ORGANIC CRUSH

HOMEGROWN HARVEST COULD BE OUR SALVATION

FINLAND, Minn. — The current state of America’s food industry reads like a litany of unmitigated disasters. Consider just a few of the most recent events:

>> The discovery of contaminated food imports — chiefly from China — with the potential for sickening and, in some cases, killing, tens of thousands of unwary consumers.

>> Congress once again bypassing sensible agricultural reforms and doling out billons of dollars in misguided subsidies to giant companies engaging in industrial-strength agriculture.

>> A massive bio-fuels boondoggle enticing farmers to grow corn for ethanol rather than food and, thus, sending supermarket prices soaring.

—Widespread droughts and pest infestations fostered by an unstable climate threatening huge crop losses at harvest time.

>> Degraded soils and contaminated waterways as more and more family farms succumb to Big Ag conglomerates.

>> Spiraling epidemics of diet-related obesity, heart disease and cancer spawned by the food industry’s huckstering of fast food and junk snacks.

Fortunately, there are changes on the horizon. Having connected the dots in this patchwork of inconvenient truths, millions of Americans now are voting with their consumer dollars for foods and products that are healthy, locally produced, and eco-friendly.

Organic food and farmers markets are booming. Pesticide-free lawns and gardens, green buildings, solar panels, wind generators, “buy local” networks, and bike paths are sprouting. A critical mass is waking up to the fact that we must green our diets and lifestyles, drastically reduce petroleum use and greenhouse gas pollution, re-stabilize the climate, and heal ourselves before it’s too late.

For 10,000 years locally based family farmers and ranchers have managed to grow and distribute healthy food, and ample feed and fiber, largely without the use of petroleum-based chemical fertilizers, toxic pesticides, animal drugs, or energy-intensive irrigation, processing, and long-distance transportation.

In 1945 most of the U.S.’s 6 million family farmers were still rotating their crops and cultivating a wide variety of fruits, grains, beans, and vegetables — organically, fertilizing with natural compost, and generally practicing sustainable farming methods they had learned from their parents and grandparents.

By 1945, as part of the war effort, Americans were growing a full 42 percent of our vegetables and fruits in their backyards, schoolyards, and community Liberty Gardens.

The nutritious, usually non-processed foods that we cooked for our family meals were purchased from locally owned grocers who stocked their shelves with a wide variety of items — typically grown or raised within a 100 mile radius of our communities.

In the 1950s the average American household spent 22 percent of our household income for fresh, locally produced food.

By today’s standards this post-war generation was relatively healthy in terms of low rates of diet-related diseases such as cancer — now striking 48 percent of U.S. men and 38 percent of U.S. women — not to mention heart disease, obesity, diabetes, food allergies, birth defects, and learning disabilities.

Sixty years later we have a Fast Food Nation spending a mere 11 percent of our household-income for food, gorging ourselves on the industrialized world’s cheapest and most contaminated fare. Some 78 million cases of food poisoning are reported in this country every year.

The good news is that there is a solution at hand. Turning back to the time-tested practices of local, eco-friendly, organic food and farming will go a long way toward restoring our health and the health of the planet.

Organic and local farms can dramatically reduce energy use in the agricultural sector by 30-50 percent while safely sequestering in the soil enormous amounts of greenhouses gases. It’s time for a change before it’s too late.

WHY TURN YOUR BACK ON CHEAP, SAFE FOOD?

AMES, Iowa — Public interest in the environment is increasing and the news is full of stories about food safety. Those developments have led many to push for a return to small organic farms.

Such farms do have certain advantages, and are committed to sustainable practices, but there is no guarantee that organic farms are better for the environment or food safety.

Organic farms ban the use of pesticides and genetically modified organisms, minimizing inadvertent effects on other organisms. However, whether such avoidance makes organic production “better” for the environment is largely a matter of personal priorities.

For the most part, these chemicals, when used properly, don’t pose any net threat to the environment. In fact, many objections to their use are philosophical in nature, rather than scientific.

Further, the required soil conservation practices are not unique to organic production. Many traditional growers use the same practices, even though not required, because of the associated soil fertility and erosion mitigation benefits.

And some types of organic food, such as poultry, require more energy to produce than their conventional counterparts. Production of organic milk requires more land input and generates more carbon dioxide emissions.

Some may argue that organic production means more local food, thus cutting down the environmental impacts of the associated “food miles.”

But a recent study from the United Kingdom’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs suggests that for some foods, global production might have a smaller environmental footprint than local production. While global products are transported long distances, they are also produced and transported in very large quantities, creating positive economies of scale.

Purely local food production also is limited to only those crops well-suited to being grown in the local environment. This means a considerably diminished variety of foods for most consumers, and many organic foods are still transported long distances for this very reason.

Nor is it true that organic foods are necessarily a safer and healthier option than conventionally grown food. In a recent analysis of government data on fruit, vegetables and meats, Consumer Reports found that foods such as asparagus and bananas, even when treated with pesticides, do not tend to contain detectable levels of pesticides anyway.

While the concept of any pesticides in or on our food sounds scary, the majority of conventional foods have no detectable pesticide residues.

The FDA has repeatedly found that America’s dietary intakes of these chemicals are well within international and Environmental Protection Agency standards. There is also the possibility of disease outbreaks from any food; the spinach responsible for last year’s E. coli outbreak was grown on a small organic farm.

A comprehensive 2002 review of scientific research found that with the possible exception of nitrate content, there is no strong evidence that organic and conventional foods differ in concentrations of various nutrients.

Subsequent reports by the French Food Safety Agency and the Swedish National Food Administration also concluded that there is no difference in terms of food safety and nutrition.

In a recent study at the University of California at Davis, organically grown tomatoes were observed to have more vitamin C, but no significant differences were found between conventional and organic bell peppers.

Surely, changes can be made to conventional food production systems to produce food that is friendlier to the environment, such as conversion from one or two crops in rotation to more diversified farming systems.

And we should continue to investigate sustainable farming practices. But the public should understand that conversion to small organic farms will not necessarily have notable environmental and food-safety benefits.