What Would Be "A Food Movement Worth Of The Name?"

Back in October of 2012, author Michael Pollan wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times  in which he said the vote on California Proposition 37 would show whether or not the “Food Movement” had developed into “a movement worthy of the name.”  Proposition 37 failed for good reasons, but Pollan has raised a good question: 

What would a food movement worthy of the name look like?

Food is a tremendously important topic –necessary for survival, but critical in many other ways too.  Our diets influence our health in profound ways.  Food is also an integral component of culture, history and religion.  Food can be a source of great enjoyment and is an important medium for family and broader social interaction.  A worthy “Food Movement” focused on a topic of this importance should have at least the following positive goals:

•      The alleviation of hunger in the world.

•      Making sure that there is a safe, affordable and nutritious food supply

•      Helping people make good food choices for optimal health

•      Encouraging food production systems which are sustainable, just, and which have a minimal environmental impact

I’m sure that many who consider themselves part of the “Food Movement” aspire to these goals, but some of those who write, speak and blog for this movement tend to focus on what they are against more than what they are for.  Additionally, some writers are anti-scientific, inclined towards conspiracy-theory-thinking, and inclined to incite fear more than understanding.  

The Food Movement's Least Worthy Tendency

However, I believe that antipathy towards farmers is the least worthy characteristic of the current “Food Movement.”

If you reflect on the positive goals listed above, most are outcomes that can never be achieved without the critical contribution of those who actually produce the food.  By this I mean those that produce the 98+% of our food that does not come from small, local or organic farms.  While there are some foods for which localness is a real advantage, the fact that different foods tend to be produced in specific regions is because it makes the most sense to do so in terms of productivity, quality, and risk. Scientific and statistical evidence shows that organic is much less productive, and that it is not expanding in terms of acreage or production at least in our own country.  Organic is growing, but only in cost.

When many food movement advocates talk about farmers they tend to do so wielding epithets via terms, like “big,”  “factory”, “industrial,” “chemical,” or “corporate.”  They tend to imply negative or malicious or irresponsible motives.   Overall, they write about farmers in a way that indicates that they don’t actually know any of them.  I don’t think it is a good feature of any movement to dismiss broad groups with no real knowledge of those they are talking about.

What Modern, Large-Scale Farmers Are Really Like

I wish many of these writers could have the privilege to meet some of the farmers I have met over the years. Examples would be a grain producer in North Dakota with a 12,000-acre farm whose “office” is the kitchen table or the 5,000-acre grain grower in Kansas whose “office” was a desk in the corner of the machine shed with a brand new runt calf under a heat lamp next to it.  These are family farms operated by an individual or two brothers with maybe one hired hand and some family help at busy times of the year.  Between the economics, amazing equipment and the steady decline in the farming populations, this is modern farming, and it is just as noble an endeavor as ever before. 

I wish these writers could meet farm managers who work at multi-thousand acre vineyards or orchard companies in California that are actually “corporate farms”.   Like the grain farmers, these are all examples of technically sophisticated, business-smart, environmentally aware, generous and friendly folks who farm today.  Well under 1% of our population is directly involved in farming today.  Those who do are worthy of recognition, not demonization.

Farmers take on enormous economic risks each growing season with so many factors outside of their control (weather, commodity prices, pest outbreaks, new regulations…).   Rather than being armchair critics, it would be wise for Food Movement folks to assume that if farmers do something, there is probably a pretty good reason.  If they apply pesticides, it is because pests and their damage are real, and that failing to control them would compromise the production efficiency, quality and safety of their crop.  If farmers grow a certain crop or a biotech improved version of that crop it is because that is their most rational economic and risk/management choice.  The companies that sell seeds, equipment, chemicals or fertilizers to farmers can only do so if they create real value for their customers. Farmers are not stupid.  They only stay in business if they make good purchase decisions.   The products that famers buy support private investment in the development of better seed, better equipment and better crop protection chemicals.  There is nothing sinister about this.  It benefits farmers and thus, indirectly, all of us.

The Farmers Most Worthy of Food Movement Support

There are a great many “conventional farmers” who are on the cutting edge of environmentally friendly farming.  They use best practices like no-till farming and cover cropping to build soil quality and reduce off-site pollution. They use integrated pest management; fertilization via precision-variable-rate application for non-irrigated crops, or “spoon feeding” of nutrients via irrigation; or controlled wheel traffic (GPS and beyond) to avoid soil compaction and to reduce nitrous oxide emissions (greenhouse gas).   A “food movement worthy of the name” would be allied with this major group of progressive farmers.  Instead of railing at the farm community as a whole or at the companies that supply progressive farmers what they need, a worthy food movement might be brainstorming ways to change the farmland lease and credit systems which don’t encourage the sort of long-term thinking that is required for farming in the most sustainable fashion. 

Farmers are not the problem when it comes to important things about food or about legitimate goals of a worthy Food Movement.  Farmers are a critical part of the solution.

You are welcome to comment here and/or to write me at savage.sd@gmail.com

Pesticide Residues on Organic: What Do We Know?

