DAEDALUS
Andy Ho, Straits Times 8 Aug 09;
ORGANIC food is no more nutritious than conventionally produced food.
Thus concluded a recent review commissioned by Britain's Food Standards Agency. Its scientists looked at 52,000 studies done in the last 50 years but found only 55 to be methodologically satisfactory enough for analysis. Their review, just published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, did not look for chemical residues in the two types of food.
Let us assume this conclusion is valid. Yet people may not buy organic for nutritional value or even taste. Studies across societies from Europe to Asia show that consumers who buy organic do so primarily believing it is pesticide-free.
After all, organic farming is usually thought of as that carried out without chemicals. Eschewing the 800 different synthetic pesticides available, organic farmers rely on crop rotation, compost, manure and biological pest control.
Long-term experiments reported in a study published in Science in 2002 did find the amount of pesticides in organically cultivated fields to be 96.5 per cent lower than in conventional farms. (Some synthetic chemicals lurk in organic farm soil because it was previously contaminated, or chemicals may seep in from elsewhere - from contaminated ground water or wind drift of sprayed chemicals used in nearby conventional farms, and so on.)
In a 2002 survey carried out in Australia, over 99 per cent of certified organic food items tested in Victoria showed no detectable residues of 45 types of pernicious chemicals. (Australia has 12 million hectares of organic farmland, the largest in the world.)
Thus, an even more relevant review than the one conducted by Britain's Food Standards Agency would be one that looks at studies comparing the chemical content - especially pesticides, synthetic fertilisers and livestock feed additives - in organically and conventionally produced food.
Actually, a fine grain review of the best of such studies was published in Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition three years ago. It concluded that organic 'fruits and vegetables... contain agrochemical residues much less frequently and at lower levels than their conventional alternatives'. But for 'other types of produce... and organic food of animal origin', the dearth of data meant no similar conclusions could be drawn.
Instead of chemical pesticides, organic farmers use biological pesticides including nicotine, pyrethrins and warfarin. This means, however, that organic food may have more of such natural but potentially harmful compounds, for which no authorities are testing at all.
Could the use of untreated or treated manure and compost render organic produce more liable to be contaminated by microbes? The review found no firm evidence for this.
However, it did note the problem of fungi. They produce mycotoxins, like aflatoxin that causes liver cancer. Organic farmers tend to use copper salts or sulphur to deal with fungi.
Though banned in the European Union from 2002, copper salts continue to be used by organic farmers elsewhere. Even after a ban, copper may persist in the soil and how much copper - or sulphur - is bad for humans is not really known.
In sum, 'organic' is not unequivocally safer. It only means that the food item comes to you having abided with some process standards in production, handling, processing and marketing. 'Organic is therefore a process claim, not a product claim,' the authors concluded.
Whether organic food is better would, anyway, depend not on the food item alone but also that total constellation of factors comprising one's genetic inheritance, individual metabolism, diet, overall lifestyle and any existing illnesses.
Beyond the question of whether it is more nutritious and/or safer, buying and eating organic food may simply be part of a broader cultural affinity that includes environmentalism, yoga, vegetarianism, 'fair trade coffee', hybrid cars and so on.
Going organic is part of a trend in which educated individuals reflect upon how their habits may impact society and try to change that conduct in accordance with certain ethical imperatives such as health considerations or green concerns.
It is embedded in an anti-industrialised agriculture sensibility, while its opposite is embodied in the 'upsize me', fast-food consumer. Ironically, the rise of the gentrified culture of ethical eating occurred in tandem with the McDonaldisation of the world. And ironically too, organic farming is now big business, with the world's total land acreage of organic farms doubling between 2000 and 2007.
McDonaldisation is powered by big business which also made high-wage economies possible. And it is such wages that empower yuppies to indulge in organic dining.
Such niceties are not available to the blue-collar slaves of capital. Going organic may affect to be counter-cultural but it is really the privilege of those who profit from the culture of big business.
As British academics Alan Warde and Lydia Martens showed in Eating Out: Social Differentiation, Consumption, And Pleasure, where and what to eat have now become key signifiers of one's socio-economic class. If so, going organic may well be more about wearing a class badge than being pernickety about food.
andyho@sph.com.sg
Daedalus (meaning 'cunning worker' in Greek) was the man who built wings so he and his son Icarus could fly. As Icarus flew too close to the sun, his wings melted and he crashed to earth. Daedalus is a weekly column on the triumphs and challenges of science and technology.
