Going Organic — Hip or Hype? (2 of 3)

March 29, 2008

Organic products are flying off the shelves. Are they really what they claim to be?

In my last post I promised to return with more information on the safety of organic products. In this, the next article of the series, we will hear two sides on this issue, which it turns out, is not a simple one.

The premise: Organic products are better for you and safer. Are they?

Remember that E.coli scare in 2006? Well, that contaminated spinach that killed one woman and hospitalized 29 other people with kidney failure came from one of the largest organic farms in America, Earthbound Farms. In all, the contaminated spinach made nearly 200 sick in 23 states and Canada. What you may not have heard about were the California children that had to be placed on dialysis with permanent organ damage from the same strain of E.coli O157:H7 after consuming raw, un-pasteurized milk or colostrum from the Organic Pastures Dairy of Fresno.

The irony lies in the fact that these victims were all seeking safer food alternatives. They were promised the health benefits of milk and vegetables produced "the way nature intended."

So what happened exactly? This is where the conversation gets tricky.

"After four generations of innovation in agriculture, harvesting, and now bottling, we know that everything really important (freshness, great taste and good health) still begins in the fields." says Earthbound Farms.

"And it’s the fields that are the problem," cites Canada Free Press writer Judi Mcleod.

As John Miller from the National Review reported in 2004:

"Organic foods may be fresh, but they’re also fresh from the manure fields."

Earthbound fertilizes its leafy vegetables with cow manure.

"Most conventional farmers fertilize their food crops with "chemical" fertilizer, and put their livestock manure on feed crops like corn. Organic farmers reject chemical fertilizer. Instead, they compost raw cattle manure for some weeks, hoping that will kill any dangerous organisms that could contaminate the food. Sometimes it doesn’t," say Hudson’s Center for Global Food Issues Dennis T. Avery and Alex A. Avery.

Furthermore, a study by the Center for Global Food Issues found that although organic foods make up about 1 percent of America’s diet, they also account for about 8 percent of confirmed E.coli cases. (The Center for Consumer Freedom, Jan., 2004).

Meanwhile, the Avery’s believe "our objective should be to get the manure away from our food crops. Organic and natural aren’t safer, or more nutritious: Just more expensive, and far more dangerous."

Did I happen to mention that Bolthouse Farms, which bottles three brands of "organic" carrot juice, included three recalled products that same year? Bolthouse Farms 100% Carrot Juice, Earthbound Farm Organic Carrot Juice and President’s Choice Organic 100% Pure Carrot Juice. Two Toronto residents were paralyzed after drinking carrot juice that tested positive for a botulism toxin. Four cases of botulism in the United States have been linked to toxic carrot juice.

California grows about $400 million per year in organic produce–and about half of it comes from just five farms.

And now lettuce has been added to the potential E.coli contamination list. Earthbound fertilizes its leafy vegetables with cow manure.

Wow. So that’s a lot of scary information. What’s the flipside to these arguments?

The Flipside

There is another theory that I stumbled upon to how these products could have become contaminated. I don’t want this post to get too long, so I will refer you to another webpage for the intricate details and I will summarize below.

For the details go here:

A California Organic Spinach Farmer: How E.Coli Gets into Bagged Spinach

For my brief summary keep reading…

Andy Griffin, an organic spinach farmer, discusses an alternative theory to the E.Coli contamination theory offered by the FDA for the spinach contamination of 2006. He says:

Although the victims got sick by eating spinach from a sealed bag it’s wrong to seize on spinach as the culprit in the controversy; it makes more sense to look at the processing and handling of pre-packaged greens in general. Put another way, it’s the harvest procedures that were followed, the pre-washed claim made for the greens, and the bagged environment the greens are in that are the relevant issues, not the specific variety of leafy greens that were actually contaminated at some point during the harvest and post harvest handling.

He puts the blame on a different culprit than manure:

When we harvested baby greens by hand at Riverside Farms the workers dipped their knives periodically in buckets of antiseptic solution to clean them. We were unsophisticated then, compared to the way the industry is today, but we knew that any bacteria on the knife could contaminate the wound in the leaf where it was severed from the plant at the moment of harvest. …If the cutting blade on a harvesting machine isn’t properly cleaned, tons and tons of product can be contaminated by a filthy blade during the course of the day - Not just tons and tons of baby spinach, but tons and tons of ANY PARTICULAR LEAFY GREEN VEGETABLE, ORGANIC, CONVENTIONAL, OR OTHERWISE, that is being harvested.

So are organic products the way to go, or no?

(See the videos below for two professional opinions. First, a pro-organic viewpoint from Naturopath and Board-Certified Clinical Nutritionist David J. Getoff, and next a different take from John Edward Swartzberg, M.D., F.A.C.P., and Chair of the Editorial Board of the University of California, Berkeley).

Ultimately, after reviewing the facts it’s up to the consumer to decide. However, there is some very real data about the benefits of some organic products.

In part 3, the final post in this series, we will be discussing those products. Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion!

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