What is Organic Food?

Authors of The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter

Using the label “organic” to distinguish one tomato from another is a big stretch from the word’s original meaning, for until the middle of the twentieth century it simply meant something living or derived from living matter. In that sense, the idea of an “inorganic tomato” is a contradiction in terms, unless it is, say, a tomato-shaped glass ornament. With very few exceptions — salt is one — all our food is “organic” no matter how it is produced.

The specific sense of “organic” we use when we speak of “organic food” today traces back to 1942, when J. I. Rodale launched a magazine called Organic Gardening. Nowadays Rodale is hailed as a pioneer, but then he was often derided as a crank and a throwback to obsolete ways of farming. He advocated maintaining soil fertility and stability by putting organic matter — animal manure or compost — back into the soil rather than relying on the “inorganic,” or synthetic, fertilizers that were then widely seen as the modern way to go. So in Rodale’s usage, it was the fertilizers, and from them, the farming methods, rather than the food, that were organic, and the concern was primarily with the soil, not with issues like biodiversity or animal welfare. But the meaning of “organic farming” soon parted company from Rodale’s original narrow distinction between fertilizers. Varying definitions spun out of control as different associations of “organic farmers” tried to set standards in accordance with their own values. Some wanted to stick with a narrow definition in terms of what you could and could not put on the soil, the crops, or the animals. Others wanted to include an entire way of life, including healthy living, an equitable form of distribution, concern for wildlife, and so on. Among organizations of organic farmers around the world, the broader view prevailed. The International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements settled on this definition:

Organic agriculture is an agricultural system that promotes environmentally, socially, and economically sound production of food, fiber, timber, etc. In this system, soil fertility is seen as the key to successful production. Working with the natural properties of plants, animals, and the landscape, organic farmers aim to optimize quality in all aspects of agriculture and the environment.

Such a definition does not, however, lend itself to being reduced to a label that can be put on products to show that they were produced organically. Without specific standards that could be encapsulated in a label, consumers were often unsure what the various “organic” labels used by different associations and producers really meant.

In 1990, the U.S. Congress decided to clear up the confusion by authorizing the Department of Agriculture to establish legally enforceable “USDA Organic” standards and a certification scheme so that consumers could be confident that their food really had been produced in accordance with the standards. That led, in 2002, to a set of standards that most people in organic farming considered a reasonable compromise among the various views of what organic farming is all about. Crops must be grown without the use of synthetic fertilizers, and most synthetic pesticides and all herbicides are also banned, although biological and botanical methods of control can be used. Soil fertility is to be maintained by the use of animal and plant waste (but not sewage sludge, which can contain toxic heavy metals), crop rotation, and growing “cover crops” like clover between other crops. (Cover crops are plowed into the soil to restore nitrogen and organic matter.) Animals used for meat, eggs, or milk must eat organic grains or other organic food and must not be given growth hormones or antibiotics. (Sick or injured animals may be treated with antibiotics, but then their meat, milk, or eggs cannot be sold as organic.) Organically raised animals must have access to the outdoors, including access to pasture for ruminants. Neither plants nor animals can be the product of genetic engineering, and organic food cannot be irradiated.

Reprinted from: The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer and Jim Mason © 2006 Peter Singer and Jim Mason. (May 2006; $25.95US/$34.95CAN; 1-57954-889-X) Permission granted by Rodale, Inc., Emmaus, PA 18098. Available wherever books are sold or directly from the publisher by calling (800) 848-4735 or visit their website at www.rodalestore.com.

Author
Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values. He first became well known internationally after the publication of Animal Liberation in 1975. In 2005, Time magazine named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people.

Jim Mason is the coauthor of Animal Factories (with Peter Singer) and the author of An Unnatural Order: Why We Are Destroying the Planet and Each Other, which John Robbins, author of the best-selling Diet for a New America, calls “a wonderful and important book.” He is also an attorney and the fifth generation of a Missouri farming family.

