Organic food

Yes, organic food costs more.  But look at it this way: organic farmers - if they are truly organic - are husbanding the soil and the environment.  Mainstream, non-organic farmers are taking more from the soil than they give back - it is impossible to sustain this mode of agriculture.  Conventional foods are subsidized by the environment so their cost does not reflect the true cost of their production: fuel, transport costs and subsidies, chemical regulation and testing, health and downstream social problems.  In the long-term, organic agriculture is the only sustainable mode of food production.

Organic farmers have most of the costs of mainstream farmers, but they also have the additional costs of restoring the soils so that each year's crops come out of soils that are no more depleted than the soils that produced the previous crop.  We consumers should feel privileged to be able to pay for this replenishment, restorative and rejuvenative activity.

Characteristics of organic foods and their production

Soil quality - organic soil quality is rich and cropping can be sustained, preventing soil erosion; rainwater is absorbed rather than running off.

Water quality - both the water that runs off and the water that is absorbed are free of contaminating pesticides and artificial fertilizers that contaminate downstream and underground water storage.

High nutrition levels - because they are grown in rich organic soils, with abundant bacterial, worm, insect and fungal activity and stable moisture levels, the plants and animals growing on those soils are themselves richer, healthier and - when the time comes - better food for predators ... like us.

Free from human-made chemical management aids - fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides.  Many of these are implicated on cancer, birth defects, nerve damage and mutations.  They also can accumulate to toxic levels as they move up the food chain.

Energy efficiency - organic farms are relatively labour intensive (using the skill, judgement, knowledge as well as the physical power of workers) rather than petroleum intensive.  Mainstream farms also use fertilizers that have heavy transport costs and are generally produced or refined with high fossil fuel inputs.

Promotion of biodiversity - organic farms have a wider range of plant and animal species than monoculture farms.  (See below.)  Monocultural farms are also vulnerable to pests.

Supporting farm workers' health - farm workers in monocultural agriculture have a much greater risk of cancers.  In third world countries the same risks are magnified as control mechanisms are weak and there are children, illiterate people and farmers desperate to squeeze production out the soil without regard to future seasons.

Preserving rare species of food plants - organic farmers are renowned for their devotion to producing heritage varieties of fruit and vegetables.

Taste and flavour - although some people place a large store on organic foods have better flavour, flavour is not a necessary characteristic of organic food.  Organic foods may have a stronger flavour as they will have grown more slowly on a full range of nutrients, but there is no reason why that should make them more palatable to Homo sapiens.  Don't be disappointed if you can't detect a better flavour in your organic foods.

Appearance - Like taste and flavour, the appearance of organic fresh foods may stand in contrast to foods from the supermarket chains.  Larger size, uniformity and absence of blemishes are features that wholesalers and retailers can select for at wholesale markets.  This means that what reaches the shops is often only the top grades of foods, the others having been sold for processing, animal feed, sent to landfill or left to rot on the farms.  These grades have no relation to nutritional quality and are determined solely on external appearance.  Organic retailers are less critical of superficial, cosmetic differences from the commercial ideal, so what they sell will not always look as pretty.  Superficial appeal is often achieved by more spraying, by addition of colouring agents (in the case of eggs and oranges) and by selective breeding for appearance.  Supermarkets stock only the mainstream varieties of, say, apples and pears, whereas organic growers and sellers delight in growing and selling heritage varieties, even when these have been superseded in the supermarkets.  Organic retailers will accept a larger range of skill blemishes than will supermarkets.  Often these skin blemishes (especially in the case of apricots and apples) point to a much tastier fruit.  Organic foods have a smaller market than the mainstream and organic fruit and vegetables may remain on the shelves longer than in the supermarkets who often dump fruit every few days; supermarket foods may, therefore, be fresher.  They may, on the other hand, just look fresher as their fresh appearance could have been achieved by storing the fruit and vegetables in gases that retard the natural ageing processes.

Certified organic foods - certification costs organic producers, but it is your guarantee that the foods you purchase are organic.

Considering the impact of your food intake on the environment

Buy locally-produced food - When you buy organic food, try to buy local organic food: it supports a healthy environment near you and avoids the use of polluting transport.  A consumer in North America who buys organic strawberries flown in from Central America misses the point completely.

