12. Grapes (imported)

11. Potatoes

10. Cherries

9. Kale

8. Spinach

7. Bell peppers

6. Nectarines

5. Blueberries

4. Apples

3. Strawberries

2. Peaches

1. Celery

Today, we will look at the nutrition of organic foods.

Critics of the organic food movement find great pleasure in claiming that organic foods are no more nutritious than conventional foods. When they cite cherry-picked studies, we intuitively raise a warning flag in the back of our mind that what they say may be total crap.

Answering a question like this one is impossible in one study; rather, we need to look at an entire collection of related studies. In research, we call this meta-analysis.

The most notable published meta-analysis to date, commissioned by the United Kingdom Food Standards Agency, found no significant differences in nutrient content between organic food products and conventional food products. This review, published in 2009, has been met with stark criticism by both foodies as well as agricultural researchers.

Without trying to get deep into the analysis, the FSA study looked through peer-reviewed journals to find original articles publishing nutrient data on organic and conventional plants. Out of nearly 200 total studies, only 50 or so passed muster. And in those 50+, the only nutrients considered were those that appeared 10 or more times.

Critics of the FSA study argue that many studies were wrongly discarded and that the authors do not really understand the inner workings of agricultural experiments. When you include some of those reports, you start to see significant effects in the direction of organic plant products.  And within the included studies, you see significant effects in nutrient levels beyond the 11 reported.

Another meta-analysis (slightly more recent than the FSA work), commissioned by France’s food safety agency, AFSSA, confirmed the beliefs of those critical of the FSA report. In addition to having fewer pesticides (94 to 100% of all organic foods have no detectable levels of pesticide), organic foods offer health benefits across the board in terms of nutrient density and diversity. Notably, organic fruits and vegetables contain more phytomicronutrients (perhaps twice as many as conventional) such as polyphenols and antioxidants. Research into physiology and biochemistry increasingly shows these nutrients playing important roles in cellular processes.

Though the nutrition of organic foods is a major point of contention right now, the scientific tide does seem to be supportive of their nutrient density advantage over conventional plant foods.

Today’s subject is the the efficiency of organic farms.

Conventional farms use chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically-modified (GM) seed to boost yield. In theory, this sounds great; but conventional farming requires a constant input of energy to sustain fields beyond natural limits.

The heart of this question comes down to your definition of efficiency. Critics of organic production point to crop yield; advocates frame it as energy input versus output. Conventional farms are clearly winners in crop yield efficiency, while organic farms are more energy efficient.

There is also a concern regarding nutrition density of conventional plants versus organic plants, but that will be saved for a more thorough examination.

While I would love to side with the organic advocate view, it is hard to do so when many organic products are transported thousands of miles before reaching your dinner plate. So, even if an organic farm uses no energy input beyond the sun and natural fertilizer (animal manure), that number is meaningless when you consider the energy used in cross-country or international transportation.

So, I do not like to make the energy-efficient argument for organics, UNLESS they are purchased from local farms. Before transportable refrigeration existed, almost all produce came from local farms, and energy use was negligible.

Energy, however, becomes more important as its price rises. During the recent oil crunch, many doomer folks speculated that the American food production system would crash and that there would be massive food shortages. As the world’s economy recovers, oil prices will begin a steady rise and could once again have significant impact on food costs.

Ultimately, conventional farming in a global food production system is reliant on an abundant supply of cheap energy. When this assumption fails, so will the utility of conventional farming (though it will still exist in local/regional settings).

A series of posts on Eating Real Food, starting with this one, will consider these common talking points.

Too expensive!

Organic foods are expensive and impractical for the average American family to purchase, especially in a weak economy when budgets are already stretched thin.

Organic foods are more expensive than conventional products, but they also have the advantage of being natural. As Michael Pollan argues, the industrial food production system shifts costs from the grocery store to the hospital. Conventional production gives us cheaper calories, but the consequences on our bodies (poor health) are negative in the long-term.

If we eat better food, as a society, we may pay more at the checkout counter. But our insurance premiums drop. Critics like Martosko always seem to miss this.