The Advantage Of Organic Food

With more and more attention being given to the effect diet can have on our bodies, it is inevitable that the question should arise as to whether or not there is a particular advantage of organic food. Organic food enthusiasts will report – without hesitation – of their increased energy and overall health and vitality. As we explore the correlation between our diets and our longevity and health, it stands to reason that we must also explore the possible advantage of organic food.

The definition of organic food lies in the manner in which the food is grown and processed. Organic food is that food which is not exposed to chemicals of any kind during its growing, manufacturing, processing, or packaging. Organic fruits and vegetables are grown without the use of pesticides and are preservative-free on every level. Organic farming has emerged as one of the industries of the future as more and more people are demanding the most natural and nutritious choices for their families.

In the case of animal products, such as meat and dairy, animals are given only organic feed. Traditional agricultural farmers are in the practice of administering a myriad of chemicals to dairy cows in an effort to increase their size and milk output. Organic agricultural farmers – under stringent government guidelines – are forbidden from using such chemicals; chemicals, that should be noted, that have not been studied thoroughly enough to determine their long-term effects.

Another advantage of organic food is its positive impact on our environment as a whole. Traditionally grown fruits and vegetables are chemically treated while still in the ground, exposing the soil to a chemical cocktail that forever changes its properties – and possibly seeps into our water supply. Growing organically keeps soil in its natural state and protects the ground as well as our water.

The advantage of organic food lies in its ability to impact us on a global level; minimizing our exposure to chemically altered food and saving our planet from needless contact with unnatural contaminants.

Organic vs. Processed Foods

Organic foods are more popular than ever these days. But what do you know about them?

Organic foods and processed foods are two of the types of fruits, vegetables, and meats that can be found in grocery stores these days. In relation to this, there are several labels that are used in order to determine how much processing food has gone through. One of the steps in determining how nutritious your lifestyle is knowing whether there is a difference in organic or processed foods. Knowing what is contained in each and the effects that they have on your body can help you decide which foods to eat.

The first thing to understand is the definition of the word organic. When food is organic, it means that no preservatives, added chemicals or other types of fertilizers and/or pesticides have been added to the food. With meat, the animals can not have been given any antibiotics or growth hormones. Usually, organic foods must be approved by the USDA in order to be defined as such.

Next are the definitions of “natural” and “processed.” These types of foods can have preservatives, chemicals, fertilizers, and pesticides added to them. The meat can have antibiotics and growth hormones in it. Depending on the label of the food, there will be different levels of these additives. There are several reasons why this is done to the food. The first is to prevent extra bacteria from growing on or in the food. The second is that more food can be produced for the consumer. If the food is being transported into a different area, these chemicals allow the food to last longer. Another method that is used is biotechnology and irradiation. These are becoming a standard procedure in killing pathogens while keeping foods fresher than they would have been otherwise.

Another type of food that is often seen is organic that has had certain things done in order alter its content. Low-fat, whole-wheat, gluten-free and reduced-sodium are some of the popular labels that can be seen on processed foods. These foods may be organic, but have been processed in order to provide a different nutritional balance for your diet.

Organic food, however, still has to meet certain criteria in order to be ready to buy. For instance, if the milk is not pasteurized, it may contain bacteria that are not healthy for the consumer and can cause problems. There are also some food producers that do not follow the USDA guidelines for organic food. The products may have pathogens even though they may be available in the grocery store.

Natural Organic Products And Modern Life

It’s not always easy to find natural organic products for the person who has already gone organic, so you can imagine what type of hurdle that might be for those who are still only looking to go organic. Many people, despite their good intentions, will balk at having to buy their weekly grocery supplies from a health food or specialty store.

Over and above the prohibitive cost you would more than likely incur, is the ingrained dislike of anything that is even remotely thought of as good for you. This naturally enough stems for our childhoods when “good” was almost literally shoved down our throats with the expectation that we would grow to like everything green and nasty tasting.

The funny thing is, that we do (to a very great extent – there are a few exceptions!), but we would still readily enough cut off our noses to spite our faces and stay from our good resolutions to buy natural organic products if we had to find our way through a health food store.

