An uproar over organic

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As you know, we carry a bunch of feeds from other sites that might be of interest to you all. TheScienceDailyposts are the most frequent, and I usually cant keep up with them. Their headline about organic food having little evidence of health benefitsdid grab my attention however. The Stanford study that prompted it got a lot of coverage elsewhere; an NPR report prompted a flood of angry responses, and a New York Times op-ed by Roger Cohen praising it got a stinging retort from Donna DeViney of Soilent Greens in which she calls him an elitist halfwit among many other things.

The response to Stanfords study from almost everyone I know has been the samea big, ringing, so what. Gardeners dont grow produce without chemicals because they think it has more vitamins. As DeViney states:

Spraying Roundup is easy. Mulching and hoeing in the hot Texas sun on this little patch of organic acreage is way freaking harder. But we find it worth the extra work to not develop tumors, disease, genetic defects, or the sense that were above it all, out here in the actual dirtYou know, where food comes from.

And, of course, taste is never mentioned in the study. Homegrown producewhich is generally organicjust tastes better, as do the vegetables from our area organic farms. I never thought organic food being good for you had anything to do with nutrition; I thought the label was more about what the food didnt have, in terms of pesticides and other chemicals.

Studies like these dont weigh very much when put in the scale against common sense. I get that there has to be research, but each individual study only tells part of the story. Unfortunately, when a small (and somewhat irrelevant) piece of the puzzle receives such widespread distributionand then gets distorted further in pieces like the Timesyou have to wonder if the research has any benefit whatever.

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