News broke last week that a group of British scientists have a forthcoming article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition claiming organically-grown produce to be no more nutritious than conventionally-grown produce. Food activists, bloggers and academics alike, are throwing a fit. Many have responded with eloquent and impassioned rebuttals, such as this one by Marion Nestle published in the Huffington Post, this one from the director of the Soil Association, or this radio interview with Paula Crossfield of Civil Eats and Mark Kastel of the Cornucopia Institute. Some have dismissed the report as backed by corporate agribusiness to serve its own interests, while others deride the article’s narrow definition of “organic.” But the biggest criticism is one that is gathering steam in the media—that this report is asking the wrong question from the start.
Here’s the thing: organically-grown foods have never been proven to be more nutritious than non-organically grown foods. An organically-grown apple can boast to be a lot of things over its conventional counterpart, such as grown without synthetic fertilizers or pesticides. But never has that organic apple legally claimed to have more vitamins than a non-organic apple, though wouldn’t it be nice for us eaters to be able to assume this. In fact, organic standards have always been, and despite being watered down from their former version, are still about growing practices not about what is or is not contained within the food item itself. The organic label doesn’t even guarantee the apple free of skin-adhering pesticide residue—no apples, after all, are immune to pesticide drift from neighboring farms, even if the conventional farms are 25 feet away.
So what, then, are we buying when we pay a bit (or a lot) extra for organic food? If you’re following the mainstream news portraying organic agriculture caught with its pants down, you might come to believe you’re paying for naught.
The authors of this article, which was commissioned by the UK’s Food Standards Agency, didn’t actually complete any new tests on nutrient composition themselves. Instead they complied a rather large literature review of all studies that have compared the nutrient composition of organic and conventional produce. From an initial 91,989 articles published between January 1958 and February 2008 that compared organic and conventional produce, the authors whittled their study down to an assessment of 11 articles. That’s right, 91,978 scientific articles were dismissed on the basis of not being written in English, not being peer-reviewed, not addressing a relevant health outcome, or being concerned with pesticide contamination rather than nutrient composition. The authors conclude their review of these articles by saying that some organic produce has more nutrients than conventional, some has less and some has the same. Not exactly tabloid fodder as it’s been made out to be.
But yet it has been. Perhaps the media frenzy surrounding the UK report is an attempt by agribusiness to snatch some ground back from companies that have been profiting handsomely from the growing demand for organic food. Or perhaps it’s strategically paving the way to convince the UK once and for all, and the US as well, that we have no reason to worry about our own health when genetically-modified foods (GMOs) have thoroughly pervaded our food supply. Food products that are labeled “USDA Organic” can’t legally have genetically-modified ingredients in them. Though this article, and the ensuing debate, doesn’t address GMOs, it may have been a way to suggest the safety of conventional produce for the public and by extension, GMOs.
But more importantly, I think this is an opportunity for us to refocus, reclaim even, the discussion surrounding organic agriculture. It needs to be about the earth, not just about the produce that it yields and the vitamins we’re ingesting. We absolutely are paying for something, if not the guarantee that those organic grapes have more antioxidants than their pesticide-coated cousins. It’s a public good that we’re paying for with that label, a shot at staving off the depletion of our soil and water resources by entrusting farmers to use these organic production methods. Allowing organic food to be spun otherwise — even by the organic food marketers themselves — could prove to be much more dangerous to our, and the planet’s, health than that so-called nutrient-deficient organic banana you’re reaching for.
jenny goldstein
A native of New York and current resident of Santa Monica, CA, Jenny Goldstein is also a doctoral student in geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. She writes on and researches the interactions between local and global food systems, the politics of taste within ...
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Mike Elgan says:
I'm sorry, but you are mistaken.
Many studies have shown organic foods to be much higher in a wide range of nutrients than non-organic:
http://bit.ly/yievX
http://bit.ly/msaUt
http://bit.ly/arUOn
http://bit.ly/1m5kLC
Indeed, the study that you're commenting on itself found such differences in nutrient values. They simply chose to call them insignificant:
http://htxt.it/TrlA
Mike Elgan
jenny goldstein says:
Thanks for your comment, Mike-- the point I'm making here is not that organic food has less nutrient value, because I believe indeed, much of it has much more for reasons attributable to healthier soils, etc. and there are certainly studies out there that counter the one discussed in this article. Rather, drawing this kind of attention to the nutrient value of organic food is irresponsible to the intentions of organic agriculture, which focuses on growing practices instead of solely on the end product.
timur says:
And then something else to add: How are you/we/they conceptualizing "health"? If you imagine that "health" is something that a discrete, individual, and clearly bounded individual can have (and has a right to?), then it might be possible to argue in some reductive way that eating organic is just the same as eating non-organic. But I also think that way of conceptualizing health - kind of the same way that we could calories - ignores the way in which health can (and should) be conceptualized as something that doesn't stop at the skin. I think Nick's work on the "extensible body" is really good in this respect, insofar as he's trying to think of ways in which the scale of the "healthy body" has changed dramatically. And I think that your last paragraph is spot on - one of the things that organic food offers is a way to frame our eating as something other than an individual act. Whether we like it or not, eating is always public. Right?
