The BBC Headline this morning trumpets Organic food 'not any healthier.' Link.
Immediately, the article admits that you're going to be 30% less likely to be exposed to pesticides if you eat organic foods. So I guess it's "healthy" according to the BBC to down a shot of pesticides with my broccoli. A spoonful of DDT helps the medicine go down, as the old song goes.
Further down in the article, the BBC writes:
None of the human studies ran for longer than two years, making conclusions about long-term outcomes impossible. And all of the available evidence was relatively weak and highly variable - which the authors say is unsurprising because of all the different variables, like weather and soil type, involved.
So it was
very obviously a terrible and inconclusive study, not a study that produced clear data one way or the other!
Wildly varying data doesn't say "Hey! We have a conclusive answer!" It says "well, look at that! We need to do more studies!"
So the headline should have read "Poorly constructed Stanford study on organics completely inconclusive." We're not talking about something that deserves to be front page news in any newspaper, and definitely doesn't deserve to be fluffed up by some BBC author who thinks the study is conclusive.
And anyway, who eats organic food because of its higher nutrient value? I eat organic food when I can afford it because it's less likely to be poisonous.
George Orwell wrote in Road to Wigan pier:
On the day when King George V’s body passed through London on its way to Westminster, I happened to be caught for an hour or two in the crowd in Trafalgar Square. It was impossible, looking about one then, not to be struck by the physical degeneracy of modern England. The people surrounding me were not working-class people for the most part; they were the shopkeeper—commercial-traveller type, with a sprinkling of the well-to-do. But what a set they looked! Puny limbs, sickly faces, under the weeping London sky! Hardly a well-built man or a decent-looking woman, and not a fresh complexion anywhere. As the King’s coffin went by, the men took off their hats, and a friend who was in the crowd at the other side of the Strand said to me afterwards, ‘The only touch of colour anywhere was the bald heads.’ Even the Guards, it seemed to me—there was a squad of guardsmen marching beside the coffin—were not what they used to be. Where are the monstrous men with chests like barrels and moustaches like the wings of eagles who strode across my child-hood’s gaze twenty or thirty years ago? Buried, I suppose, in the Flanders mud. In their place there are these pale-faced boys who have been picked for their height and consequently look like hop-poles in overcoats—the truth being that in modern England a man over six feet high is usually skin and bone and not much else. If the English physique has declined, this is no doubt partly due to the fact that the Great War carefully selected the million best men in England and slaughtered them, largely before they had had time to breed. But the process must have begun earlier than that, and it must be due ultimately to un-healthy ways of living, i.e. to industrialism. I don’t mean the habit of living in towns—probably the town is healthier than the country, in many ways—but the modern industrial technique which provides you with cheap substitutes for everything. We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun.
My mother is a health fanatic. We weren't allowed to have Doritos in my house because they contained monosodium glutamate (msg). Low and behold, after eating healthy, mostly chemical-free food in my mother's house for 18 years, I was one of those monstrous men with a barrel chest (though I've chosen to go sans-moustache.) Aside from an injured ankle caused by not wearing Ankle supporting shoes when I should have (flip flops are the devil,) I'm physically healthier than a lot of people my age. Anecdotal, I know, but I don't think there's been a study of children raised on food that isn't processed. And there should be.
It's not necessarily what's on the label that hurts you. Yeah, that stuff isn't necessarily good for you (to this day, overly processed bread products make me ill) it's the stuff that they sprayed on the crops, or the fertilizer they fed the crops, or the pesticides they used when the crops were in storage. It's what leeches into your food from the industrial environment its produced in that makes you sick. That stuff isn't on the label.
When they produce cows milk filled with hormones and antibiotics, it's not on the label. When they fluff your chicken by injecting it with salt water and chemicals to make it look bigger and weigh more, it's not on the label (but it's usually soaking in weird juice.) When they make "spices" like saffron that are artificial chemical substitutes, it's usually not on the label. When they genetically modify their crops to produce their own weird chemical pesticides designed to make insects sterile, it's not on the label.
I'm not particularly worried about whether organic food is going to have more omega 3s or iron than non-organic food, BBC, I'm worried about whether monsanto has been filling it with horrible carcinogens that aren't on the damned label.
Now I'm not against using pesticides or fertilizer or genetically modifying corn so that it can grow in an African desert and feed starving people, but I do want every single one of those things to be thoroughly studied, examined under a microscope, cleared for human consumption, and then put on the damned label so that we can make an informed decision about whether it goes into our family's bodies or not.
When I can afford organic, I get organic, because I know that there are going to be fewer off-label chemicals in organic food than there are going to be in non-organic food. I buy fresh food as opposed to processed food because there are fewer steps by which Monsanto can legally leech it's garbage into my food without telling me.
BBC, when food is 30% less likely to expose you to chemical pesticides, to say that it's 'not any healthier' than food which comes in a pesticide marinade is complete nonsense.
Our food is killing us. It's giving us cancer. It's making us fat. The way it's made is killing our ecosystem and killing our farms. It's sucking up our water supply. We need to move to a system where we locally produce healthy food for everyone. We need to put every single chemical that ends up in your food right on the label, whether it has been intentionally added or not. We have a right to know what's in the food we consume.
There are a ton of other issues to be talked about here, and I'll admit, I don't have all of the facts. I grew up thinking that a lot of what was in the food on the shelf in the grocery store was poisonous. Those instincts have served me pretty well this far.
I want the data. I'm doing my own research at this point, because when someone like the BBC goes this far afield, it means that it's our job to get the facts out. Again.
Treat the comment section here like an open thread. If you've got data or diaries on the problems of food production, its impact on the environment and on human health, and sustainable solutions, drop it here.