Reasons to Rethink Organic

The Huffington Post put up a slide show with some excerpts from the chapter on organic foods in The Food Police.  Here is the lead in:

Everywhere you turn, you hear "organic is healthier", "organic is greener", or "you absolutely MUST buy organic." It's not a question of whether we want to eat healthy, environmentally friendly food -- who doesn't want that? The question is whether organic lives up to the hype and whether it's worth it to pay a hefty premium. One of the problems with organic is that few shoppers know what the term really means, and they project onto the nebulous word all their hopes and dreams of good eating. Despite what many believe, organic doesn't mean food from small farms, produced without pesticides, or grown in the USA. There are a few advantages to eating organic but there are some drawbacks too. If you're rich enough and well-informed on the issues, then I say go for it. But, if you're not so sure whether organic lives up to all it is promised to be, here are a few reasons to re-think doubling your grocery bill.

Solving Obesity Externalities

​It doesn't matter whether you listen to Bill Maher on the left or Sean Hannity on the right,  you'll hear guests on their show arguing that something should be done about obesity because one's weight imposes a cost on others.  Obesity, they argue, is an externality, and therefore requires government regulation to make private costs equal social costs. 

Many of these argument surround the health care expenses incurred by Medicare and Medicaid.  I don't think that is a particularly good argument, but I don't want to get into that in this post.  Rather, I want to remind readers of what the Nobel prize winner, Ronald Coase, taught us regarding externalities.  ​In particular, if your behavior is harming me, I now have an incentive to negotiate with you to lessen the harm done.  

​It appears that at least one airline, has taken this lesson to heart.  According to the CNN story:

The head of Samoa Air has defended its policy of charging passengers by their weight, arguing such a system is not only fair but the future for other airlines.

and:​

What makes airplanes work is weight. We are not selling seats, we are selling weight.

and:

According to the airline's website, "your weight plus your baggage items is what you pay for. Simple."

​

I suspect there will be quite a few folks who don't like this policy.  Yet, we already have to pay airlines if we want to check bags or sit in the seats with more leg room.  You're free to bring several bags or stretch out your legs, but the airline is going to make you pay for that privilege rather than charging it to all passengers.  

But, surely this isn't fair because (some) people can't affect their weight.  Yes, but I also can't affect my gender, my height, my age, or my race - all of which have been shown in various studies to affect wages, employment outcomes, and so on.  Men pay more for life insurance than women because we're riskier.  It is hard for me to see that it would be "fair" to force women to pay more for life insurance (to partially pick up men's cost) simply because men are likely to die sooner for some reasons under their control and some that aren't.       

It is almost certainly true that heavier passengers cost the airline more money (and thus raise the prices of airline tickets for everyone else).  ​Ultimately, the airline isn't discriminating against over-weight people, they're simply applying equality to every pound that enters their plane.  To do otherwise is to ask the thin to pay more than their "fair share."  

How is it that I can support an airline trying to solve an obesity-externality problem when I'm skeptical of the government ​doing the same?  Competition.  If you don't like Samoa Air's policy, don't fly their airline.  Moreover, if their policy turns out to be one that people (thick and think alike) don't like, there will ultimately be another airline that enters the marketplace to offer passengers a more desirable deal.  Samoa Air may ultimately find that trying to regulate their obesity externalities simply isn't worth the effort, and if that is indeed the case, I suspect you'll see a rapid reversal of policy after a few poor quarterly earnings reports.

Is Organic Sustainable?

I ​ran across this really interesting blog (via Tyler Cowen's blog) post on nitrogen use in agriculture by Adam Merberg, who says he is a "reformed food reformer."  

Merberg's main point is that, aside from a small handful of crops, nitrogen is a key limiting ingredient in growing more food.  ​Much of the nitrogen used in modern commercial agriculture comes from the air!  Well, it's taken out of the air by a "synthetic" process that prohibits its use in organic agriculture.

Organic agriculture, like all agriculture, requires nitrogen.  Soil (regardless of how you farm) looses fertility after a while and requires replenishment to continue productivity.  Organic seeks nitrogen in cover crops (like clover and soy) but mainly through use animal manure.  Merberg asks a reasonable question: where does the manure get it's nitrogen.  The answer is that it largely comes through conventional agriculture and the "synthetic" process invented by Haber.  The manure spread on many organic farms comes from cows/hogs/chickens that ate grains grown using "synthetic" fertilizer.  

When we read that organic can "feed the world" we need to ask where all the nitrogen will come from to make it happen.  ​

Here are a few snippets from Merber's article (the back-and-forth in the comments was interesting too):​

By identifying manure as a source of nitrogen, Vasilikiotis dodges the issue of nitrogen fixation entirely. However much nitrogen exists in manure today, much of it has been fixed industrially before being taken up by corn plants and laundered through the guts of conventionally-farmed animals. Vasilikiotis does not explain how that manure might come to be in an organic world. To do so would require demonstrating the potential for sufficient biological nitrogen fixation

​and

Natural processes, like atmospheric nitrogen deposition, can help replenish some nutrients, but the fact remains that the nutrient cycle remains open. Maintaining modern yields generally requires inputs of some kind to replace nutrients removed in crops. For instance, Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm–which Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma identifies as a model for sustainable agriculture and describes as “completely self-sufficient in nitrogen”–actually brings in nitrogen in conventionally-grown grain, which is fed to chickens whose manure fertilizes the pasture.

and, interestingly . . .​

In recent years, the US government has begun allowing the recycling of human waste by authorizing the use of treated sewage sludge, called biosolids, as fertilizers. However, in 1998 organic advocates successfully protested proposed guidelines which would have allowed application of biosolids in organic agriculture. Whatever the merits of their objections, it is ironic that the movement for a more “natural” agriculture now opposes ending the waste of nutrients that Liebig once decried as “a sinful violation of the divine laws of Nature.”