Tania Hershman says:
Excellent post, your points are very well made and, in my opinion, spot on!
jcm52 says:
I'm concerned a little by the apparent criticisms of the original scientific study in your article. A few comments:
first, the science the study focused on was whether the nutrients are different. You've correctly addressed that point: this is obviously only part of the story for whether it is 'healthier'. It's not necessarily the scientists' fault that the media has taken their work out of context. It is clear that this article does not address things such as pesticides. It was focused on nutrients to keep it a manageable problem. Obviously the issue of pesticides should be addressed as well in another survey article. It probably has already been done, and maybe the media even picked up on it then. But this new study is flavor of the month for the media...
second, be clear that this was intended to be a survey article. To address the nutrient comparison of all organic foods with non-organic equivalents is far too big of a project to do by one research group. So the standard approach in science is that once sufficiently many individual studies have been made, someone collects them into a survey article. The fact that they didn't do their own tests is standard, and not a reflection of their bias/ability. Perhaps you didn't mean to imply that the study was deficient in this, but it was the impression I received.
third, because this is a survey article, it did a word search to find all the articles on which to base its study. If you plug in a term into google, you'll find thousands of papers. They then threw out a bunch of the articles. If you look up 'slim' online, do you read the Dutch webpages on page 10 that are talking about some intelligent person? Since you criticized throwing out the papers that weren't peer-reviewed, I want to note that is a VERY good reason to discard a supposedly scientific study. If you do a scientific study, you publish it - if you can. What that means is that you send your paper to a journal, the journal sends it to other scientists who evaluate it for whether you've done decent science (this is called peer-review). If you can't convince them that you've done a good scientifically sound study, it doesn't get published. My own experience with reading peer reviewed papers suggests that if you want to publish something and you've halfway done it right, there will be a journal willing to publish it. So if these studies couldn't find a journal willing to publish them, odds are they aren't scientific.
All that being said: as a scientist, my own feeling is that this survey article is probably correct, the difference in the nutrients they focused on is not significant. Indeed, the whole organic process doesn't change anything that should really affect whether a tomato has more or less vitamin D.
Am I still going to buy organic? Absolutely. Exactly for the reason you point out. I've never gone organic because I expect more nutrients. I've bought organic because I expect fewer pesticides and more environmentally friendly runoff from the farm. The organic process does affect how likely that tomato is to be covered in pesticides and whether the runoff causes algae blooms that damage fisheries.
M. Davis says:
Hasn't it occurred to anyone to ask why they did not just commission a new study. New testing. What a bunch of crap! Smells like pig manure to me! Anyone with an ounce of common sense will realize that a fruit or vegetable grown on organic soil will have more nutrients than one grown on depleted, chemical laden soil.
Terry Pollock says:
In speaking of the media fest surrounding the latest “scientific” review article claiming organic foods are no more nutritious than conventional foods, the author states that “Food products that are labeled “USDA Organic” can’t legally have genetically-modified ingredients in them. Though this article, and the ensuing debate, doesn’t address GMOs, it may have been a way to suggest the safety of conventional produce for the public and by extension, GMOs.” Do YOU know what a GMO is? Most people do not. That ignorance is the safety net of not only agribusiness, but of the pharmaceutical, finance, conventional medical industry, you name it! Censorship of information such as the FDA ruling that genetically-modified foods should not be labeled for consumers is the single biggest cause of the rampant confusion and mistrust out there.
There ARE standards for organic foods which, at the very least, strictly limit use of the synthetic chemicals and fertilizers we don’t need to ingest anyway. This fact alone makes organic foods better and as the author states, was not even a question that was asked in the large review article in the American Journal of Nutrition that is the center of this current food frenzy.
Study organic growing practices. Read!! It’s your body, so do your homework! Think about what has sustained humans for thousands of years. We have not yet evolved to need daily chemical cocktails. (Although we act as guinea pigs when we flippantly take an average of 8-10 prescription drugs per day!!) Instead, we run on molecules with which we have evolved over those thousands of years, substances which our bodies inherently KNOW how to use. Common sense tells most people to try and eat purer food.
The author also mentions another huge benefit of organic production – it’s way easier on the environment. Most energy use in the US goes to producing food in the conventional way – because most of that food is destined to become a food product – a refined and processed version of a recognizable vegetable, fruit, nut, seed or grain, or livestock, poultry or fish. Organic eating is inherently about eating food that your grandparents and great-grandparents ate – and that was before there was a need to distinguish a natural growing system. After World War II there was a lot of comfort with new chemicals in this country - better living through chemistry. But it went too far, and basic health was forgotten by all its promoters.
The only way out of this mess is for each person to commit to growing food, some way, some how. One pot of tomato plants is a good start. You will find it’s the most natural activity in the world for you – because most of your ancestors were damned good at it.
Lisa L says:
More nutritious or not, is TASTES better. Yes, it does.
I just got back from Haiti (where everything is organic by default) and the food, especially the meat, tastes 100% better, as everything is raised naturally. So there.