Conscious Choice: Organic Matters

October 2001

Organic Matters

by Henry Brockman

I am an organic farmer. These days the response to that statement is almost always, "Hey, that’s great!"

Over the past decade or so, organic has gone from the hippie fringe to the mainstream (except in rural areas like mine, where many farmers and agribusiness professionals still regard the term as pejorative). There is now a $6 billion-a-year market for organic food. Organic food companies are hot stocks, organic frozen dinners are sold in the grocery stores, Gallo Wine produces organic grapes, and organic tomatoes from Chile are available in the dead of winter.

A Tale of a Tomato

One of those tomatoes sat on my kitchen counter for weeks last winter. My sister got it in a crate of organic produce from a Chicago co-op and brought it down to the farm. This single red tomato with one tiny sticker saying "Product of Chile" and another tiny sticker saying "Certified Organic" sat, alone, on our counter for days. I thought about eating it, wondering if it tasted anything like mine. I even picked it up a few times. Then I put it back.

When my sister came back a few weeks later, it was still sitting on the counter. "You didn’t eat it."

I couldn’t. I had no desire to eat a fresh tomato in the dead of winter, especially one that could sit, bright-red, for weeks without getting soft. I knew nothing about that tomato. Its life history was a cipher to me. Who planted it? Who picked it? What kind of soil was it grown in? How was it fertilized? Irrigated? How many people had touched it on its long journey to my kitchen counter? How long had it sat in a box? Were the hangar, plane, truck, warehouse, and cooler it sat in fumigated with noxious chemicals? How much fuel had been burned on its way from a field in Chile to my counter in Congerville? I had no idea what the answers to all these questions might be.

This, sadly, is the story for almost every food item, organic or conventional, found in supermarkets throughout this country. According to Michael Pollan of the New York Times, "Ever since we began buying our food in supermarkets, the food chain that ostensibly links the American eater to the American land has grown steadily longer, more intricate and less legible; by now it is all but invisible to most of us. This is evidently the way agribusiness wants it, judging by the vigor with which they fight any effort to tell consumers more about how their food is made."

This is the dark cloud that billows about the silver lining of more organic food becoming more available. Now you can be as far removed from your organic food as you were from your conventional food.

Last summer I visited a fashionable grocery store after a long, hot day selling at the Evanston Farmer’s Market. While I was there, I browsed the produce section. My eyes were drawn to a bin full of organic mesclun salad mix. It was beautiful — a little wilted, yes, but not a single bug hole in the whole thing. So I picked out an arugula leaf and popped it in my mouth.

Nothing happened. Now, arugula is a boisterous green, rich and full, with a little hotness, a little bitterness, a little oakiness and a lot of indescribable but delicious flavors. This leaf had none of them, not even a hint. I could have been eating anything — or nothing.

I’m sure that those perfect arugula leaves were grown under row covers (made of spun plastic) to keep the insects out (insects love arugula as much as we do) and with plastic drip tape irrigation to make them grow fast and lush. The result: a beautiful salad green with no taste. And according to Robert Shewfelt, professor of food science at the University of Georgia, produce with less taste is produce with less nutrition. Shewfelt says, "In general, when you pick something at peak flavor it is about the same as picking it at peak nutritional value." In other words, flavor is an accurate measure of comparative nutritional value. We do not require a laboratory, fancy tests, or expensive equipment to find out which vegetables are better for us. All it takes is the taste buds we were born with.

The link between flavor and nutritional value is a harsh indictment of most vegetables in the produce aisle. How much Vitamin C is in a tasteless tomato, how much beta-carotene in a banal carrot, how much calcium in dreary kale? Listen to your taste buds. "Not much," they say. And it doesn’t make any difference if those tomatoes, carrots, and kale were grown organically or with chemical fertilizers and pesticides; if they are equally tasteless, they are equally nutrient-poor.

While the vegetables grown by small-scale, local farmers like me remain nutrition powerhouses, the sad fact, backed now by countless studies, is that most organic produce in our stores is no more nutritious than conventionally grown produce. In 1997, Joan Dye Gussow, professor emeritus of nutrition and education at Columbia Teachers College and a friend to organic agriculture, wrote an article entitled "Is Organic Food More Nutritious?" Seventy years of studies comparing store-bought certified organic and conventional fruits and vegetables, she said ruefully, have produced no hard proof that certified organic food is more nutritious.

Another proponent of the organic movement, Virginia Worthington, compiled the results of thirty different studies comparing 300 vegetables. Certified organic produce in these studies had a higher nutritional content 40 percent of the time and conventionally grown crops were more nutritious 15 percent of the time. While Worthington interpreted this as a victory for organic produce, the results still mean that 45 percent of the time there is no nutritional benefit to buying organic produce and 15 percent of the time organic is actually the worse choice. These comparative tests have provided the supporters of modern, industrial chemical agriculture with ammunition for shooting down claims of the supremacy of organic agriculture.