​

For the record, I'm not against organics.  But, I am against the mis-truths that are often spread in their defense.  ​

Does Organic Food Cause Autism?

Of course not.  But if you applied the same logic used by many anti-GMO activists who claim that the increased use of GMOs caused the rise in autism, one would have to claim that the of organic food also caused autism.  That's according to this post by Kevin Folta.  

His little parody shows how easy it is to create a scary sounding food story based on spurious correlations.  In fact, he shows three graphs illustrating the rise in autism, the rise in diabetes, and the rise in organic food consumption over time.  All three track each other almost perfectly.  But no one reasonable would claim that diabetes causes autism or that organics cause autism.  Likewise, no reasonable person should claim GMOs cause autism unless they can provide some causal biological biases for the claim.  

It is exactly this sort of fallacious correlational analysis that "suggests" adoption of GMOs in India caused an increase in suicides.  This little tidbit spread like wildfire around the web, made its way into food documentaries, and now is often repeated as fact.  The trouble is that when you actually look at the facts, the story doesn't hold much water.  

Here are the first two paragraphs of Folta's parody:

While people think of "organic" cultivation techniques as natural and safe, there are important points we might consider.  Most of the plants used today have only been developed genetically in the last 100 years, and even "heirloom" varieties were bred relatively recently.  There have been no long term studies, and plants certainly are known to produce a wide suite of toxic compounds.  

Worse, organically cultivated plants are placed in highly artificial environments.  Rather than growing in soil as it exists, soils are highly amended with composts and manures. High levels of nitrogen and carbon dramatically alter gene expression leading to patterns never observed in nature. Van Djik et al. (2012) found that there were dramatic differences in gene expression between conventional and organically-grown potatoes, with organic potatoes showing higher expression of stress-related genes. There have been no long-term studies to assess the effects of this un-natural gene expression. 

Pesticide Facts

Over at his NYT blog, Mark Bittman weighs in on pesticide use in agriculture. It is really hard to know where to start to address the misnomers that are raised in his piece. Let me begin by saying, however, that no one (including myself) likes the thought of eating pesticides in food. But, we need to put things in perspective. Here are some UC Berkeley scientists:

We estimate that about 99.9% of the chemicals that humans ingest are naturally occurring. The amounts of synthetic pesticide residues in plant foods are low in comparison to the amount of natural pesticides produced by plants themselves.

Bittman begins by saying:

After the publication of “Silent Spring,” 50 years ago, we (scientists, environmental and health advocates, birdwatchers, citizens) managed to curb the use of pesticides[1] and our exposure to them — only to see their application grow and grow to the point where American agriculture uses more of them than ever before. And the threat is more acute than ever.

But if you click on the link he actually provides in the quote, you'll find front and center from the EPA that:

Total pounds of U.S. pesticide use decreased by approximately 8% from 1.2 to 1.1 billion pounds from 2000 to 2007.

Similarly, if you look at the USDA, you'll find that:

In 2007, roughly 877 million pounds of active ingredients were applied to U.S. cropland at a cost of roughly $7.9 billion. In comparison, in 1980, roughly 1.1 billion pounds of active ingredients were applied at a cost of roughly $7.1 billion (in inflation-adjusted dollars). During 1980-2007 the aggregate quantity of pesticides applied in the U.S. declined at an average rate of 0.6 percent per year

So, it appears the entire premise of the piece is off base. Still, I will briefly remark on some of the other claims raised in this piece:

• Even if pesticide use were increasing (which according to the above it is not), you have to keep in mind that not all pesticides are created equal. The pesticides farmers now use include much more glyphosate (think Round-Up) than they once did, which is less toxic and environmentally damaging than options they use to use (think atrazine).
• I agree integrated pest management (IPM) is a promising alternative and it is one that many farmers and food processors are already, voluntarily, pursuing because it can be profit enhancing. Pesticide resistance is a problem - always has been, always will be. Calling something a "superweed" makes it sound as if this is a new problem but it isn't. IPM can help mitigate resistance issues.
• The piece tries to link trends in pesticide use with autism and IQ. Has anyone heard of the Flynn effect? IQ is rising not falling.
• It is true that organics tend to (on average) use fewer total pesticides. But it is simply not true that organic farmers can't use pesticides. They can use "natural" pesticides like copper and sulfur, which are more toxic than many synthetics. There is really no way to tell when in the supermarket whether the organic has more or less pesticides than the non-organic.
• If you want to read a really nice account about pesticide risks in food, see Bjorn Lomborg's book. There you'll find lots of data and statistics showing that the relative risks of food pesticides are very small in the grand scheme of things. Moreover, he shows that the bigger cancer risk is not ingesting too many pesticides but rather not ingesting enough fruits and veggies.
• On an acre-per-acre basis, which commodities are the biggest users of pesticides? You might be surprised to find out that it is not corn, soybeans, or wheat but rather fruits and veggies like lemons, strawberries, etc. It is true that more pesticide is used in corn than strawberries but that's only because we grow a lot more corn than strawberries. If you look at pesticides per acres planted, a much different picture emerges.