Unfortunately, health benefits tomorrow do not address organic being too expensive today. If you have limited money to spend on groceries for the week, you will probably skip the $4 organic milk in favor of the conventional gallon on sale for $2.

A legislative approach could subsidize organic farming operations. These farming operations could then reduce the direct cost passed onto consumers. T0 be fair, though, consumers would still be paying for the subsidy in their tax bill.

Alternatively, individuals could be better informed as to which organic products are more cost-effective than others, and then left to make decisions on their own. An all-organic diet is incredibly expensive; a selective-organic diet is much more practical. For example, there are some products I do not worry about simply because the organic nature of them means little. (In a later blog post, I will go into this with more depth).

So are organics too expensive? Yes. But only if you consider just the grocery store price tag.

The many articles on this blog revolve around a single theme: eating real food.

People will ask me, “Just what the heck does that mean? Am I not eating real food right now?” as they down a fast food burger or suck back a Diet Coke. In a general sense, sure, you’re eating food. But it’s not necessarily natural. Natural is a big part of what makes real food real.

How about the rest of the blanks? What is real food? Real food has SOLE.

S: Sustainable

Sustainability is the general idea that what you do today doesn’t make tomorrow (and beyond) worse off. When industrial farmers use petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers, they’re taking a shortcut to higher yields. This is problematic primarily because it has lead to globalization of food production and the idea that we need to KEEP using pesticides & fertilizers to feed an exploding world population. So, we’re using a scarce supply of oil to grow food, and then even more oil to ship it around the planet.

Small, organic farms (in the traditional sense) tend to be sustainable because they use little more than solar power to grow food. Sound pasture management techniques can also advance soil fertility (whereas industrial farming erodes fertility which is why fertilizer is required in the first place).

O: Organic

No (or very little) pesticide or chemical fertilizer used in the production of the food. It doesn’t impact the taste (as far as I can tell), but pesticides can build up and stick around in your body, turning those trace amounts into something significant and potentially harmful.

L: Local

Locally-grown food will be fresher and in season. It’s traveling considerably less distance between the farm and your plate than the average American meal.

Beyond that, buying locally-produced food keeps your food dollar in the local economy. For example, if every Michigan family were to eat one meal per week from foods bought at a farmer’s market, an extra $37 million dollars would stay within the state’s borders each week.

E: Ethical

The ethics of food lie on a continuum: there is no binary state with one food being ethical and another not; you can only claim that one food is more ethical (relatively) than another. These food ethics derive from factors related to their production and transportation.

For example, consider a two carrots.

Carrot A was grown 3000 miles away on an organic farm in another country. Earlier this week it was picked, transported via jetplane, and delivered to your local grocery story.

Carrot B was grown 50 miles away, but with some fertilizer and pesticide. It was picked this morning and brought to the nearby farmer’s market.

Which would you buy? Each approach has ethical pros and cons, though in this case I would lean toward Carrot B.

Hey foodie,

What’s up with organic spices?

If you have been near the spice racks at your local grocery store, you’ve probably seen a section for organic spices. They look just the same, but tend to be in nicer glass bottles and are marked with a higher price tag.

What goes into that higher price? Let’s find out by examining the various stages of spice production.

Importation

Spices are imported from all corners of the globe. This usually goes against traditional locavore philosophy, but the spice trade has been around for ages and you don’t need much of it to get by. Well-kept spices will last a long time, unlike those Fijian apples that magically arrive in your grocery market all throughout winter.

Just like the coffee trade, spice farmers tend to be from under-developed nations and are easy to exploit. Fair trade certification for spices has recently become popular, and organic companies have been organizing around a common sense of moral obligation to justly compensate the farmers.

Processing

Before being bottled and shipped to grocery stores, the spice needs to be sterilized. Major manufacturers use traditional methods like irradiation (literally, shooting radioactive particles at the crop) and fumigation (exposing the product to harmful, carcinogenic gas). Irradiation and fumigation are common because they are inexpensive to employ, and the cheap spices on the shelf probably went one of these routes.

There is a third, more expensive way to sterilize spices: steam. Steam technology, though complicated, offers none of the carcinogenic drawbacks of irradiation and fumigation. Unfortunately, manufacturers don’t usually disclose how they sterilized their spices.

