1. Humus Worshippers
The Origins of Organic Food
The birthright of all living things is health. This law is true
for soil, plant, animal and man: the health of these four is one
connected chain. Any weakness or defect in the health of any
earlier link in the chain is carried on to the next and succeeding
links, until it reaches the last, namely, man.
—Sir Albert Howard, 1945
In 1998, Chensheng Lu, a researcher at the Department of Health at the University of Washington, began testing children in the Seattle area to see whether he could detect pesticide residues in their urine. He was looking for signs of organophosphates, a class of chemicals closely related to nerve agents developed during World War II, which subsequently came into widespread use as pesticides in a far less potent form, eventually accounting for half of all insecticide use in the United States. The chemicals inactivate enzymes crucial to the nervous and hormonal system, which, at high enough levels of exposure, can lead to symptoms as various as mild anxiety or respiratory paralysis. Long-term exposure increases the risk of neurobehavioral damage, cancer, and reproductive disorders.
Lu and his colleagues thought that children living near farms would have the highest levels of pesticide residues, since they were subject to drift from nearby fields. But the 110 two- to five-year-olds he studied in the Seattle metropolitan area turned out to have higher levels of pesticide metabolites (the markers produced when the body metabolizes the chemicals). This suggested that food residues or home pesticide use, not drift, were the primary path for exposure.
The study also had a curious anomaly: One child out of the hundreds they had studied had no signs of any pesticide metabolites.
“It was kind of surprising,” said Lu, who now directs the Pesticide Exposure and Risk Laboratory at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta. When the researchers interviewed the parents, they learned the family ate organic food almost exclusively.
This provided the first hint of scientific evidence that an organic food diet reduced pesticide exposure in children. Another study looked at pesticide residue data from 94,000 food samples from 1994–1999 and found organic food had about two-thirds less residues than conventional food. This showed that organic consumers were getting what they paid for—lower pesticides in food—but the study looked only at what was in the overall food supply, not what people ate. By identifying metabolites in the urine—through a technique known as biomonitoring—the researchers had evidence of pesticides children had actually consumed.
Cynthia Curl, another scientist then at the University of Washington, followed up on Lu’s finding and published the results in March 2003. She showed that a group of children who ate mostly organic food had one-sixth the pesticide metabolites of those who ate nonorganic food, but the study could not identify the pesticides, or determine their risk, since many different ones produced the same markers. The study only concluded that eating organic food reduced the children’s risk of exposure to harmful pesticides from an “uncertain” level to a “negligible” one.
Lu, with funding from the Environmental Protection Agency, has since buttressed this conclusion. When a research team he led substituted organic foods for a conventional diet in children for five days, they could find no evidence of pesticide metabolites in their urine. When they reintroduced conventional foods, the metabolites returned. The paper concluded that an organic food diet provided “a protective mechanism” against pesticide exposure in a manner that “is dramatic and immediate.”
Although the potential risks incurred by pesticide exposures over a lifetime are unknown, people who choose to eat organic for this reason have, in effect, decided to opt out of an ongoing social experiment into whether pesticides are safe. Given the number of pesticides that were once freely used but have since been removed from the market for health reasons, this is not a wild or unreasonable choice. For children the reasoning seems even clearer.
Chemicals are up to ten times more toxic in the developing bodies of infants and children than in adults, according to a 1993 report by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a nonpartisan, government-funded research body. At ages one to five, children also eat three to four times more food per pound of body weight than adults, and their diet is far more concentrated (infants consume seventeen times more apple juice than the U.S. average, for example). So not only are children subject to a higher dose of pesticides, but the chemicals also have a greater impact on their bodies. That conclusion, reached in the NAS study, led to an overhaul of U.S. pesticide laws in 1996, charging the EPA to consider the impact of pesticides on children, a reevaluation process that is still going on.
“If you can reduce some risk from some usage or pathway, you actually reduce your overall risk,” Lu said. “And it just so happens, for kids, the majority of exposure comes from dietary intake. So the benefit can be quite overwhelming.”
The curious thing about this conclusion was that the people who were buying organic food—largely women, who make most household purchasing decisions, and especially mothers—already assumed it was true. It was common sense. If you ate food from organic farms that shunned toxic pesticides, less residue would end up in your body. You might not know what substance you were avoiding, or what the actual risk was, but that didn’t really matter. Why consume pesticides at all if they added no nutritional value and might be detrimental to health? And why not support a farmer who had figured out how to produce food without them? This wasn’t a giant leap of faith but a conclusion consumers could easily reach, even if it required them to pay more for food.
amily: 'Times New Roman'" Food scares have simply reinforced this conclusion, since they feed on consumer unease with the conventional food system. This became apparent in 1989, when CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a report about Alar, a pesticide that the government kept on the market even though it was a probable human carcinogen. Sprayed on apples, the pesticide was converted into a potential carcinogen when apples were heat-processed into juice and applesauce, products largely consumed by children. In the spotlight, the EPA banned the substance, saying that “long-term exposure to Alar poses unacceptable risks to public health.” The entire episode created, as Newsweek put it, “A Panic For Organic,” which was a mixed blessing for the young industry, since stores soon faced shortages of organic food and fraudulent items appeared, leading Congress to pass national organic food regulations in 1990.