Food for Thought: Organic Grub Worth Buying?

(April 13) -- Sales of organic foods in the United States are increasing by double digits annually. The government says that in 2009, cash boxes at grocery stores, farmers markets and roadside stands collected as much as $28 billion from the sale of presumed pesticide- and drug-free fruits, vegetables and meat.

But as the growth of the organic market soars, so do the questions about what consumers are actually getting for their money.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's inspector general issued a report finding significant breakdowns in the National Organic Program, the office that's supposed to ensure that food bearing the green USDA Organic label has been grown, picked, packaged and delivered in a manner that adheres to federal regulations. It followed a British government report declaring organic foods no better for consumers' health than the conventional kind. And on Tuesday night in New York, a panel will debate the premise that "Organic Food Is Marketing Hype," as the title of the event puts it. Along with the live audience, the panelists' arguments will be heard by viewers and listeners tuning in to sponsoring media organizations NPR and Bloomberg TV.

"The organic food industry is now contending with the challenges of improving quality and value in an era of steady growth, while countering a diverse mix of cheap shots, overt attacks and misinformation," says Chuck Benbrook, chief scientist for the Organic Center, who's among the panelists squaring off in Tuesday night's debate.

Other scientists who support organic foods stress that they are subjected to more stringent checks than other comestibles. But with skeptics raising doubts, the possibility of an anti-organic backlash looms. At the same time, because the USDA can't guarantee its standards are being met, grocery chains that deal in organic products have to worry about whether they're giving shoppers what they think they're getting.

"It is a perpetual concern," says Trudy Bialic, director of public relations for PCC Natural Markets in the Pacific Northwest, "something we have to think about all the time."

Holes in the Latticework

According to the USDA's National Organic Program, as of July, the government had 98 accredited certifying agents (54 domestic, 44 foreign) to certify approximately 28,000 organic operations worldwide. Their audits play a critical role in ensuring public confidence in organic foods, notes Wendy Gordon of the Natural Resources Defense Council's consumer Web site Simple Step. "If it's just a voluntary program or the industry is inspecting itself, that means nothing."

But 98 certifiers for 28,000 certifees is not a favorable ratio. The report on the National Organics Program released on March 18 by the USDA's inspector general documented several other problems as well:

• The NOP took between seven and 32 months to pull the certification of some companies proved to violate the organic standards. In one example, purportedly organic operations ordered to stop selling under the organic label in 2006 were found last year to still be peddling fruits and vegetables on the Internet while continuing to claim they were certified organic.

• The NOP's certifying agents are failing to conduct the required periodic testing for chemical residue, and the government has no way of knowing whether any such testing is taking place under the NOP's auspices.

• Failures and inconsistencies in enforcement plagued parts of the system, especially the USDA's overseas certification process.

• Certifying agents are not only overburdened but may lack adequate training.

"All of these factors reduce NOP's assurance that products labeled as organic meet a uniform standard," the report concluded. It recommended more than a dozen major changes to strengthen the United States' organic foods system.

Those who maintain that conventional food is all that's needed responded with a round of "we told you so," while organic supporters looked at the same documents and pointed to how relatively few problems were found overall.

Bialic says the report's findings came as no surprise.

"This has been a reoccurring question all along, especially with agents and organizations certifying organic foods overseas," she says. "The report documented many problems deep in the crannies of the organic effort. But we believe, we hope, that the new administration of the federal program will make the needed improvements."

What Organic Doesn't Have (And Why That's a Good Thing)

Some scientists are fervent in their belief that when the organic label delivers what it says it does, the consumer is getting quality.

"Organic food is held to a higher standard than any other food produced on the planet. It must meet all the same standards for safety as conventional food, plus all the organic certification standards," says Richard Wiles, senior vice president for policy for the Environmental Working Group.

And at least one peer-reviewed study has shown that organic foods offer a potential benefit in what they don't contain.

It was conducted in 2008 by Chensheng Lu, then a professor at Emory University's School of Public Health and a leading authority on pesticides and children, who took as his subjects a group of children living on Mercer Island, a wealthy suburb of Seattle.