Are there really less pesticide residues on organic crops?  The answer might not be as simple as you think.

A few weeks ago it was announced that for the first time in the history of USDA-Organic, there will be mandatory pesticide residue testing starting in 2013.  This was always a theoretical possibility, but a government audit of certifiers showed that it essentially never happened.  Now it will, at least to some extent (something like 5% of operations)

I wrote to the contact person at USDA to ask this question:

"will this new testing program look for any residues of the pesticides that are allowed on organic crop and thus applied frequently?"

Why Ask This Question?

Most consumers believe (erroneously) that organic crops are not sprayed with any pesticides at all.  That is not true, and the criterion for what can be sprayed on organic has nothing to do with relative risk - it is simply based on whether the pesticide is deemed "natural."  Knowing what is actually sprayed on organic crops, I was particularly interested in the copper-based fungicides because they are rather toxic by modern standards, and about Bt, protein insecticides because it would be helpful to calm people freaked out about Bt-biotech crops to be able to compare the exposure to this ultra-safe material when they probably consume farm more that is sprayed on crops vs when it is expressed by the crop.

Unfortunately, I learned that this new testing program is only there to encourage compliance with the organic rules, not to document anything about relative residue levels.  There will be no testing for organically approved pesticides.  In fact there won't be any public data-base generated and the sampling will be at the discretion of certifiers - not random.

This leaves us with the same situation we have had for a long time.  Organic advocates and marketers make regular claims about the advantage of organic with regard to pesticide residues, and yet there is no actual data to support that claim - at least not for the US.

But Didn't That Stanford Study Compare Residues?

Remember the recent "Stanford Meta-Study" comparing organic and conventional that stirred so much controversy?  They found lots of studies about nutrient content, but in their extensive search of the scientific literature they were only able to find 9 studies that compared pesticide residues in organic and conventional.  Only one of those was even from the US and it was from the mid 1990s.  It was based on a testing program at USDA called the PDP (Pesticide Detection Program).  While that group does an excellent job of monitoring pesticide residues on conventional crops, it has never looked for the pesticides most likely to be found as residues on organic - things like copper salts.  So even that one study that the Stanford group cited for the US was not a meaningful piece of data for residue comparison.  So much for the scientific literature as a source on this question.

Why Doesn't the PDP Test For Copper, Bt, Biologicals Etc?

I contacted the USDA scientists who run the PDP to ask why they don't test for things like Copper fungicides, Bts or other biologicals.  The answer was quite practical.  They use something called multi-residues methods (MRMs) with which it is possible to simultaneously test for 2-300 different synthetic pesticides in a single analysis run.  However, because of solubility issues and detection technology differences, many organic-approved pesticides cannot be extracted or measured by the same protocol.  To do the testing for these individual categories of pesticides would be far too expensive for the budget of that agency.  The random sampling method of PDP is also not well suited to getting enough organic samples for comparison.

Can We Compare Residues?  No.

So, here is where we stand on the question of pesticide residues on food.  The conventional supply is rigorously tested for the main products they intentionally apply as well as for any off-label or environmentally persistent products left over from the bad old days.  We get a data set every year which essentially says that there isn't anything to keep consumers from confidently buying that food.  The organic food supply is going to be tested to some degree for the first time, but we won't see any real summary of that data nor will we be able to compare it to conventional.  We also know that there won't be any data generated about the pesticide residues most likely to be present on organic.

Do We Know Anything About Pesticide Residues On Organic Crops?

There was a relatively small, but high quality pilot study conducted by the USDA as background for their new testing regime.  The authors were careful to point out the multiple reasons that their data is not really comparable to PDP (limited number of crops, smaller sample size not collected in the same fashion, fewer chemical tests conducted...).  What they did find was that there were definitely some synthetic pesticide residues detected on organic crops - mostly consistent with spray drift, accidental contact in packing houses, persistent environmental pollutants....  The levels they found were not problematic from a safety point of view, but that is just as true for the PDP testing of conventional crops.  This pilot program was like the PDP in that it used MRMs and so it didn't test for the majority of organic pesticides.   So, bottom line, we still have no real data about the most likely pesticide residues that occur on organic crops and we are unlikely to get any.

What Would Happen If We Could Get Information About Organic Residue Status?

If organic were subjected to the same level of random and comprehensive testing that is used for conventional, and if all its pesticides were included, it would almost certainly come out "dirty" by the absurd and irresponsible methodology employed by the Environmental Working Group to create its annual "dirty dozen list".  They just count detections without regard to the nature of the chemical in question or its concentration or its EPA tolerance.  If there ever were a comparable pesticide residue database for organic it would force a far more scientific discussion of which residues matter and which do not.  My guess is that both conventional and organic would come out as just fine for consumers to eat, but the "organic advantage" would disappear when both types of food had to be compared using scientifically sound assessments.

Bottom line.  Just eat your fruits and vegetables and whole grains.... enjoy them!

You are welcome to comment here, and/or to write me at savage.sd@gmail.com

Organic produce image from Pculter's Photostream