Luckily, the organic label is here to save the day. I asked Frontier Natural Products Co-op, the makers of “Simply Organic” (you’ve probably seen some of their products at your grocery store) about spice sterilization and here is their response:

The key methods of sterilization of spices in the non-organic industry are irradiation and ethylene oxide treatment. Irradiation has enough of a negative connotation in consumers minds that it is almost never labeled when used in food products, and generally does not require disclosure. Ethylene oxide treatment also does not have to be disclosed on treated products. However, one by-product of it’s application is the formation of ethyl chlorohydrin, a carcinogen, which is formed in high levels in some spices as they are treated. For example, as of February of this year, the FDA has banned it’s use on basil, since the reside of the carcinogenic compound approaches 1000 parts per million or 1 part per thousand.

At Frontier, for sterilization we only use steam – which is essentially super heated water used to kill microbes. Of the 3 methods discussed, it is the only allowable method in organic production. The application technology of steam treatment is quite sophisticated, since the need to maximize the flavor attributes while destroying microbes is essential. While the process is currently outsourced by Frontier, we are in the process of implementing our own steam sterilization unit at a cost of approximately $1 Million, and will be fully operational early next year. We believe it is an important piece of our food safety commitment and the control gained by having this in-house is important as the technology is becoming more widespread. It also allows us to service our customers with the highest quality products possible.

Basically, organic spices are the only option that are guaranteed to have been through steam sterilization.

Additives

Standard spices may throw in additive fillers, artificial colors, and artificial flavors. This is pretty easy to check on as the ingredient list will reveal the presence of these non-food elements, but if you buy organic spices then you have a label guarantee to that effect.

Packaging

One other thing you may notice: inexpensive spices come in dinky plastic bottles. This makes them feel literally cheaper, and they have an additional downside of using BPA-laden plastic (unless they’ve recently adopted BPA-free plastic). Glass bottles are free from the presence of BPA. Just another aspect to consider.

Conclusion

Organic spices are different than your run-of-the-mill spices for three major reasons:

1. Use organically (free of chemical pesticides and fertilizers) grown crops as raw material.
2. Tend to use fair-trade certified crop importation, making sure the farmer is paid a just wage for his effort.
3. Sterilized by way of steam, which is more expensive but without the downside of irradiation or fumigation.

To the writer of the e-mail which prompted this exploration I can safely say, “Yes!  There are many things “up” with organic spices.”

To anyone considering the difference between organic spices and regular spices, hopefully this article has provided some valuable information to digest. As consumers, we don’t typically get to see how products like these are made. When we peel away those layers of wool, the difference between one mode of production and another becomes obvious.

Buying organic spice is a small part of day-to-day life, but one that might help you sleep better at night.

Acknowledgments: My many thanks to Frontier Natural Products Co-op’s Steve Krusie (Director of Public Relations) and Ravin Donald, PhD (VP of Quality Assurance and Research & Development) for helping me on this topic.

In the United States, food producers must receive certification before they can go about adding ‘organic’ to their label. This is disadvantageous to small (independent) farms, as the process costs more than the label will bring back in revenue. The odds are that several stalls at your local farmer’s market are occupied by farmers who more or less produce organic food without being able to call it that.

You will also see different terms associated with “organic”, and they mean different things.

• 100% organic: A product that really does have all-organic ingredients.
• Organic: Products have 95% or more organic ingredients.
• Contains organic ingredients: 70% of more organic.

If you’ve ever seen that USDA Organic sticker before, it’s on products that qualify in the 95% or greater category.

So what about products that are less than 70% organic? They can say what exactly is organic in their packaging description, but that’s it. The fine for mis-representing organic origin currently sits at $11,000.

While regulation helps ensure that labeling is honest and consistent, it does carry some disadvantages. Notably, there is a growing concern that policy-makers will re-write the  “organic” guidelines in a way that cowtows to lobbying interests. Even more odd products could slip through the cracks. Additionally, any change that makes certification more difficult will be one that favors large, industrial producers. That’s not necessarily a more sustainable future than we face now.