The paradox of nutrient-poor organic produce

To understand the paradox of nutrient-poor organic produce, we must delve into the tangle of factors that determine comparative nutrient levels in produce. These factors fall into three basic categories: 1) how the produce is grown, 2) genetic factors, and 3) the relationship between grower and consumers.

Factor One: Healthy Soil. Let’s start with what happens on the farm. As far back as 1938, soil scientists in the U.S. Department of Agriculture warned of the rapid depletion of soil nutrients in this country due to unsustainable farming practices. Thus, even turnip greens — rated as the best vegetable source of iron — if they are grown on a soil from which the iron has been mined out over years and years of intensive row-crop agriculture, will not have high iron levels no matter whether they were grown organically or conventionally.

Large-scale certified organic farmers do not use synthetic fertilizers — and that is definitely a good thing. Like chemical farmers, however, large-scale organic growers concentrate on providing their crops with the Big Three essential nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, because as long as there is a plentiful supply of these, plants will grow fast and big. I would argue, however, that plants grown in most large-scale organic and conventional farming operations are fed a diet that is too rich, particularly in nitrogen, and consequently grow too big too fast, causing their nutritional value to plummet.

Robert Shewfelt cites the work of many scientists to back this up. W.H. Eppendorfer found that when plants are given too much nitrogen, protein quality actually declines, and S. Nagy and W.F. Wardowski found that ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) levels declined as well. A study by J. N. Sorenson revealed that while higher nitrogen fertilization produced larger cabbage heads, those heads contained proportionally more water and proportionally less ascorbic acid and dietary fiber than cabbage grown with less nitrogen fertilizer.

In addition to heavy inputs of readily-available nitrogen, vegetables grown by the big growers also get heavy inputs of water. Crops grown with plenty of water grow fast and large, but as Sorenson found, more water can mean less nutrients and fiber.

Studies have also shown that crops that are harvested and handled mechanically suffer greater post-harvest nutrient losses than hand-harvested produce due to the bumps and bruises they sustain. Each bump and bruise damages cell walls and allows nutrients to escape and oxidation to occur. Here is another reason to buy your vegetables from the small-scale farmer, who picks and packages each bunch of beets, each tomato, and each head of lettuce with that most delicate instrument, that miracle of evolution, the human hand.

Factor Two: Genetics. Simple genetic variation is perhaps the most widely overlooked preharvest factor behind variation in nutrient levels of vegetables and fruits. Different varieties (cultivars) of the same vegetable vary widely in the amount of nutrients they contain. When Ronald Eitenmiller, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology at the University of Georgia, looked at the nutrient composition of different cultivars of apples, peaches, and other fruit, for example, they found variation in Vitamin A levels as high as twenty times. Robert Shewfelt reports that carotene levels in any given vegetable may vary by a factor of ten, depending on the cultivar. That means that Carrot A may have twice as much carotene as Carrot B, three times as much as Carrot C, and ten times as much as Carrot D. I grow a variety of carrots called Sugarsnax, for example, which contains much more beta-carotene than other varieties. You will not find Sugarsnax carrots in either the conventional or certified organic aisle in your grocery store, however, because the variety is not as productive or as pretty as the mainstream commercial varieties.

Factor Three: The Faceless Marketplace. In the wholesale market, there are no faces. The farmer grows for faceless consumers and the consumer eats the food of a faceless farmer. There is absolutely no accountability. If you buy a tomato at the store and it tastes terrible, do you say to yourself, "Well, I’m never going to buy a tomato from that farmer again"? Of course not. You got it from a shelf, not a farmer. Even if you wanted to complain, you would find it nearly impossible to trace your way back down the chain to find out where that tomato came from and who grew it.

When a farmer sells face-to-face to the public, the situation is reversed. If a customer buys a tasteless tomato at my market stand, well, I hear about it. And then I can do something about it. A tasteless tomato is serious business and I need to figure out the "why and the wherefore." A farmer who sells directly to the public can also grow varieties like Sugarsnax carrots that have been bred for higher nutritional content and greater flavor, because the farmer can inform the customers about why they should be buying that variety.

Another aspect of a direct farmer-consumer relationship is the distance between the field where the food is grown and the table where it is eaten. The average produce item in this nation’s stores has traveled 1,500 miles to get there. Consequently, crops such as tomatoes and melons and many of the tree fruits must be picked while still unripe so they can ripen up during their long trek to market. Unfortunately, nutrient levels in produce are highest at peak maturity. Small, local farmers selling directly to the public can let their tomatoes and melons ripen up on the vines. The plants continue to pump the fruit full of vitamins and minerals, as well as cancer-fighting lycopenes, right up to the time when they are supposed to be picked — when they are at their peak of maturity, nutrition, and flavor.

Post-harvest treatment of the crop is also a factor in preserving high nutrient levels (and again, flavor). Sweet corn is probably the most striking example. All plants continue to respire after they are picked, burning up their sugars and giving off carbon dioxide (CO2), water, and heat. Sweet corn picked at 80 degrees will continue to respire at a rapid pace, releasing 400 milligrams of CO2 per hour. This CO2 is being generated by the breakdown of sugars. The more respiration continues, the more that sweet corn becomes "unsweet" corn. Cooling corn from 80 to 70 degrees cuts the respiration rate in half. I pick my corn in the cool of the evening and then immediately pack it in a crate with a jug of ice in the center and topped off with crushed ice. Twelve hours later, I’m selling it at the farmers’ market and my customers can’t get over how sweet and delicious it is.