Over the course of a year, Lu, now at Harvard, fed 21 children ages 3 to 11 conventional fruits, vegetables and juices from nearby grocery stores for five days at a time. Then the kids were switched to organic foods.

Twice daily on multiple days in each of the four growing seasons, he tested their urine and saliva. When the children ate conventional food, markers of organophosphates -- the family of pesticides spawned by the creation of nerve gas agents in World War II -- appeared in the biological samples. None was found when the children were eating organic.

"The transformation is extremely rapid. Within eight to 36 hours of the children switching to organic food, the pesticides were no longer detected," Lu said at the time.

"Once you switch from conventional food to organic, the pesticides (malathion and chlorpyrifos) that we can measure in the urine disappears. The level returns immediately when you go back to the conventional diets."

Lu is repeating the study in two different communities. The exposure levels observed in Lu's study were lower than the levels that the Environmental Protection Agency regards as safe. But many public health experts and advocates believe those levels are in fact not safe, especially for children.

"Many studies suggest that children are more susceptible than adults to the effects of pesticides -- especially to low-dose, long-term exposures," says Karl A. Tupper, staff scientist for the Pesticide Action Network North America.

The only way to avoid that exposure, Lu's study suggests, is to go organic.

Label Overload

Among the panelists at the Tuesday night debate taking the stance that organic food is all hype is Sir John Krebs, former chairman of the U.K. Food Standards Agency. It was that body that issued the report arguing that there "are no important differences in the nutrition content, or any additional health benefits, of organic food when compared with conventionally produced food."

Another panelist on the hype side is Blake Hurst, a gifted writer who also farms 4,500 acres of corn and soybeans in the northwest corner of Missouri.

"Consumers should not pay the premium price for organic food. There is just not proof that it's worth it," he said during an interview last week.

He points to the pro-organic view that argues against adding hormones to milks. "Milk already contains 24 natural hormones as is," he says, "so that just doesn't make sense."

Adding to consumers' confusion regarding organic products is the fact that the label itself "is not a safety seal or a safety program," says Consumers Union senior scientist Urvashi Rangan, whom the debate organizers recruited to argue against Krebs and Hurst.

Instead, "it's a marketing program with a set of comprehensive standards, inspections and procedures to verify the system is working."

The organic label is also one of many a shopper will confront during a trip to the grocery store. And many of those others -- antibiotic-free, hormone-free, free roaming, no additives -- do not promise what they appear to.

"In almost all cases, they mean nothing. The products haven't been certified and there's no law behind it," says NRDC's Gordon.

She sees the "natural" self-designation as especially vexing, since many consumers conflate it with organic.

"Natural is a made-up term that manufacturers slap on food. There is no requirement, no law behind it, no regulations that farmers have to go through to use that label.

"Consumers are completely confounded by that 'Oh, it's natural,' " she says. "Not true, and there's no way of finding out."

So...How Good Is Organic?

"Organic food, as we understand it, is lower in additives, whether they are antibiotics, pesticides or chemical fertilizers. However, it's not necessarily safer from a bacterial or viral perspective. Organic foods have caused human illness," says William Marler, one of the nation's top food safety lawyers. He says his team has handled litigation on behalf of people sickened by organic raw milk, organic ground beef, organic peanuts and other products.

Representatives at both the USDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told AOL News that anecdotally, they think organic food is safer than conventional. But neither knew of anyone in the government who had enough statistics to prove or disprove that.

The USDA inspector general's report made it clear that during the Bush administration, efforts to ensure the quality of organic products and empower the agents who inspect them more or less stagnated.

President Barack Obama has promised changes in food regulations, including those governing organics. After taking office he brought in an expert who'd spent 20 years tromping through organic regulations, appointing Miles McEvoy to head the federal organic program. McEvoy in turn declared that "the age of enforcement" had dawned for the organic food industry.

Food-safety activists and grocery chains that sell organic food were among those who cheered the loudest.