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

[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.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Well, remember there is always more money behind research defending tobacco, air pollution, chemical foods, etc -- than behind research that might support the other side.

[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).

[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.