic is the holistic principles and practices,” said Bill Duesing, executive director of the Northeast Organic Farming Association in Connecticut, and president of the 7-state NOFA council.
Bill Duesing
Duesing speculated that fallout from the report could make organic advocates’ jobs a bit harder, but should not change the way they educate the public.
“I don’t know if we’ve ever advocated that organic food is healthier for you,” said Duesing, himself an organic farmer in Oxford, where the NOFA chapter is based. “It’s not the main reason we’re doing it…organic is really working with nature, conventional agriculture is working against nature.”
It’s also about local food production, economic fairness and health for farm workers and creating a system that avoids nitrogen runoff, a major global threat to waterways. Duesing recently wrote a short essay on the advantages of organic, and it did not even mention healthier nutrition for consumers.
But in the long run, organic advocates say, there is a very real benefit for consumers’ health, as organic methods avoid pesticide residues and restore trace elements of minerals to the soil, perhaps improving the food that grows there.
The Stanford report, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, assumes that federal guidelines on pesticides are in fact safe, an assumption challenged by the President’s Cancer Panel in 2010 — and by the common sense of anyone who follows the politics of regulation.
A rebuttal by Washington State University researcher Charles Benbrook says, among other things, that the Stanford report ignored federal data on antibiotics and pesticides even as it concluded that there is less of those things in organic food.
And what about having lower pesticide levels? The Vermont-based Organic Trade Association went as far as to put out a press release with the headline, “Stanford research confirms health benefits driving consumers to organic.” Saying that’s what the report concludes takes some brass, to steal a phrase Bill Clinton used Wednesday night about Paul Ryan’s Medicare accusations.
But it isn’t wrong, and that’s part of the point: Healthy is a tricky word.
The more important distinction in the food supply is not organic vs. conventional, but big national producers vs. small local producers. The so-called natural foods industry is riled up these days over a class-action lawsuit against Kashi over its use of ingredients said to be hazardous or regulated as drugs. Kashi is owned by Kellogg Co.
I asked Duesing which he would choose if he had to eat organic food grown in China or conventional food produced here in Connecticut — where the options are expanding, with 82 organic farms as of 2008, according to an Aug. 30 story by my colleague Janice Podsada.
“I would go for the local Connecticut,” he said quickly, adding, “They’re both very important.”
At the West Hartford farmers’ market on Thursday, Kathy Caruso of Upper Forty Farm in Cromwell, known for her heirloom tomatoes, said she had not had a single query from a customer.
“I would venture to say that they buy my tomatoes because of the variety and because they taste good,” Caruso said. “To me, there’s no issue here. Vegetables are good for you.”
George Hall’s granddaughter, Brooke Lindstrom, said some customers have asked about the report. “The people that are really in organic are going to keep shopping here,” she said.
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5 Responses to Organic Reaction: Farmers Annoyed, Not Threatened By Stanford Study
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Organic foods are great and by all means if you can afford them buy them. Just don’t say it’s more sustainable or nutritious. They’re not. A planet of over six billion people can not be fed organically, chemical fertilizers and pesticides must be used or people will starve. Billions of people. Conventional agriculture is not working against nature, it is feeding the planet.
I think the only thing to take away from the Stanford report is public research in the U.S. is severely under supported.
“Small Organic” — the local guys don’t have the collective organization or individual deep pockets to fund the research needed.
“Big Organic” which is most of what you find in stores has two problems. One is it’s dominated nearly exclusively by companies that also market conventional goods, so they don’t have an incentive to undercut their other lines to boost organic. Second is most of Big Organic follows the same flawed industrial model as much of conventional food production — the thin soils, harvesting immature, and shipping thousands of miles from California and Florida just won’t produce vegetables with comparable nutritional value of those produced locally.
In my mind local trumps mere organic, though organic and local is probably the best.
I’m no organic zealot — you’ll find bottles of Sevin, Glyphosate, and 2,4-D in my garage. But I use them very sparingly and against very specific problems (invasive plants, poison ivy, invasive red lily beetles, and to control squash vine borers).
Too much of our farms are run on an industrial basis that ignores the whole system. Our health, and our wallets, suffer from it. What we save at the supermarket we pay out instead at the hospital.
Agreed. I purchase organic food all the time and never once thought it was more nutritional that conventional food. This study was the first I even heard of that claim.
Organic food is about reducing pesticide/insecticide use, support natural methods of farming, and supporting environmental protection – not about getting a higher vitamin content from your food.
> A planet of over six billion people can not be fed
>organically, chemical fertilizers and pesticides
>must be used or people will starve.
Sorry Bob, but you’re wrong.
The myth of the Green Revolution depending on external inputs in the forms of fertilizer and pesticides grew up in the mid-20th Century because corporations can concentrate great wealth by marketing those inputs. And making loans to buy tractors; and money making those tractors and tires.
Of course since business is financing the purchases of fertilizer, pesticides, transgenic seeds, large machines…you then also need a system of Federal subsidies to ensure that most of those farmers most of the time can make their debt payments.
Had a like amount of research instead focused on continuing to improve plants that weren’t bred for high-input systems as well as how to operate diversified, holistic farms in which a complex mix of animals and plants support each other there wouldn’t even be a debate. However, self-supporting farms that need only very minimal if any use of external inputs like fertilizer, pesticides, and tractors don’t generate much profits for folks other then the farmer.
People who say we can’t feed six billion organically are doing so by looking first at yields that are 60 years out of date; but more importantly they’re comparing an industrialized system of very specialized farms that grow a monoculture like corn or perhaps corn and soybeans, while another feedlot fattens cattle, and another farm grows tomatoes, and orchards in New Zealand ship apples to America.
However, when you combine multiple elements on one farm while your management needs increase greatly, the output of the farm increases as well. A simple example is a field that will support 2000# of beef is likely to also support 500# of sheep and 200# of chicken. As a monoculture, 2000# of protein is all it produces. As a polyculture the beeves eat what the beeves eat (primarily grass); sheep prefer fobs and clip grass lower then beeves so they harvest food the beeves couldn’t; chickens come and scratch our larvae from dung (breaking the cycle of worms that would otherwise need the purchase of pesticides to feed the cattle and sheep) as well as bugs from the ground and plants even smaller then what the sheep ate. By using mobile coops and portable fencing you can force the animals to allow sections of the field to rest and recover between grazing pressure. The manure put out by the animals is of different qualities and helps nourish the fields in different ways and timing (for example, while weed seeds are passed by cows — which the chickens may eat and break down, weed seeds are not passed by sheep who can break them down in their digestive tract; now you need to buy less fertilizer and less herbicides.) Now that same farmer, though he has to know about sheep and chickens in addition to beef, and has to move low-cost shelters and fences every few days and find markets for his extra products, is producing from his same land 2700# of protein and doing so with fewer external inputs.
No, we can’t feed six billion organically if we’re stuck on an industrial model of specialization in our heads. If we adopt a pastoral model of emulating the complexity and chaos of nature…it won’t be a problem.
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