I had intended to start in on costs for food, but I realized that a better place to begin this time is on food quality.  It does not matter much if your food is cheaper if it is poor quality as well.

As I mentioned in part 1, no one would argue that if you pick your own produce or get it from a nearby neighbor, farm stand, or farmers market you will in general get better quality, in terms of taste and nutrition, food than what you can generally find in the local supermarket.  This is almost entirely due to the fact that it is fresher, not to how it was grown.

As I mentioned in my last food post, this difference essentially disappears in most parts of the country once you are out of season for a given food in your area, which in Vermont is far more of the year than anything is in season.  It is hard to imagine that home preserved food is more nutritious than fresh produce coming from other parts of the world where they are currently in season.

Perhaps local and organically grown foods are more nutritious and that benefit persists beyond harvest and into storage so that stored local, organic foods are still better for you than shipped, fresh, conventional foods.

However this does not appear to be the case.  A meta-analysis of more than 200 studies, the results of which were published last year by Stanford University, found there is little difference between organic and non-organic foods.

After analyzing the data, the researchers found little significant difference in health benefits between organic and conventional foods. No consistent differences were seen in the vitamin content of organic products, and only one nutrient — phosphorus — was significantly higher in organic versus conventionally grown produce (and the researchers note that because few people have phosphorous deficiency, this has little clinical significance).

A month later the New York Times published an article calling the Stanford study “flawed” because it focused on nutrition (specifically vitamin content), apparently they accept the lack of difference in this regard, rather than why, according to the author, most people buy organic foods in the first place: to avoid pesticide residue and antibiotic resistant bacteria.  Their point is that a true definition of “nutritious” must include these factors as it doesn’t matter if their are more vitamins in the produce if other things are poisoning you, a point I have no argument with.

One of the big supposed benefits of organic foods is that they don’t use “pesticides” in their production.   In the sense of a pesticide as “a chemical used for killing pests” this is obviously false, as organic growers have to deal with pests the same as conventional growers.  As it is commonly used, pesticides refers to scientifically created chemicals as opposed to “natural” ones.  This of course does not necessarily mean that organic foods are safer in this regards.  As Pierre Desrocher points out in “The Locavore’s Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000 Mile Diet“:

This is not to say, of course, that organic growers to don’t use pesticides of all kinds (pests apparently fee no urge to spare organic crops because their produces are nicer to them), but rather that they make abundant use of “botanical extracts” and “rockdusts” which are nothing but old-fashioned pesticides like pyrethrum and copper suflate that were around at the time of the Model T and are much less effective than pesticides created later through scientific research. (Rigorous test have shown that many pesticides used by organic producers display higher toxicity for mammals, persist longer in the environment, and do more collateral damage to non-pests.)

In any event pesticides are not a big contributor to health issues.  In his review of Thomas Degregori’s Agriculture and Modern Technology: a Defense, journalist William Kay points out the following.

Degregori’s focus is food. He zooms in on what is best described as “Pesticide-Residue Molehill” versus “Germ Mountain”. Ingesting trace pesticides on food is not a significant health risk. Field-hands and others working with barrels of concentrated pesticide are at risk. Statistics on pesticide poisoning are completely skewed by the inclusion of both suicide-by-pesticide attempts and incidences of accidental drinking of pesticides. Emergency wards are not filled with people who have eaten herbicide residues on store bought produce.

On the other hand, emergency wards are busy helping people who have eaten germs or funguses with their lunch. Degregori cites a Center for Disease Control and Prevention (1999) study which used a variety of surveillance systems. They concluded: “food borne diseases cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States each year”. Salmonella, listeria and toxoplasma are the worst of a catalogue of toxic food borne bugs. (3) In addition to germs there are natural poisons secreted by crop diseases. The scariest are “aflatoxins” emitted by a fungus common to corn, rye and peanuts. Aflatoxins are 100 times more carcinogenic than PCBs and “have brought untold misery to humans throughout history”.(4) Other grain moulds like rust and smut release toxins causing insanity, birth defects and immune system disruption. (5)

The issue here is “Food Safety”. Public attention should be rapt on the micro-organisms in our food, not pesticide traces.

Pierre Desrochers mentions listeria (or rather listeriosis, the disease caused by listeria) in his chapter on food safety.

Sadly, this chapter was being completed as the culprit in the deadliest outbreak of foodborne illness (25 deaths and counting) in a quarter of a century in the United States had just been identified.  Not surprisingly, the guilty party in a multi-state outbreak of listeriosis turned out not to be a large agri-business plant with top-of-the-line food safety technologies, but a “pesticide free” and “four generation strong,” family-operated cantaloupe farm located in Southeast Colorado, Jensen Farms, that not only marketed its output at local farmers’ markets, but also had benefited from the “buy local” campaigns of large retailers in the area, such as King Soopers, Safeway, Wal-Mart, and Sam’s Club.

From all of the above we are left with a couple of conclusions:

• Organic and local foods do not have appreciably greater vitamin content than conventional foods.
• Organic and local foods are unlikely to be safer, statistically*, than conventionally grown foods.
• Freshness trumps source or production method when it comes to nutritional content and taste.

* I love what Dr. Leonard Peikoff says in regards to statistics, which is something along the lines of “the use of statistics is a measure of our ignorance of a situation.”  So statistics are useful when you have to make a decision about a situation but you don’t have any real knowledge of the actual things involved and it is too costly to obtain it.  So for example you might rely on statistics on the safety of air travel given that you cannot possibly find out the specifics of the plane, crew, airport and etc of your flight.  In the context of foods, it is certainly possible that specific local producers, organic or not, may have superior methods that result in better nutrition and safety than is usual, but in the aggregate, organic and local produce is unlikely to be better once freshness has been taken into account.