Food Fight: Organic vs. Conventional Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg
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Organic food, conventional food, local foods…oh my! You wouldn’t think these terms would charge up so many avid readers and bloggers, but they did, and big time. This week, I wrote a piece for The Huffington Post called “Organic Vs. Conventional: Have You Been Robbed?” and hell broke loose; 400 people commented on the post with numbers still increasing, and President and CEO of Stonyfield Farm, Gary Hirshberg, even took it upon himself to write a piece entitled “…In Response to Makenna Goodman.” My original argument on this subject was that “organic,” in all its eco-conscious glory, may not necessarily be the better option over conventional. Now. Before everyone starts freaking out and calling me foolish, ridiculous, libertarian or some kind of Monsanto plug trying to promote high fructose corn syrup and diabetic babies, let me clarify what I mean:
First of all, the very idea of certified organic—and its counterpart, conventional—were created by a government mandate that established a binary between two types of farming. This was a good thing in many ways, considering it set standards and made it so that environmentally harmful and inhumane farms were set apart from those seeking techniques with less of an ecological footprint, and more “organic” notions, in the basest sense of the word—of or relating to a living organism (compost, natural fertilizers, manure, etc.). At the same time, however, this standard created a great socio-economic divide, in its assumption that farming techniques can fall into only one of two categories. Also, the dichotomy hides a lot of truth both about the variety of “organic” farms and the variety of “conventional” farms. A certified organic farm might not be all that great in the grand scheme of things, and a non-certified—and therefore legally speaking “conventional”—farm might be ecologically, humanely, and nutritionally incredible.
My point, however, is not to demonize organic or to sanctify conventional. I buy organic, when I can. But I also buy so-called conventional, when it’s from a farmer I trust. There are myriad of other issues related to the less-than ideal choices we face in selecting our foods: distance between the consumer and the farmer, transportation and fuel emissions, price and elitism, and the treatment of laborers—for example this article about certain organic farms not offering health insurance to their pickers. Suffice it to say, there is a gray area between organic and conventional that needs to be discussed.
What does Organic actually mean? Because it is possible to have the organic stamp of approval on eggs, if, say, the hens are cruelly cramped in cages for most of the day, and over-fed organic grain until they are big and fat, and then produce eggs high in saturated fat and cholesterol. This is because diet is a key factor in organic certification, more so than others such as exercise, size of free-range area, and access to “salad greens” i.e., grass, bugs, and wild edibles, a subject Joel Salatin speaks on at length. Again, this is not to say organic is BAD and conventional is GOOD. But certification leaves many questions unanswered. In some cases, there are small-scale farms producing “conventional” meat that is better raised (grassfed, free-range, etc) and yet is not certified organic because of something like, the farmer feeds their pigs and hens food scraps from the local school which includes non-organic material. Conventional, in other words, doesn’t necessarily mean sprayed with massive amounts of pesticides and cattle crammed into terrible quarters (although in many cases, that is true, and those are farming techniques that should be eradicated completely.) But many small, family-owned farms operate using deep organic compost practices, no pesticides, and free-range techniques, yet still do not qualify for organic certification for a variety of reasons, not least being a lack of interest in the bureaucratic rigamarole. So the point I bring up isn’t, choose organic, or choose conventional; it’s that we should know all our options to inform whatever choice we make.
Gary Hirshberg, President and CEO of Stonyfield Farm, does not agree. To him, organic is best. He responded adamantly to my article saying I am “taking aim at the wrong target. Much like the person who frets over which china to use while the house is on fire, you take organic—which accounts for 2–3% of food sales—to task while ignoring the rest of our food system.” Be that as it may. Hirshberg is right on in that the rest of our food system is totally out of whack and needs to be addressed. But he is far off the mark in assuming that certified organic is the only tool available to the firefighter. More than that, he ignores the fact that there are actually multiple, overlapping fires in the house. One fire is the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and organic certification is one (but not the only) way to fight that particular fight. Another fire is the dominant power of corporations in shaping our economies, politics, culture, and, yes, agriculture and environment. The world as we have it is not ideal and sometimes compromises are inevitable: Hirshberg might indeed be right to have chosen the organic fight over the corporate fight in selling Stonyfield Farm to the Danone conglomerate. But I’m not prepared to say, “case closed” on that question.
Yes, if I lived in an urban center and had no access to yogurt made locally by a trusted source, of course I’d buy Stonyfield over something as conventional as, well, its corporate sibling Dannon. And I don’t disagree with the notion that if there are going to be mega-businesses that occupy large amounts of farmland, I’d much prefer they operate using organic techniques. But just because something has a sticker on it, does not mean you can trust it 100%. Which isn’t to say you can’t trust it at all, just that nothing is exactly what it seems.