Buying our natural organic products from our normal grocery store or supermarket almost makes it seem like a natural (if you will excuse the pun) exercise in grocery shopping. Sure our monthly grocery bill would go up, but we would still have the satisfaction of knowing that we purchased our natural organic products not from a health food store!

However, all of that notwithstanding, when you go to buy your natural organic products be it at the health food store, or the grocer’s around the corner, there are a few things that you will want to look out for, and these involve the small matter of seals. Not the marine or the army variety, but the variety which involves a stamp or a certification of some sort.

The most commonly recognized of these seals is the USDA seal of organic certification. There are many such different seals for the numerous natural organic products, but it is best if you first learn about them. For instance even though an organic product might be USDA certified, it doesn’t necessarily have to have 100% of organic products contained within its packaging.

In fact, unless it specifically states on the packaging that you are buying a 100% Organic product, you will most likely be getting natural organic products which have only 95% of organic produce or even only a minimum of natural organic products contained within it.

As mentioned earlier, the easiest way to tell the difference is by carefully looking at the packaging of the natural organic products that you are buying. “100% Organic” will give you (not unnaturally enough) a hundred percent of organic produce in your products.

A simple “Organic”, will yield over 95% of organic products in your foods, and the very misleading “Made with Organic Products” will be the one to give you a minimum of only 70% of organic products found within the bounds of the packaging.

Local or Organic? A False Choice

A couple of years ago, I visited an organic vegetable farm in southeast Minnesota, not far from the Mississippi River. Nestled in a valley that sloped down from rolling pasture and cropland sat Featherstone Fruits and Vegetables, a 40-acre farm.

Featherstone was part of a local food web in the upper Midwest, selling at a farmers’ market, through a CSA (community supported agriculture) and to co-op stores in the Twin Cities. But the partners, Jack Hedin and Rhys Williams, who began in 1995, were having a tough time economically and realized they would have to boost sales if they were to become viable. The farm earned about $22,000 a year — split between the two partners — so they had to take on debt to keep going; this, after a 60 to 70 hour work week.

Hedin told me he made some calls and eventually landed a deal with Whole Foods to supply the natural foods chain with organic heirloom tomatoes. When I visited, they were in year two of the contract, picking the tomatoes before their peak ripeness, then shipping them to Chicago for stores in the Midwest. The deal had become the biggest sales channel for their farm; while still “local,” they were not as local as when they sold in their backyard.

There was a lesson here, one that often gets lost in the debate about which is better, local or organic? Too often this is understood as a zero sum game — that the money you spend on organic food at the supermarket will mean less for local farmers. After all, the food you buy is being shipped from who knows where and then often ends up in a processed food product. I’ve heard the argument that if all the money spent on organic food (around $14 billion) were actually channeled to local food, then a lot more small farms would survive and local food networks could expand. Well, Featherstone was doing precisely the opposite: it had entered the organic wholesale marketplace and then sent its tomatoes hundreds of miles away to survive as a small and, yes, local farm.

As consumers, it’s hard to understand these realities since we’re so divorced from the way food is produced. Even for conscious consumers who think about values other than convenience and price — avoiding pesticides, the survival of small farms, artisan food, and, of course, the most basic values, freshness and taste — choices must be made. Should we avoid pesticides at all costs or help small local farmers who may use them? Should we reduce food shipment miles, or buy food produced in an ecologically sound manner regardless of where it’s grown? These questions arise because we want to do what’s right.

The problem, though, is that these questions set up false choices. What Hedin and others showed me was that when it comes to doing the right thing, what really mattered was thinking about the choice — to be aware, to stay informed, and to be conscious of our role as consumers. But what you actually chose — local or organic — didn’t really matter.

Hedin, for example, was competing against farmers he actually knew on the West Coast, who also supplied organic produce to Whole Foods. I met one, Tim Mueller of River Dog Farm, in the one-bar town of Guinda, California. His farm sold produce at the Berkeley Farmers Market about 90 minutes away, but he was also tied to wholesale markets. (I saw River Dog’s heirloom tomatoes in western Massachusetts.) For these organic farmers, selling wholesale was a foundation for economic sustainability.