But perhaps the greatest culprit behind lost nutritional value is simply that old nemesis, the passage of time. As soon as a vegetable is picked it begins losing nutritional value — and fast. Leeks, for example, lose over 50 percent of their total carotene within three days. A study by Mary Eheart and Dianne Odland showed that even under optimal storage temperatures green beans lose 60 percent of their Vitamin C in the first three days after harvest and lose another third by the end of the fourth day. By the end of the week, it won’t matter if you eat a whole bushel of beans — you’ll have to look elsewhere to get your U.S. recommended daily requirement of Vitamin C.

And it is not only nutritional elements that are lost. Many of the phytochemicals that provide a whole range of health benefits from fighting cancer to regulating cholesterol levels to stimulating the immune system also decrease rapidly over time. Jerusalem artichokes and burdock root contain a phytochemical called inulin that acts like insulin in the body and so is highly beneficial to diabetics. After twenty-four hours, however, most of the inulin rapidly converts to starch.

It is truly disheartening to think about how many nutrients and beneficial phytochemicals break down and disappear as produce — whether certified organic or conventional — wastes away in warehouses and trucks and more warehouses and more trucks before it even makes it to the store, where it sits on the shelves some more before you finally pick it up and put it in your cart. Contrast this to produce from a local farmer selling at a weekly farmer’s market or a farm stand or through a CSA (community supported agriculture). The maximum time between when I pick and pack the vegetables and when my market customers put it in their bags is twenty-four to thirty-six hours; in most cases it is closer to twelve to eighteen. My CSA customers twenty miles down the road get their produce within six to twelve hours of harvest. At the store, you’d be lucky if the produce was picked six to twelve days ago.

Paradox Explained and Paradise Regained

So, here it is — the answer to the paradox of organic produce that is no more nutritious than produce bombarded with all the agri-chemicals known to man. The samples that were used in the comparative studies of organic and conventional produce came straight out of the wholesale market pipeline. In other words, these studies tested the products of large-scale organic farms — which supply the bulk of organic produce on the store shelves — against the products of large-scale conventional farms. It should come as no surprise, then, that these studies rarely find any statistical difference between vitamin and mineral levels in the two types of produce. The samples of both types were grown under farming practices that are detrimental to nutrient levels, such as heavy use of water and nitrogen. All samples arrived in the researcher’s lab after a long journey through the same packing and transportation infrastructure, which bumped and banged these tender nutrient packages along yards of conveyer belts and along miles of roads. They all sat in trucks and warehouses days and weeks before reaching the laboratory. Finally, both the organic and conventional produce were cultivars bred for uniform size and shape, a pretty appearance and transportability — not flavor or nutritional content.

So, I won’t argue that the organic produce sitting in Whole Foods, Fresh Fields, Jewel, or Kroger is more nutritious than its conventional cousin. But I will argue fiercely that my small-scale, locally-grown, locally-sold organic produce raised on rich and healthy soil under natural conditions is.

And while I am arguing fiercely, here is another very important point: although small-scale, locally-grown, locally-sold produce is better for you than any other kind of produce, there is an even more important reason to eat truly organic food. Eating organic is not just good for you, it’s good for the planet.

True organic agriculture is truly a matter of life and death. But it is not a matter of my life, my death. Not a matter of your life, your death. It is a matter of life and death for the planet. You and I will do just fine whether our food supply is grown organically or conventionally. The planet (and the seventh generation) will not do just fine. The soil and its inhabitants will suffer, the fields and their inhabitants will suffer, the entire environment will suffer and eventually die.

A conventional tomato is produced by killing insects, killing plants, killing soil microorganisms, killing the soil, killing a portion of the planet. Although mainstream organic agriculture is far better than conventional chemical agriculture when it comes to its impact on the environment, it does not enhance the life of the planet. An organic tomato on my farm is produced in a way that enhances life — my life, your life, the lives of the deer and mice, hawks and swallows, the lives of butterflies and beetles, ants and aphids, the lives of oaks and grasses, nematodes and algae, fungi and bacteria.

It sounds naive, perhaps even self-important, but in my very small way, I am working to save the world. And every time you eat truly organic food that is grown and sold locally, you, too, are working to save the world. Instead of a vicious cycle, we can create a virtuous cycle: the more consumers of true organic food there are, the more truly organic farmers there will be. And the more truly organic food available, the more people will eat truly organically.

So...Eat organic. Save the world.

Excerpted with permission from Organic Matters, © 2001 by Henry Brockman. Copies are available for $5 each, including shipping and handling. Make a check payable to TerraBooks, and send to RR 1, Box 141, Congerville, IL 61729. Click here for more information.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: