Dear So and So,
I grew up, studied, and worked in and around Portland, but now I'm living in Costa Rica to attend graduate school at the United Nations Mandated University for Peace. From the name of the university, you can accurately assume that the student body is somewhat of an alternative crowd. I'm writing to address an issue that I'm currently studying at UPeace; an issue that I first felt in the unique ambiance of Portland: organic food, and the public's misconceptions of poison.
The recently popular push for organic agriculture has many motivations: avoidance of chemicals in our food, getting back to nature, reducing our impact on the environment, fairness in costs and wages for farmers, and social responsibility. The thing is, some people want more than that, and their voices are loud and influential. According to IFOAM’s Principles of Organic Agriculture (IFOAM, 2008), organic agriculture is being pushed as a lifestyle rather than a practice, a moral value rather than a system, and even as a religion rather than a method.
In fact, organic agriculture is a subset, or a type of agriculture. It is a "new" way to raise crops with particular standards that happen to be stricter, environmentally speaking, than that of techniques seen in conventional agriculture. This particular methodology requires science as a tool to validate its significance. I could tell you that the sky is green, but observation contradicts that statement. The same is true here: I could tell you that crops grown without the use of pesticides are healthier, but testing is required to verify that claim. The scientific processes of observation, testing, analyzing, and reproduction are crucial to the success and the best methodology for this type of agriculture. So what does Science say about pesticides and health?
Anyone from the state of California can tell you, just about everything on the market today can give you cancer. From where did this paranoid misconception of chemicals come? The truth is, everything is made from chemicals, even you. Chemicals are the building blocks of everything you can see and touch. When Organic Preachers talk about “chemical-free food,” they really mean man-made, synthetic, or artificial chemicals. Organic Believers have manipulated the usage of the word 'chemical' as they have done with the word 'organic', which simply means a compound that has a carbon base to its molecular structure. Organic Believers have convinced many people that chemicals in our food is a bad thing - that chemicals are poison and that if you eat them you won't be healthy.
As the father of toxicology, Paracelsus, pointed out nearly 500 years ago, “Everything is poisonous yet nothing is poisonous. The dose alone makes the poison.” (Guggenheim, 1993). Even our most precious resource, water, is a poison. If you drink too much water, it is toxic to your body and you will die. Have you ever tried to cultivate fruits and veggies without water? If you're a fan of 'crunchy', you’ll probably love it! The chemicals used in conventional agriculture are designed to be toxic to pests, not to humans. Standards set by the USDA, and the FDA regulate limits so that the amount of artificial chemicals in our food never becomes harmful. The unfortunate thing is that the Organic Believers have made you afraid of these chemicals anyway.
In my class of future world leaders (how we should think of graduate students), we spent an hour one day bantering about the toxicity of butane in french fries and concluding that we didn’t want butane anywhere near our food! The conversation originated from a passage in The Omnivore's Dilemma, in which Michael Pollan wrote:
"Then there are 'anti-foaming agents' like dimethylpolysiloxene, added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during the fry... According to the Handbook of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effector; it's also flammable."
He adds the word 'flammable' here to drive home his poison implication, but any cooking oil and most edible foods will burn! Does that make them toxic? Pollan goes on to say,
"Perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to 'help preserve freshness.' According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e., lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food."
Lighter fluid in our food sounds horrible, but it’s not! The amount permissible is so small that it's not poisonous for human consumption. Pollan connects TBHQ to butane (a very inaccurate connection, chemically speaking) in an attempt to relate to the Organic Worrier that something toxic is going into our food. Why would McDonalds put something toxic in their food? A sick joke? No. It’s there to ‘help preserve freshness’ as is stated. All food decomposes; the purpose of adding something to subdue infectious bacteria is a health and safety supplement. The problem with Pollan’s argument is that butane is not very toxic at all. According to OSHA and the Center for Disease Control, butane is not reactive, unstable, or significantly toxic (NIOSH, 2005) (OSHA, 2004). The most likely way it could harm you is by displacing all the air in your lungs and asphyxiating you. People dying from butane are huffing it, not eating it.
If you don't make a habit or hobby out of huffing chemicals, why then should you worry about butane in your food? Because Organic Believers tell you to. What kind of implications does that have on society? Consumption habits are altered, production methods change to adapt, some businesses fail and others spring up to accommodate the new trend. While Pollan uses fear to sell a book, he convinces Orangic Believers that butane is bad. If many Organic Believers are loud enough they could have the power to get McDonalds to stop using TBHQ. The result is a less safe McNugget. Is this really the sustainability we're looking for?