Trust. These days, there’s not much people can trust aside from a label—we’ve gotten very far from the place where we know exactly where our food comes from (although lately there is a rise in food/farm-awareness, CSAs, etc…we’re making progress, for sure.) And especially in an urban center, when you’re not close to farms, all you really can trust is a sticker that says, “This is good. Eat this.” It’s undoubtedly easier to buy Earth-, animal-, and human-friendly non-organic food when you know your farmer and trust their practices, and of course it’s easier to know your farmer if you live in a more rural area. At that point, certification is probably a lot less important; if you know your farmer uses a tiny bit of conventional grain but their cows graze all day long on fresh grass (and therefore don’t need much grain at all, if any), you’re more likely to buy their “conventional” steaks.
I recently moved from New York City to a rural town in Vermont, recently started farming, and recently realized that organic may not be exactly what I always thought. It’s interesting (and a little scary) that someone like Gary Hirshberg would choose to lecture me on why I shouldn’t be asking these kinds of questions. I think everyone should be asking these kinds of questions! It’s all in the name of being curious, learning about the politics of food, and seeking transparency in a political economy that has, more often than not, betrayed its consumer.
As Michael Pollan said in a recent interview with Democracy Now!:
…It’s very simple. It really is. I mean, you know, as a journalist, you know this, that usually when you drill down into a subject, you find things are more complicated than you thought, and the blacks and whites don’t quite work anymore. When it came to nutrition science, the deeper I went, the simpler it got. And by the time I had spent two years studying what we know about nutrition and health, I realized that, you know, all the—that you could dismiss so much of this sketchy science, and as long as you ate real food, and not too much of it, and emphasized plants more than meat in your diet, you would be fine, and that the over-complication of food by industry, by government, is something really to be avoided. And so, the challenge is, though, how do you identify food?
…I’ve had to update my rules. And with all this new marketing based on these ideas, my new suggestion is, if you want to avoid all this, simply don’t buy any food you’ve ever seen advertised. Ninety-four percent of ad budgets for food go to processed food. I mean, the broccoli growers don’t have money for ad budgets. So the real food is not being advertised. And that’s really all you need to know.
Whether Hirshberg likes it or not, this debate is on. Read more of what people have been saying, in the original articles’ comment sections, the entire Democracy Now! interview with Michael Pollan, and other blogs below that have taken up the debate since then:
“Organic Vs. Conventional: Have You Been Robbed?” by Makenna Goodman
“The Real Problem With Our Food System: A Response to Makenna Goodman” by Gary Hirshberg
May 15th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Makenna, I think one of the issues your situation raises is the multi-faceted meaning of what we call “sustainable agriculture.”
If we want that whole phrase to have meaning, then we have to care about the “-culture” portion alongside our care for the “agri-” portion. That’s were you start getting into the conundrums of local conventional vs. distant organic, or small-scale conventional vs. large-scale organic, and so on. Maybe the biology of farms is protected and sustainable in a world of organic-only production, but if the social aspects of agriculture, the culture, aren’t also sustainable, where does that get us? Failing farms, highly processed and unhealthy certified 100% organic crud, and so on. There’s no simple step from where we are to some utopia of sustainability. There’s no question we’ll have to wander around a bit in the process as we discover that one focus (say, organic) has meant we’ve failed to pay sufficient attention to something else that’s also important (say, economic viability for small, diverse farms, which are important for sustaining decent rural communities–which, in turn, are important for sustaining decent urban communities). Lots of people will specialize, like how Hirshberg is a specialist on promoting technical organics. I’d say “more power to him” since I want him to succeed in convincing all the dairy farmers of the world to follow organic practices, but I can’t. What I really want for him is “equal power to him” — and to all the farmers who have to make it work on the ground, and to all the people who have to struggle to find food that’s good for them and their world, and who have to struggle to even have the ability to have any freakin’ idea of what’s actually good and what’s mere marketing sham.
May 20th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
As far as I’m concerned, the most important thing in the world of sustainability, be it organic, biodynamic, or the actuality or possibility of shopping locally, is that we now have wide open, every-day conversations about our food. We are educating each other in a wider context, we are beginning to understand that although there is no simple solution to the diverse problems of pollution, food safety, and climate deterioration and how all of that affects our food and therefore our bodies; and thanks to Michael Pollan, Joel Salatin, Eliot Coleman, Gary Zimmer, and yes, Gary Hirshberg, we have language that most of the population can grasp…We can really begin to address these issues in a larger format. We all want to eat clean food that is grown without poisons, without unidentified genetic manipulation, we all want to have access to affordable clean food, we all deserve this…the question remains how do we do this in a manner that doesn’t put our food system in further jeopardy. Wouldn’t it be great if we were all given a little piece of land and a bunch of seeds –like Alice Water’s farm-to-school projects in Berkeley and New Orleans, and that from an early age we began to care about and understand where our food comes from—and we were able to give our little plots the same kind of generous attention that many of us do in our shopping at greenmarkets and in the cooking of meals. I say YEAH to Makenna for furthering this conversation and bringing up the possibility that once something enters the mainstream, like the word, ORGANIC there are questions that should be asked even at the greenmarket..like How was the food grown? In what kind of soil? What fertilizers were used? Were the animals grazing and were the grasses treated with any pesticides? If they were fed forage, was it organic? Did the cows use antibiotics? This debate is a sign that there are people who care and are seeking the best ways to assure a clean, safe, healthy, safe food supply for us all. Thank you, Makenna for initiating this debate.
