Organic Food, Conventional Food

[nancylebov]

Over at Less Wrong, I raised the question of whether there's evidence that organic food is better for health than conventional food, and asked for anything from anecdotes to studies.

Less Wrong being Less Wrong, someone raised the question of whether conventional food might be healthier.

In any case, they turned up nothing in the way of evidence, as distinct from heuristics or very vaguely related experiments. (Strange but true: food from plants which have to fight off insects for themselves is more mutagenic than food from plants which are protected with pesticides. Or at least sort of true-- I don't know how many mutations or species of bacteria this was tested on.)

So I'm asking a (mostly?) different bunch of people here. Have you heard or tried anything comparing the health effects of organic vs. conventional on people? Mammals? Multi-cellular organisms of any sort?

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Some of the key work on this was done by Bruce Ames, whom you can look up on Wikipedia. I read his journal article reviewing toxic and carcinogenic qualities of natural plants back around 1980, I think. I don't know if his work inspired the more recent idea that a lot of plants are toxic and that herbivores shift between eating different plants to avoid too high a dose of any one toxin, which I read about somewhere in the past few years, but it seems compatible with it.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I think this is missing the point. The point isn't whether th8is bite or that bite of broccoli is delivering more nutrients or less toxins to you at this very minute.

The point is that the methods used to produce conventional food are bad for everybody and everything. Soil is also a living thing, and when you kill everything in it, you kill the soil, and what you have left is not a growing environment for plants but a neutral medium with nothing much to hold it together when you run unregulated irritaing sprinklers on it: so it washes away, taking with it a load of toxic chemicals and isolated nutrients, when then proceed to befoul everything downstream of the original place. Methyl bromide and other toxins sprayed on the fields don't stay there, they are wafted over the landscape, collecting wherever the wind patterns take them (in one dramatic case, right on top of the middle school I used to teach at, down by the strawberry fields). Pollinators die. The predators of creatures who like to eat what we eat, and creatures that can impart disease to plants and to us, die. The children of communities in agricultural areas die of cancer and respiratory diseases. Agricultural workers die young.

And, as I said, the soil dies, a lingering death, in which its prouctivity drops year by year and more and more expensive additives are thrown at it to try to overcome the destruction. Remember the blooming California desert? It's fading, and nobody wants to talk about it.

That's why we push for organic farming practices. Not so you can feel good about your diet.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

That's why we push for organic farming practices. Not so you can feel good about your diet.

I'm not sure who your "we" is.

I think a lot of people who prefer organic/sustainable food do share your larger concerns, though I don't see the health of farm workers mentioned much.

However, I also see claims that organic food is healthier for the people who consume it, and I'm interested in whether there's evidence for that part.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Right, you don't see the health of farm workers mentioned much, and it's a problem.

Organic food is healthier for the people who do and don't consume it, because it entails less toxins in the overall environment.

Myself, because I'm this close to the wire, I do a calculation when I buy produce: can I possibly? Lately the answer is yes more often than not . . . except that, being in an agricultural area, I am also blessed with food banks that mostly give out produce, so I'm not actually buying that much produce these days. The Grey Bears bag is almost enough greens to get through the week all by itself, since I also get some meals from work.

edited for typo. Probably missed some.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

I'd expect organic vs. non-organic to be about as significant a difference as kosher vs. non-kosher, since both systems are grounded in religious imperatives and intuitions about purity.

[avram]

Back when Jim Henley was food-blogging, he wrote about the virtues of farm-raised, free-range food, which isn't the same thing as organic, but has similar connotations (and similar difficulties in determining, as a customer, whether the thing you're buying in the supermarket was actually produced in accordance with the values you desire).

Apparently eggs from pastured chickens taste better, and Jim's mom had an easier time digesting pastured beef than grain-fed.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the links.

I'd say that grass-fed beef from the farmer's market is definitely superior, but the difference isn't nearly as large (maybe not there at all) in the low-end Whole Foods beef, and I won't pay their higher prices.