The organic community’s propagation of fear is eerily reminiscent of something most Organic Believers fought so tenaciously against in recent history: the Bush administration. The Bush administration was accused, and quite rightly so, of fear mongering in an effort to generate support for a ludicrous war. How are Organic Believers' efforts so different in fear mongering for chemical-free food? Their conspiracy theories use the same methods to manipulate people into making ill-informed decisions. In the end, we're losing sight of what's right.
Science is reliable and trustworthy. It can show us what is healthy, and what is not. It can inform us of the best actions to take, and most definitely has a place in organic agriculture. Some may claim that science is inconclusive on the topic of chemical-free foods. That's ok! It just means that further research is warranted and that no conclusions should go unquestioned. Policy makers, businessmen, Organic Believers, pseudo-intellectuals, and even reputable universities need to avoid using manipulated science to support their agendas, as was seen in the Badgley/Avery debacle of 2007 (Avery, 2007).
Consumers need to be aware of the assumptions, speculations, and misconceptions that are prevalent in today's market so that educated and responsible decisions can be made. Knowledge and responsibility are the only things that will ensure sustainability, the future of all kinds of agricultural production, and our health.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it,
Andrew Judkins
Bibliography
Avery, A. (2007). ‘Organic Abundance’ report: fatally flawed. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, 22(4), 321–329.
Guggenheim, K. (1993). Paracelsus and the Science of Nutrition in the Renaissance. The Journal of Nutrition, 1193. Retrieved February 11, 2009, from http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/reprint/123/7/1189.pdf.
IFOAM. (2008). Principles of Organic Agriculture. 1-3.
NIOSH. (2005). NIOSH Pocket Guide to Chemical Hazards: n-Butane, Retrieved February 11, 2009, from http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npg/npgd0068.html.
OSHA. (2004). Safety and Health Topics: Butane, Retrieved February 11, 2009, from http://www.osha.gov/dts/chemicalsampling/data/CH_222200.html.
Pollan, M. (2006). The Omnivore’s Dilemma. New York: Penguin Press.
6 comments:
Sensay,
I guess its Hg Sushi for everyone.
Loved your paper. The mythos built up around "going organic" troubles me as well. For example, the main threat to most threatened species is not hunting, global warming, or pollution -- it is habitat destruction. Modern farming methods have saved millions of acres of wilderness habitat through their superior yields. Yet organic is seen as more environmentally responsible and "sustainable."
I will admit that organic meat is more humane, and that is worth something. The meat industry is cruel to animals -- though one might justifiably ask how many of those animals would exist at all absent the industry (better not to be born?). But aside from humanitarian concerns, organic meat, milk, and produce is usually only "environmentally friendly" to the extent that you live in an agriculturally productive area anyway -- and if you do, then your local produce, whether organic or not, will be more environmentally friendly and tastier due to lower transport distances.
Love the comment on toxicity. Everything has a toxic dose -- salt, water, even oxygen.
The only devil's advocate rebuttal I might have to your piece is the assertion that regulatory standards always provide adequate protection. Some man-made chemicals have a relatively short track record of study, and some things permitted at one time have been established later to have toxic effects at lower doses than expected. "Organic" products, on the other hand, involve primarily substances with which the human organism has a long track record. That long co-existence could provide some additional indication of safety even in the absence of definitive clinical proof. Alternatively, studies that are performed are more likely to involve longer terms for older substances. Also, since individual circumstances vary (e.g. pregnant women usually are more sensitive to contaminants, and some people are more sensitive than others), the "eggshell" phenomenon might indicate some utility in the slight added margin of safety that historical usage can provide.
Does that slim margin justify the fervour? Probably not. Nice paper.
Your commentary about Organic was brilliant. It was a pleasure to read and I think you really hit the key issue. Fearmongering is all too often based on unsubstantiated findings. And many people critical of Fox News and the Republican Party try and use the same tactics, but fail to see this. Fact of the matter is that you cannot feed 7 billion people solely with organic agriculture. It is too land and resource intensive. Organic products are luxury goods for elites and that is why I am not a fan. People don't put chemicals in our food as a conspiracy they do so to produce more food with less effort and to drive down prices so people can afford food.