May 20th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
I read both pieces last week and leaned in favor of Gary Hirshberg, simply because I was more convinced of his argument. But I agreed with both writers on different points.
His point that organic food is the wrong target is one I agree with. I don’t think, however, that you (Makenna Goodman) were all that negative toward it, and you give an interesting perspective. You raise good points about the food movement and I think that the conversation is worthwhile (plus you’re having the conversation with or without my blessing :). But valuable or not, I would like to see the manner in which the debate is framed changed to not one of organic food “robbing” someone, but rather, that you don’t have to necessarily spend the big bucks to get almost organic, perhaps largely sustainably-farmed products. The two of you have perspectives that are different, but you both seem to be on the fair, clean, healthy, whole food side of the argument.
I think that the debate has been approached much more wisely by Michael Pollan, who I heard say just what you quoted him on this past Monday at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago. It’s a choice between whole foods and edible food-like substances, was another point he raised.
The value I see in this debate flies out the window when whole food and organic farming skeptics, like global warming skeptics, see a headline as a reason to continue eating/living unhealthy, on the whole unsustainable lifestyles. It gives people something to point to, an excuse, if you will, to continue bad practices. I hope that as a writer being featured on popular forums, such as Chelsea Green and The Huffington Post, that you will see that the framing, the headline you choose, can have a big impact and can hide what is otherwise a valuable argument behind skeptics who won’t read the finer points but rather say, “ya see?” when they see your headline and move on.
I agree and commend you, Makenna, for bringing up the point that a sticker, a label, an organic category doesn’t necessarily mean that something is sustainable, that it is better for you, or that the animal led a good life. The story of food is more complicated than one classification or label. Use your forums wisely and let’s not make this a fight of organic versus conventional but one of defining healthy, safe, clean, sustainable foods and food manufacture, in the many forms it takes on, as better than the vast majority of our conventional foods.
May 20th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Really we must first decide if we’re speaking using the term organic as a matter of horticulture or ideology/politics.
We do all know that to a plant there is no difference between organic nutrients and “inorganic” (chemical) nutrients, right?
the fundamental problem is that chemical agriculture allows grows to slack on the other facets of good horticulture because so much can be made up (for a while) with chemical nutrients. That, particularly soil culture, needs to be addressed before worrying about being organic. It should also be noted that over-application of organic nutrients causes the same problem set as over-application of chemical nutrients (run-off, etc.) With good soil culture very little of either set is needed, and it probably doesn’t matter which type of nutrient a grower uses.
Pesticides are a somewhat different matter, but here too, organic pesticides (beyond soaps) can be over applied and are indiscriminate. And so i might ask the organic proponents whether Bt should be considered “organic” as it is, after all, a naturally occurring life form. If it is, can Bt corn then be considered organic too?
Sustainability should be the watch word, not organic. Furthermore, organic should be considered a result to be achieved rather than a means.
I answer gardening questions all day long, so i’ve heard most of them. I grow almost completely organic and buy my produce through an un-certified friend’s organic CSA (meat and eggs too). But i’m just about completely fed up with the “organic” as a political ideology/borderline cultish religion. Every day people make a big deal out of whether the bagged manure we sell is “organic”. Yeah…how many organic cows are there in the US and organic grazers leave the manure on the field rather than bag it up to sell. But hey, it says “organic” on the bag so it must be a short cut to a clear conscience, right?
I am to the point of answering that everything is organic because people don’t want real answers anyhow. And if i’m questioned i’ll just point out that there’s carbon in it so it’s organic…as nobody bothered to include in their question that they define “organic” ideologically.
May 21st, 2009 at 11:29 am
I just grow my own food and eat vegan. That way i don’t have to worry about being lied to. Or i go to a farmer’s market, where i can develop a weekly relationship with the farmer, and know the practices and the methods that are employed.
Organic labeling in terms of dairy and egg products really means nothing, the animals are still treated terribly. And whats the point of eating organic produce if it had to travel 2000 miles to get to your grocery store? Doesn’t that kind of negate any benefit of it being grown organically?
If it is not grown in my backyard, or with in 100 miles of me, I don’t eat it. I will say that sometimes i miss bananas and the more exotic fruits, but it is a sacrifice that i make to live a green lifestyle.
May 27th, 2009 at 11:18 am
[…] plug, and a proponent of high fructose corn syrup and diabetic babies, because I talked about the debate between organic and conventional farmers (is organic always better? Is diet the deciding factor in animal health…etc.) Also, I bite. […]
May 28th, 2009 at 10:25 am
[…] plug, and a proponent of high fructose corn syrup and diabetic babies, because I talked about the debate between organic and conventional farmers (is organic always better? Is diet the deciding factor in animal health…etc.) Also, I bite. […]
July 20th, 2009 at 11:46 pm
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