Forget Organic: Just Eat Those Veggies

One of the more unglamorous, but important, public health victories of our time is the rapidity with which one particular prescription for better living has won almost universal consensus. It is this: People --particularly kids --should consume two to four servings of fruits and three to five portions of vegetables a day.

But lately, this healthful prescription arrives with a mixed, and potentially self-defeating, message. The carrier of that message is the $7-billion organic-foods industry, which routinely denigrates as “unsafe” or “environmentally unfriendly” any food that is not grown locally, seasonally and without pesticides. By doing so, as one school nutrition director puts it, kids --and the rest of us for that matter --end up with the false notion “that the only vegetables and fruits that are truly safe and conscionable to eat are organic.” Faced with the high cost--and just plain weirdness--of a $2 tomato, what kid wouldn’t rather go on a Doritos binge?

Yet the truth about today’s non-organic produce is bright. Science--if not Whole Foods--tells us that mainstream fruits and veggies are safer than ever.

Once upon a time they weren’t, of course. Throughout much of the postwar period, farmers sprayed pesticides as liberally as they used water sucked out of the Owens Valley. Not now. One reason is the rise in popularity of sophisticated integrated pest management (IPM) systems, which minimize but don’t eliminate the use of costly chemicals. Using such practices, farmers here and abroad have cut back dramatically on pesticide and herbicide use. Many have found, to the frank consternation of chemical companies, that a quarter cup of the herbicide Roundup per acre, applied at just the right time, achieves what a quart per acre does when applied indiscriminately.

Consequently, the produce that ends up in your local Ralphs--organic or not--likely won’t have any significant chemical residues. And foreign produce, that other great bugaboo of organic types, looks increasingly clean as well. The most recent report from the USDA’s Pesticide Data Program, for example, shows that imports have quickly reached the low pesticide levels now found on U.S. produce.

For Westsiders who worry that any residue level is unhealthful, particularly for their children, it pays to repeat a single epidemiological fact. As the esteemed journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology recently put it: “During the past 50 years of regulating thousands of substances, there is no known case of toxicity in children from the ingestion of food additives or pesticides that were used in conformity with established tolerances. Accidental exposures, intentional abuse, illegal use, and exposure to applicators or to farm workers explain the entire inventory of cases of human toxicity to pesticides.” And in the April 2000 issue of NeuroToxicology, researchers documented the effects of low-level exposures of young animals to organophosphorous (OP) and pyrethroid insecticides. The scientists found that “young animals are not more sensitive than adults to lower doses of OP or pyrethroid insecticides.”

One reason for that comes from the frontiers of neurology. Toxicologists studying 16 cancer drugs in use by children and adults in phase-one clinical trials found, for example, that “the maximum tolerable dose for children was higher than for adults for 13 of the compounds.” This, the researchers concluded, “may be attributable to higher rates of metabolic or renal clearance.” Kids, it seems, can shed many toxins faster than adults.

The news is similarly encouraging regarding a number of other organic health scares, which have had the cumulative effect of encouraging parents to make bad nutrition decisions. The notion, for example, that hormones in beef and milk will make little Jenny hit puberty by the time she hits her 9th birthday is no longer taken seriously by many of those who first tendered the notion. Moreover, of all the consensus research (wherein scientists of differing persuasions agreed) surveyed by the liberal environmental-toxins scholar Sheldon Krimsky in his new book on the estrogenic effect of chemicals, dietary residues ranked as a nonissue.

On another front, this past March, a comprehensive study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which analyzed the blood and urine of 3,800 kids, found that levels of mercury were so low as to cause many environmental pediatricians to reverse long-held fears about feeding kids fish and seafood.

If trepidation is less warranted in respect to the traditional boogeymen of the food world, what should one think of its heroic organic opposite?

Though there is little disagreement that organic growers often produce a tastier fruit--and that their field workers are safer--there is growing doubt from a public health perspective that its extra culinary and moral kick warrants its three-to fourfold price premium.

For one thing, much of the organic produce currently available is farmed using the same water-intensive, soil-eroding methods long criticized for damaging the environment. (The concern has even erupted among small organic farmers, who protested the trend at a recent meeting of the influential Chef’s Collaborative)

The insistence that organic represents the be-all and end-all eclipses a much more serious public-health threat: food poisoning. The U.S. suffers more than 76 million cases of it every year, an increasingly large percentage of which derive from fresh fruits and vegetables. Instructively, two recent high-publicity food poisonings both came out of the organic trade--one from an Arizona distributor of “natural” unpasteurized orange juice, the other from a Northern California grower of unwashed bean sprouts. Even many liberal food scientists now agree that the organic industry’s focus on dietary residues has diverted far too many USDA inspectors from spotting this real threat to food safety.

What would happen if cheap produce imports were curtailed because of more stringent pesticide regulations? In April 2000, George M. Gray, the deputy director of the Center for Risk Analysis at Harvard University’s School of Public Health, published a state-of-the-art econometric modeling of the issue. Looking at a scenario wherein regulators eliminate all organophosphate pesticides, thereby sending everyone to more expensive organic options, Gray concluded: “Price changes [would] cause food substitutions, less consumption of fruits and vegetables, with a concomitant increase in cancer risk. A nutritional deficiency spread across a large population has serious effects . . .” With this last sentiment, even the ever-vigilant Center for Science in the Public Interest now concurs.

It may seem unfair to beat up on an industry that still plays a small role in the nation’s total food supply. Yet anyone who covers food and public health--or, for that matter, any savvy TV viewer--knows that the organics industry plays a disproportionately powerful role as an instigator of media-born trepidation. Food scares sell.

But they do nothing to get our kids to eat those important five servings a day.