Environmentalist are really starting to bother me as well at times. I was recently lashed for saying that industries are hurting right now enough and it may not be the best time for climate change measures and I was bombarded by students and the teacher as well. Hey, fact is the world we live in now is dependent upon consumer demand, and the manufactures that produce those products. We as a nation need to show more restraint when times are good so we don't have such an enormous price to pay all at once. But lets not kick industry while its down. People are getting laid off all over the world it just doesnt not seem like the time to me and i stick to my story.
Sorry for that rant, but I 100 percent agree with you, people should be waving their fists and asking for more studies to be done. Not just bitching about shit that they have no clue about. Also, back in the states, organic bananas suck compared to the shiney chemical loaded ones.
Andrew you are a gifted man and I miss your musk. you are the type of kid who needs to be heard and I think you may have found your calling to become a columnist.
Stay classy,
Leon
To my immense disappointment, but not to my surprise, this is the evaluation of my paper, on which I received an 84:
Andrew,
Your editorial is well written, and I support your attempt to be critical of attempts to use scientific data inappropriately. But in order to make this argument, you need to do your legwork a bit better. You seem to be making several main points. The first one is that organic should be just a set of practices rather than a way of life, etc. But you give us no real reasons or support for this statement, and this is an entirely different point than what you end up arguing about science. Your second point, about how chemicals are not as bad as organic believers make them out to be may well be true in some cases, but again, you do not actually give us enough counter-evidence to support your statement that TBHQ is not actually related to butane. Your point about inhaling being worse than ingesting is a fine one, but that isn´t really the point. You haven’t shown us that ingesting it does not have any side-effects. To make your argument effectively, you should have come up with some data showing that it does not have the health effects that Pollan cites it as having. He after all, also does not say that eating fries once will kill you, but rather uses it as an example of the a larger food system and what a complicated array of not only chemicals, but political infrastructures, lobbying campaigns and interests stand behind it. And that brings us to your third point, that it is not some “sick joke” by some company, but the combination of all those larger policies, infrastructures, structural inequalities and political interests that combine into a particular array of “side-effects,” and that is not something that science alone can solve. In short, while I think in general you have a valid point I do not think you have backed it up well.
She went on to further evaluate my class efforts saying:
I know that you like trying to be controversial, but feel that if you want to do so effectively you need to be more thoughtful about it. Although you submitted many discussion questions, they were often referring to quotes taken out of context or written without seriously considering the larger issues being raised by the authors. I was disappointed by your field journals, because you were quick to judge and label people (as ignorant for believing in traditional knowledge and as being on a bandwagon for being leaders of a movement for social change) and jump to conclusions (that there must be hidden pesticides somewhere because of a spraying device). You did this without making an honest effort to understand their point of view and way of life and take it seriously. To do so, you should have asked don Francisco about the backpack sprayer and asked him how he knew about the medicinal properties of jamaica, and asked Eva and don Jaime how they differentiate themselves from the new trendy organic “bandwagon.” This would be an engaged critical approach, based on real dialogue, rather than making smug backhanded stabs at people after the fact. Good luck in trying to hone your critical stance to be a force for positive change,
g.
I hope your teacher is not a native English-speaker, because if (s)he is, that is one poorly written evaluation. Also, your point was that there WAS no "evidence" of danger from TBHQ - the author just went with a sly "hey, it's like butane!" non-argument. How do you critically engage someone who applies the equivalent of an ad hominem attack against a chemical?
The entirety of prof's comments were unintentionally hilarious. "You shouldn't assume that because he has a backpack sprayer for spraying pesticides that he is ACTUALLY spraying pesticides. You're obviously not "respecting" his perspective on lying about pesticide use to fool chumps like the Professor.
Hey Andrew,
I like your critique. I do think your prof has some points about the logic and flow of the arguments.
Generally, my concern about synthetic chemicals in food or in the environment is that their impacts after long-term human exposure have not been tested/determined on most of them. It's one thing to be consuming synthetic chemicals in accordance with determined safety standards, it's quite another to be consuming them and being clueless about the potential long-term impact.
The real tragedy here though is that it sounds like you've landed in an incredibly one-sided learning environment. I've always thought the best professors never make it clear where they stand on these controversial issues. After all, their job is to teach, not preach.
Also, the Chirpan football tournament will be held again this year. Your super-sub performance will be missed.
All the best,
Thomas
Post a Comment