Published Wednesday, March 10, 1999, in the Contra Costa Newspapers
------------------------------------------------------------
Author lashes out at organic farming
BY MARIAN BURROS
NEW YORK TIMES
Dennis T. Avery wants organic food to go away. And he doesn't care what it
takes. Four years ago, he said that organic food could not feed the world
without destroying the environment. Now, he says it's lethal.
In an article in the fall issue of American Outlook magazine, published by
his employer, the Hudson Institute, a conservative research group, Avery
wrote, "Organic foods have clearly become the deadliest food choice." This
is the case, he said, because organic farms use animal manure and do not
use chemicals or permit pasteurization. The last assertion is untrue, as
were several other statements in the article.
The accusation might have gone unnoticed, but excerpts from the article
were published in the Wall Street Journal and continue to be picked up
around the country, by the Associated Press, the Tampa Tribune and trade
industry publications.
The simplest definition of "organic" is food grown without hormones,
pesticides or synthetic fertilizers. Avery, however, used the terms
organic, free-range, natural and unpasteurized interchangeably.
"I grant you that I've mixed together natural and organic," Avery, the
author of "Saving the Planet With Pesticides and Plastic" (Hudson
Institute, 1995), said in an interview last month. "But to me they are
distinctions without significant difference in terms of public health."
His most combative accusation is based, he said, on 1996 data compiled by
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, showing that "people who
eat organic and 'natural' foods are eight times as likely as the rest of
the population to be attacked by a deadly new strain of E. coli bacteria."
Yet some of the foods that caused the outbreak, which he called organic,
were not organic, like unpasteurized apple juice.
Avery's claim that "consumers of organic food are also more likely to be
attacked by a relatively new, more virulent strain of the infamous
salmonella bacteria" was based on a Consumers Union study in 1998 showing
that premium chickens had higher levels of salmonella than regular
supermarket chickens. But the premium chickens were not organic.
In the article, Avery took the Food and Drug Administration to task for
failing "to issue any warnings to consumers about the higher levels of
natural toxins their researchers regularly find in organic foods." In the
interview, he said that that assertion was based on a statement by Dr.
Robert Lake, an official in the agency's Center for Food Safety and
Nutrition.
Lake denied making such a statement, saying, "We don't go out of our way to
sample organic food, and hence I don't think we are in a position to say
anything one way or another about it."
Avery wrote that because "organic farmers use animal manure as the major
source of fertilizer," there are higher levels of harmful bacteria in
organic food. Katherine DiMatteo, the executive director of the Organic
Trade Association, said that manure is not the major source of fertilizer
on organic farms (it is also used in conventional farming) and that, when
it is used, certain rules must be followed for safety.
Avery said his real goal is to prevent organic agriculture from becoming
the norm. "My big concern is that we do not have room on the planet to feed
ourselves organically," he said.
The attack on organic food by a well-financed research organization
suggests that, even though organic food accounts for only 1 percent of food
sales in the country, the conventional food industry is worried.
------------------------------------------------------------
NewsHound is a service of Knight Ridder.
For more information, visit the NewsHound website at http://www.newshound.com
or send an email to speak@hound.com.
To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command
"unsubscribe sanet-mg".
To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command
"subscribe sanet-mg-digest".
All messages to sanet-mg are archived at:
http://www.sare.org/htdocs/hypermail