Moreover, by expanding the organic market, we may be actually helping local farmers. The USDA surveyed farmers’ markets and found that about a third of farmers selling direct were organic — local and organic, that is. In comparison, just one percent of all American farms practice organic agriculture. So for smaller-scale farmers selling direct, organic food has become a key component of their identity. By bringing more people into the organic fold, through whatever gateway they happened to choose, the pool of consumers considering local food would likely increase too.

That’s at least what Jim Crawford, a farmer from south central Pennsylvania believed. His 25-acre operation, New Morning Farm, works two farmers’ markets in Washington, D.C., and Jim played a key role in the growth of local foods in the region, having started out as an organic farmer in the 1970s. He told me he worried when Whole Foods opened a supermarket near his farmers’ market location in Washington because he thought he would lose customers. But over time, he noticed, sales kept rising. He thought the supermarket, which stocked a lot of organic produce from California, was actually converting customers to organic food and they in turn were finding their way to his market.

But what about companies that have pursued the organic marketplace without any concern for local food? What about, say, Earthbound Farm, which has grown into the third largest organic brand and the largest organic produce company in the nation, with its bagged salad mixes in three-quarters of all supermarkets? The company fiercely competed with other organic growers who later went out of business; its salad was grown organically but with industrial-scale agriculture; and the trucks that shipped the salad around the country burned through a lot of fossil fuel.

But Earthbound was competing with the likes of Dole, Fresh Express and ReadyPac in the mainstream market to offer consumers an organic choice. It did little for local food (a saving grace, since it left the market to smaller players). But Earthbound farmed on 26,000 acres of certified organic land, which meant that 267,000 pounds of pesticides and 8.4 million pounds of chemical fertilizers were being removed from use annually, the company estimated. And as studies repeatedly show, organic farming also saves energy (since the production of fertilizer and pesticides consumes one-third of the energy used in farming overall). Earthbound’s accomplishments should not be ignored — even if they are anything but local.

Which brings me to a final point: How we shop. Venues like Whole Foods are not fully organic because people are often unwilling to spend more than a small portion of their grocery budget on organic foods. It’s too expensive. This is one reason why organic food accounts for just two percent of food sales — one percent if you include eating out. Similarly, local foods, though important, total 1-2 percent. So arguing over local or organic is a bit like two people in a room of 100 fighting over who has the more righteous alternative to what the other 98 people are doing. It doesn’t really matter, because the bigger issue is swaying the majority.

When I shop, visiting the Dupont Circle farmers market in Washington, D.C., on Sunday morning and then going to the supermarket, I make choices. I buy local, organic, and conventional foods too, because each meets a need. Is the local product “better” than the organic one? No. Both are good choices because they move the food market in a small way. In choosing them, I can insert my values into an equation that for too long has been determined only by volume, convenience and price. While I have nothing against low prices and convenient shopping, the blind pursuit of these two values can wreak a lot of damage — damage that we ultimately pay for in water pollution, toxic pesticide exposure, livestock health, the quality of food and the loss of small farms. The total bill may not show up at the cash register but it’s one we pay nonetheless.

So what’s my advice? Think about what you’re buying. If you want local food, buy local. If you want organic, buy organic. The point is to make a conscious choice, because as we insert our values into the market, businesses respond and things change. There’s power in what we do collectively, so is there any reason to limit it unnecessarily?

Health And Other Benefits Of Natural Organic Foods

It’s not everyday that a person has the chance to change the way that they eat. You might try to do so, become healthier and eat healthier but in a great many ways you will be thwarted in this desire. This is why the benefits of organic food can have a far reaching effect on you, more so than you might have thought.

Why do I say this? Because even though you might try to become healthy and change your way of living, it is extremely difficult to do so in many circumstances. With the advent of more and more organic foods onto the scene however, it becomes easier to hold to your desire to live a healthier lifestyle. Why? For the simple reason that your healthy eating habits become even healthier when they come in the guise of organic foods.