I can get raw milk from around the corner, and it's definitely easier for me to digest (lactose intolerance) than pasteurized milk, and it's much tastier. Unfortunately, it isn't easy enough to digest-- I'm unlikely to have pain or diarrhea, but it produces so much farting I don't think it's worth it.

[kiya]

My brother's celiac disorder basically cleared up when he went on a strict all-organic diet. He commented that his epidemiology classes explained this: that the immune system requires multiple triggers to flip out, and wheat gluten is a common trigger. Pesticides are also common triggers. When he stopped combining the two, he started to be able to have a beer again.

When his celiac was full-bore he basically looked like a somewhat animated skin-coated skeleton. Now he doesn't even reliably test out as having the gluten sensitivity blood test marker.

For your anecdotal level.

[kiya]

Cattle can't digest grain very well, which means that when they're eating it they have less efficient digestion (read: more flatulence, I've heard that cow farts are actually a potential significant greenhouse gas factor) and less nutritious meat. One of my husbands is prone to muttering "Cows are a mechanism by which humans can eat grass", which is a useful point as well; if we wanted the nutrient profile of corn (which is not great, actually, and corn is a cast-iron bitch to digest), it would be more efficient for us to eat the corn.

I find the taste difference between pastured meat and grain-fed meat so significant that I've more or less given up on ordering steaks at restaurants that source conventional meat. I can get better flavor from the lowest-quality grassfed cuts on a griddle in my own kitchen, for a third the price.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I've had this suspicion myself. Jonathan Haidt writes about purity as one of the five basic moral categories (the others are harm, fairness, loyalty, and respect for authority), and suggests that it's purely a conservative concern. But that turns on identifying "purity" as relating solely to sexual conduct. Kosher law, as you say, relates purity to diet, and I think environmentalist concerns are driven by similar motives as well as by scientific and prudential concerns—there is an undercurrent of feeling that the Earth is sacred and must not be defiled.

(In the 19th century, people who wrote about "pollution" were often referring to masturbation.)

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

What people call organic farming is ideologically descended from Theosophy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Steiner), and more generally German nature mysticism c. 1900. And it is a deeply conservative ideology--arising from intuitions about purity and resistant to evidence and innovation.

There's a lot of room for public critiques of modern farming technology. Unfortunately, "organic" has occupied most of that space, and that hurts everyone.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I personally know that grass fed beef has a distinct (and better) taste when compared to grain fed beef and have noticed that local organic small-farm raised pork is vastly better than supermarket pork, but there are too many variables for me to know if there's one primary difference or all of them contribute equally

I've yet to notice any similar difference for organic fruits and vegetables vs. conventional ones, but my reasons for buying organic are identical to ritaxis.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

It may be a deeply conservative ideology. But it seems to appeal to a lot people who self-identify as "leftist" or "progressive" or (what used to be called) "counterculture." I take this to mean that there are puritanical impulses all over our notional political spectrum. . . .

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

Flippant response: "It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea." - Robert Anton Wilson.

Less flippantly: yeah, I tend to read that wing of progressivism as puritanism turned inside-out. It's not Conservative but it's very conservative, in the context of Haidt's analysis. It has a lot in common with Leon Kass's "wisdom of repugnance".

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I like the notion that "liberal" and "conservative" aren't consistent systems-- they're bundles of issues which are grouped together for historical reasons.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Pretty much, yes.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

I tend to interpret 'conservative' as a stance that bows to political heritage and the wisdom of elders, whatever that heritage and those elders happen to be. Which explains odd phenomena like American conservatives being what other countries would call liberal. They venerate liberty because they were ordered to.

[redbird]

If the reason is that organic practices are better for the soil and the farm workers, someone with a limited budget should be asking "which pesticides are worst for farm workers? What crops are they used on?" and try to either avoid those products altogether or go organic for those specific things. If the main issue was toxins in what gets to the table, it would be more important to look at what's being fed to children.