Organic farming increases biodiversity - at every level of the food chain, all the way from lowly bacteria to mammals.  This is the conclusion of the largest review ever done of studies from around the world comparing organic and conventional agriculture.  Typically, each of the 76 studies reviewed measured biodiversity in groups of organisms ranging from bacteria and plants to earthworms, beetles, mammals and birds.  Of 99 separate comparisons of organisms, 66 found that organic farming benefited wildlife, eight concluded it was detrimental and 25 produced mixed results.  Organic farming aids biodiversity by (1) using fewer pesticides, (2) using less inorganic fertilizers, (3) by adopting wildlife-friendly management of habitats where there are no crops including strategies such as not weeding close to hedges and (4) mixing arable and livestock farming.  And this is what we purchasers pay for in the price of organic produce. (This came from a New Scientist article by James Randerson.)

Buying food is the most political decision we make

Jules Pretty says that modern agriculture is set up to encourage one thing: produce more.  Yet farmers clearly do many other things we value, such as managing the landscape, helping fix carbon in the soil and preventing flooding.  The key to making sustainable agriculture viable is to convince people that farmers should be paid for all the extra things they do.  Every time we buy food, our choices shape farms and nature and communities somewhere in the world.  It's the most political decision we make and we make it every day.

Organic foods do not necessarily replicate Pleistocene characteristics

A note on grassfed meat - In North America, the term 'grassfed' is used to distinguish meat (mainly from cattle) fed on pastures rather than in feedlots.  'Grassfed' does not necessarily equate with organic, though it may. 

Fat profiles in organic meats - Organic foods are not always of Pleistocene quality either.  Organic meat may, for example, come from animals that have never been exposed to the rigours of surviving without human husbandry.  Organically grown cattle, for example, may be fed (organic) grains; they may not range free, exercising vigorously as they migrate with the seasons and have quite different SFA:MUFA:PUFA fat profiles from fenced, watered, nurtured 'couch potato' livestock that may still be certified organic.  Talk to your butcher and discuss the criteria the butcher uses to distinguish organic meat.

Eat food in season - In the Pleistocene almost all food would have been fresh and consumed only in season.  Tony Chettle says "If you want to eat strawberries or tomatoes all year round you pay for that, but there's a better solution.  A fresh tomato salad is perfect mid-summer but not in mid-winter.  A tomato out of season is terrible."  He, of course, advocates using the richer-flavoured sun-dried tomatoes in winter  - well, he markets them.  Food preservation that is impossible without modern technology is hardly Pleistocene. 

The cost of fresh foods

Tony Chettle, Europe's largest producer of organic groceries, believes that cost pressures have taken the romance and meaning out of farming.  Food is too cheap. "In Europe and the US the big supermarkets are constantly waging price wars, and the turf they fight on is the fresh food and vegetable floor because they make the lowest margins here.  They're willing to have a margin loss because it drives shoppers into their stores where they also buy products with real margins.  Farmers, however, are forced to use any yield loss efficiency to maximize profits.  When they get four Euro cents for a lettuce, of course they cut corners and do the unthinkable."

The cost of organic fresh foods

If organic fresh foods are more expensive, doesn't make them the preserve of the wealthy?  Not necessarily.  Certainly if will if the purchaser expects to (1) maintain the same proportion of their budget devoted to food,  (2) continue purchasing the same foods,  (3) not grow their own foods or swap with neighbours.  Even people who are far from wealthy pay extra for flavour, novelty, packaging, cache, out-of-season availability etc. - features without nutritional merit.  A re-alignment of our attitudes to food might be all that is needed to make a saving.  Such a realignment would be made easier for those who understood about nutrition, horticulture and the food supply chain and were prepared to step outside their unexamined acceptance of the cultural determinants of their food consumption.

But isn't there an issue of equity here?   That is, are not organic foods the preserve of the relatively rich and denied to the poor?  In the Pleistocene, everyone ate organic and everyone was pretty much equal in terms of wealth.  This whole website is about the changes wrought by 10,000 years of agriculture - not only on our nutrition, but on our health, our psychology, our attitudes (including our attitudes to 'equity'), society and the planet itself.  Think it through.

Organic cf. GM foods

From The Spectator 1 November 2003: '... What seems increasingly clear is that in this country [UK] there is no measurable demand from consumers for GM products, but there is an increasing demand for organic.  Would not the effort and money that is being diverted into trying to persuade the public to swallow GM be better invested in building up organic agriculture? ...' (Letter from Edward Collier).

References:
Canberra Organic Growers produce an informative quarterly journal (the writer of this page is a COGS member)
Tony Chettle, British producer of organic groceries, in article by Susan Owens in the Australian Financial Review, 12 December 2003
Good Foods Organic Co-operative, Red Hill, Brisbane, Australia (their brochure c. 2001)
Griffith Organic Butchery, Canberra, Australia
Jules Pretty, University of Essex, in New Scientist, 17 July 2004
James Randerson, New Scientist, 9 October 2004