Missing the point on organic food

Yesterday, the New York Times published an article, "Stanford Scientists Cast Doubt on Advantages of Organic Meat and Produce," on the findings of a study that suggests organic produce and meat does not contain any more nutritional value than conventionally grown food. A better title would have been "Stanford Scientists Miss the Point." 

Now, first off, I would like to point out that the finding of the study is questionable because the study's methodology is pretty inherently flawed. As critics note in the article:

lumping all organic foods into one analysis misses the greater benefits of certain foods. For example, a 2010 study by scientists at Washington State University did find that organic strawberries contained more vitamin C than conventional ones.

That is completely beside the point, though, since the main importance of organic agricultural practices is not a possible nutritional increase in food, but the reduction of pesticides, antibiotics and artificial manures introduced into the environment. John Wargo, Professor of Risk Analysis, Environmental Policy, and Political Science at Yale, says in his book, Our Children's Toxic Legacy:

As we [enter] the twenty-first century, an additional 5 to 6 billion pounds of insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, rodenticides, and other biocides are added to the world's environment each year, with roughly one-quarter of this amount released or sold in the United States.

This is such a large amount that there isn't a single person on Earth that does not have detectable levels of these chemicals, according to the Mount Sinai School of Medicine's Center for Children's Health and the Environment. This is also just pesticides. The FDA found that in 2009 over 29 million pounds of antibiotics were given to US livestock, which means that 80% of the antibiotics sold in the US go to farm animals.

The myriad of reasons both these facts are so problematic cannot be sufficiently addressed in this post, but essentially the pesticides released into the environment, besides being carcinogenic, eventually find their way to water where they disrupt and destroy marine environments, causing huge ramifications throughout all the eco-systems on the planet, and the antibiotics used in farm animals has been shown to be linked to the rise of drug resistant diseases and other major human health concerns.

You could be forgiven for not realizing this since not even the token environmentalist noted these benefits of organic foods. It's a bit sad, but since the organic movement only seems to advance in fits and starts that correspond to major food scares, its proponents have taken to being even more vocal about its nutritional health benefits hoping to win more mainstream converts. The nutritional benefits have also been touted by agribusinesses trying to profit from the increased interest in organic food because it allows them to add a higher price tag without their products truly being organic. Since this is where the benefits lie in the popular mindset, industrial agricultural companies are able to fight the organic food movement by focusing scientific study on the alleged nutritional benefits, which could very well be negligable if not non-existent. While, these Stanford researchers claim they took no funding that could bias their study, that is not true of a lot of this research.

One would hope that at least the reporter would put all of this in context, yet the headline would lead you to believe that there are no other supposed benefits to organic foods and the article itself does nothing to show there is more to it then that. Given that this is one of the most important issues facing the world at this time, it is unbelievably disheartening that everything about this article shows a complete lack of literacy in the science and current issues surrounding organic food.

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Me Blog Pretty One Day

My day today began like most any other with the much too common morning ritual of waking up right on time, promptly falling back asleep without resetting my alarm, and then waking up again too late to start a morning routine that will probably never become routine because of my inability to execute that simple first step. Unlike most days, though, when I finally became alert-ish, I realized there was an actual reason for my sluggishness for once - I was sick.


Now that I've called out of work and am alone with nothing but 300 cable channels, any book accessible via Kindle and the entire internet to entertain me, I need something to somehow sustain my interest. So, I've decided to join the ranks of the bloggeratti. I've contemplated starting a blog in the past because, like that girl from Mean Girls who doesn't even go here, I just have a lot of feelings. But you could say that it was a metaphorical fever dream since I was never able to overcome the initial inertia to start it. Now that the fever part is a bit more literal, I, for whatever reason, have both the gumption and can-do spirit to finally get started, so here we go.


There won't be much in the way of a high concept defining this blog or providing an overarching theme tying all the posts togethers. However, there will hopefully always be a sense openness and interest in discussion. So, should you happen upon my modest little corner of the internet, please feel free to share your expertise, opinions, and sense of humor.

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