Going organic isn’t healthier, harms the planet — and put me in hospital for a week

Good for the Earth and good for you. That, in a (pesticide-free) nutshell, is the claim made by the organic food movement. In fact, its very title is misleading: all food is ‘organic’. But last week its claims were given a comprehensive, peer-reviewed demolition.

A report from the University of British Columbia concluded that organic farming methods depleted the planet’s resources more than conventional farming methods — and that there were no health benefits to consumers to compensate them for the much greater cost of their grocery bills.

The authors’ first point rested on the fact that organic farms produce up to 25 per cent less food per acre than those that use pesticides to destroy crop-killing weeds. on the basis that land conversion to agriculture is one of the greatest threats to wildlife, they conclude that organic is less environmentally friendly than conventional methods.

Poisonous

And, while they concede that organic food may contain ‘slightly more micronutrients’, it was by no means clear that this provided ‘any actual health benefits to consumers’.

What is clear, however, is that devotees of so-called organic foods and the linked fad of ‘natural’ remedies run lethal risks. Just last weekend two people were rushed to hospital, critically ill, having drunk some herbal tea from a shop in San Francisco. They required resuscitation after their hearts were weakened by a plant-based toxin, aconite, found in the tea. There is, by the way, no known antidote to this entirely natural poison.

It is surprising how little fuss is made when lethal organic products are put on the market. If a conventionally farmed product had similar effects it would be front-page news, backed up by vivid press releases from the Soil Association (the trade body for organic farmers).

did you know, for example, that last year 92,000 packets of potentially fatal tablets containing St John’s Wort extracts were sold to unsuspecting Britons? The batches had been mixed with poisonous weeds when the plants were harvested. Much more seriously, did you know that in 2011 almost 4,000 people were seriously affected — with 53 fatalities — as a result of E. Coli poisoning from organic beansprouts produced in Germany? Perhaps because only seven Britons were affected, it did not make headlines here.

I was almost a fatal victim of organic farming methods myself. Some years ago my wife decided our vegetable garden should be entirely organic. She fertilised it with pigeon droppings from an apparently reputable supplier of alternatives to the man-made nitrogenous stuff.

I can’t report any better flavour in our vegetables. What I can report is that I contracted psittacosis from the spores of our organic manure. My condition — sometimes termed ‘bird flu’ — quickly developed into a form of pneumonia untreatable by standard antibiotics. That meant a week in hospital, on a drip.

Fallacy

It is, typically, the mother in a family who seeks out organic food on the weekly shop. She may well be influenced by the nonsense that pesticides have some connection with cancer in humans; and what mother would not be prepared to pay up to 50 per cent more for the family’s vegetables if she thought her children were thereby less likely to get cancer?

This insidious fallacy originated with the woman sometimes described as the mother of the organic movement. Rachel Carson’s hugely influential book Silent Spring claimed man-made chemicals in the food chain would cause ‘practically 100 per cent’ of humanity to be wiped out by a cancer epidemic in one generation. That was over half a century ago, and we are longer-lived than ever.

As Professor Anthony Trewavas of Edinburgh University points out, in the period since 1950 — when pesticides began to take an increasing role in food production — ‘stomach cancer rates declined by 60 per cent in Western countries’.

Trewavas has a dog in this fight. He is an advocate of ‘no-till’ farming, which avoids damage to the soil caused by ploughing: organic farmers must plough to destroy the weeds which would otherwise have been killed by pesticides.

As the professor points out, if pesticides really were the cause of cancer in humans, you would expect conventional farmers (who handle the stuff in industrial quantities) to have much higher rates of that dreaded illness. But his research revealed that, of 12 separate investigations into farmers involving a total of 300,000 people, all but one found that pesticide-using farmers had overall cancer rates substantially lower than the general public.

Cheaper

Perhaps more pertinently, for those at the purchasing end, three years ago Cancer Research UK announced that ‘in our large study of middle-aged women in the UK we found no evidence that a woman’s overall cancer risk was decreased if she generally ate organic food’. The charity’s survey of 600,000 women aged 50 and over actually found ‘a small increased risk of breast cancer among those who ate organic produce’.

At this, the Soil Association — perhaps concerned for the businesses of its members — denounced Cancer Research UK and brazenly told the public to take its report ‘with a pinch of organic salt’.

I’m not claiming the organic food on the shelves of reputable supermarkets is less good for you than the much cheaper conventional equivalent. But I wouldn’t dream of paying a penny more for it.

As it happens, I buy quite a lot of our food from the local farm shop. Much of it has wonderful flavour — more than similar produce from supermarkets. But this is not an organic farm. The greater flavour is just because the food is fresher, having travelled no great distance.

But pesticides and man-made fertiliser? We are all better off for them, both in our wallets and in our health.