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Saturday, March 15, 2008
Should people invest time and money in local, organic food?
Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Andrea Cornell Sarvady, a left-leaning columnist, responds.
Rebuttal
My colleague Shaunti clearly appreciates the wholesome goodness of local organic food. Yet her affectionate description of the hormone and pesticide-free meals served up at her parent’s mountain home begs the question: Should putting fresh, healthy food in our bodies really be a vacation-only splurge?
We forget that until the 1940’s all agriculture was organic. Now, it’s another story. “If our food had to be labeled with the variety of pesticides and herbicides used, then you better believe organic would be more prevalent” declares Alice Rolls, Executive Director of Georgia Organics.
Rolls easily concedes that we needn’t go organic on everything. Yet when it comes to many foods it’s hard to buy that pesticides aren’t a problem. It doesn’t explain why some pesticide-using farmers maintain an alarming double-standard in their own lives: Rolls has heard plenty of accounts of “conventional farmers who won’t eat their own crop but have an organic garden by the house for personal consumption.”
Despite this troubling hypocrisy if “hundreds of millions of people would starve” without their pesticide-laden food, I’d spray the fields myself. Fortunately, that’s just not true. Researchers from the University of Michigan found that yields were almost equal on organic and conventional farms. Moreover, organic farming gives underdeveloped countries some unique survival advantages. Farmers in remote communities gain true self-sufficiency, rather than dependence on costly pesticides and the genetically modified seeds required to tolerate them.
Local and organically grown food is harder to find and often a bit more expensive than the piles of “big ag” bounty available at the local supermarket. Yet if you buy organic or local food where it counts, cutting out some of the other garbage you mindlessly throw in the cart, you’ll probably break even financially— and come out way ahead, health-wise.
So don’t think of frequent trips to your local farmer’s market as a chore. Think of it as giving yourself vacation food without the staggering hotel and airline bills.
Far from an organic purist, I’ve nonetheless found that I’m never sorry when I put a little time and effort into finding the freshest food my town has to offer. I figure that my hard-working body deserves it. Doesn’t yours?
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Commentary
By Shaunti Feldhahn
The organic-food industry reminds me of Starbucks coffee. It costs more, it doesn’t necessarily taste any better and yet somehow buying it makes people feel better. Organic foods have their place, but the moral-high-ground hype of the modern organic movement drives me crazy. Organics come with trade-offs they don’t seem to recognize.
In theory, always buying locally-grown organic food is a wonderful idea. My parents retired to the mountains, where they grow their vegetables, get eggs from the farm down the road, and know which farmers have the best hormone-free meat.
But modern suburbanites don’t know the local farmer. And once that local link is gone, it is very difficult to know what you’re getting for those higher-priced “organic” foods. Today, that label assures a higher price, but not that the product is more natural, healthier or even that it tastes better.
Not to mention that the research is mixed on which organic products and processes are actually healthier. British studies, for example, have found that organic milk contains more anti-oxidants, but lower levels of vitamins A and E.
Organic types condemn pesticides; but most studies sanction the miniscule amounts consumers ingest. More importantly, without pesticides to ward off insects and fungi, crop yields would plummet. And chemical fertilizers horrify organic types, but are one of the single most important advances in feeding hundreds of millions of people who would otherwise be starving.
With those trade-offs, I appreciate the common sense approach of Cindy Burke, author of To Buy or Not To Buy Organic. She started a book on going totally organic, but her research changed her mind. By phone, she explained that understanding where your food comes from is more important than, for example, paying a premium for supermarket organic milk, when those cows are probably stuck on a giant factory farm instead of grazing on grass. She said, “Organic started as a sustainable way of growing healthy food in a bio-diverse environment, but big business has turned it into a high end niche. That’s why I did all the research on when it matters to buy organic and when it doesn’t. It doesn’t make sense to buy everything organic, especially if it has a small exposure to pesticides; you can get better value and food almost as good.”