Concretely: if it's about the flavor or nutritional profile of the crop, making cotton organic is irrelevant, because I'm not planning to eat my shirt. On the other hand, and very concretely, about the only thing my household is specifically and consistently buying organic is milk, because cattitude prefers the flavor of organic 2% milk to conventional 2% milk. I don't know what the underlying variables here are (we're in New York City, so New England or mid-Atlantic dairy farming practices).

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Bernard Shaw made much the same joke earlier. There is a scene in Act I of Man and Superman where John Tanner, the socialist hero, is harassing Roebuck Ramsden, a man a generation older, about his old-fashioned ideas, and Ramsden indignantly protests that he is as advanced a thinker now as he was in his youth.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

Strange but true: food from plants which have to fight off insects for themselves is more mutagenic than food from plants which are protected with pesticides.

Plants can't defend themselves against predators by running away. Their main options for self-protection are armor (bark, shells, thorns, etc.) or poison. Many plants secrete poisons in response to attack, sort of like an immune response. For example, blackened/wounded sections of potatoes are much richer in alkaloids than unbruised sections. This is also why chopping onions can irritate the eyes: the onions are literally creating a cloud of poison gas in response to trauma.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

It's not just the pesticides, though. The whole method of treating the dirt as a tabula rasa in which to put "input" like artificial fertilizers and pesticides and expensive imported water causes a toxic environment for everyone involved. Artificial fertilizers, even though they are made of compounds which are highly valuable nturients, are themselves toxic when they are applied in the ever-larger amoutns demanded by the conventional system.

(I need to make an aside here and point out that it would be ridiculous to insist that there is no place in well-managed agriculture for any of these types of additions. But their place ought to be very small and well-thought out)

Over-applications of nutrients kill the wild plants at the periphery of the farms, which robs the soil of their roots and cover, making it more vulnerable to destructive erosion. It also kills, directly and indirectly, the matrix of soil organisms that makes soil soil and not just dust: it kills the animals living in the habitats created by the plants: and so on.

Eroded soils clog up the waterways, turning creeks into marshes and marshes into drylands. The washed-away soils include the overabundant nutrients and the pesticides I'm not talking about right now, and until the waterways dry up and disappear from the silt and from the over-irrigation I'm not talking about at the moment, they carry these polluted silts and gravels in suspension downstream where they pile up in other areas that might not have otherwise been affected. I have heard from watershed scientists that they have found DDT in waterways where it has not been used for decades, because it was buried in the soil, turned up by deep plowing, and washed into the waterways by irrigation runoff.

But, as to pesticides: methyl bromide is one of the very, very worst. There is no level at which it is safe to use. It kills every kind of organism, including large mammals. It can be carried around by air currents, in which case it tends to concentrate in certain areas, but it also can linger on produce and delivered to the consumer. It's heavily used on strawberries and other crops which are otherwise difficult to grow due to the fact that so many tough little animals find them delicious. It was supposed to be completely outlawed and retired from the scene by 2005. That is, no longer even manufactured.

However, it is still being made and used. And the only strawberries which are not treated with methyl bromide are the ones marked "organic."

Cotton is a bad offender too, but I don't know the specifics or what are the favorite pesticides to use with it.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

The second paragraph doesn't follow from the first. The first is bullshit, the second is irrelevant to the discussion.

Food grown in IPM or organic farms doesn't mean potatoes with black spots.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

You may be talking about some consumers of organic groceries, but you are not talking in the least about people who grow food, or the people who do science in the field.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

We find a noticeable difference in quality of Walmart meat (all seems like veal, ew) and ordinary meat at QFC. Less difference between QFC and Whole Foods ordinary, or WF ordinary vs WF organic.

So much stuff is labeled 'organic' these days, I suspect there's been some finagling about the definition.

There's a big difference between the eggs from our own freerange chickens (ordinary laying mix and scratch plus whatever they find in the woods) and storebought eggs even from Whole Foods.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

...The first sentence is taken directly from the original post. Take it up with nancylebov.

The second paragraph is my attempt to describe why, to the extent and in the circumstances in which the preceding claim may be true, it may not be so strange. As it directly addresses a claim from the original post, I think 'irrelevant' is perhaps harsh.