As you can see, the benefits of organic foods are many and you need only to scratch the surface to start finding them. As you dig deeper you will find there are more and more benefits of organic foods, some of which you might not even have thought about.

So what are the benefits of organic foods? Well, to begin with, organic foods are produced in such a way that there are no chemicals in the growing process or in the case of animals, the rearing process.

No chemicals are introduced into the mix and only natural fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides are used. In the case of farm animals, only organic feed is given to them, so you can be assured that when you get organic meats or milks and things that the animals too are reared according to organic standards.

There are also other benefits to organic food which includes the exclusion of genetically modified organisms (GMO). GMO’s to put it succinctly are foods which have had their genetic structure modified in some way or other.

While this might seem to yield many benefits in the field of agriculture by providing farmers with larger amounts of useable crops, no one still fully knows what the disadvantages are of modifying the genetic structure of living organisms. You need to look no further to find further such glaring deficits that science only found out about years after their regular and widespread usage, than to look at Lead and how bad we consider that to be.

To that extent, the benefits of organic food far outweigh the dubious goodness of non-organic foods, at least until the jury comes back in on that question. The only problem is the high cost of organic foods – the medical costs that you might incur upon seeing your monthly food bill after going organic might put you off the many benefits of organic food until such time as they become less expensive!

Exploring The Benefit Of Organic Food

In today’s society – with an ever vigilant eye towards health consciousness – we are forever in search of those factors that will give us the edge in achieving maximum health. As we’ve learned, a healthy diet, a consistent regime of physical activity, and plenty of rest all has a profound impact on our overall vitality. Subsequently, there has been an overwhelming group of people that swear by the benefit of organic food.

Produced by organic farms, organic food is grown under strict government supervision. Under these guidelines, organic produce is grown and packaged without the use of any chemicals or pesticides. Traditionally grown, non-organic produce is subjected to a myriad of chemicals – most of which are have not been studied thoroughly enough to understand or contemplate their long-term effects on the human body. Researchers are still undecided as to whether or not these chemicals can be linked to everything from food allergies to certain types of cancer. The benefit of organic food is that they are not subjected to these unreliable substances.

Meat and dairy produced under organic guidelines are also chemical free. Traditional agricultural farmers often subject livestock to a bevy of chemical supplements designed to speed their growth and weight. Further, dairy cows are often given chemicals to increase their milk production. The benefit of organic food is that livestock is given only organic feed that is chemical and supplement free.

Another benefit of organic food is its advantage to the environment. Traditionally grown produce are treated with chemicals; naturally the chemicals are then in the soil, changing the landscape and contaminating the ground and surrounding water supplies. The benefit of organic food is the ground in which it is grown is left unchanged.

Making a commitment to organic food means making a commitment to your health; the benefit of organic food lies in the chemical free enjoyment of natural whole food. Further, the benefits to the environment are varied and long lasting. The decision to go organic is a healthy and responsible one.

Exploring Organic Food Delivery

With the rise in convenience services throughout the world, we – as a society – have gotten quite used to acquiring what we need with minimal nuisance. For many, drive through food establishments, banks, and even dry cleaners has reduced our weekly errands to one car trip. And for city dwellers – where every conceivable convenience sits just outside the door – there is hardly a service or commodity we must do without. In the spirit of such advancements, and in an effort to appease the health conscious among us, organic food delivery has now become available in nearly every city and town throughout the world.

Organic food is produced by a growing crop of organic farmers committed to chemical-free practices. Fresh fruits and vegetables are grown without the use of pesticides and are not chemically altered in any way. Organic dairy products are produced by animals that are fed organically and not given any supplements common to traditional agricultural farming. Organic food, while growing in popularity, can still be difficult to find in some parts of the world. Organic food delivery businesses, eager to meet these challenges, opened their doors; their purpose is to bring fresh and natural organic food right to your front door.