Written by Jill Fraser
A headline late last year in the UK´s national daily newspaper The Times chided, ´Eat your words, all who scoff at organic food´.
The jibe was referring to the initial results to come out of the biggest study ever to be conducted into the benefits of organic food – a £12m European Union-funded project in which conventional and organic crops were raised side by side.
Overwhelmingly the conclusion was that organically produced crops and dairy usually contain more "beneficial compounds" - such as vitamins and antioxidants – than nonorganic produce.
Further details, which it is hoped will finally put to rest the ongoing debate about organics versus conventional food, will be released over the next 12 months.
In Australia the organic industry is flourishing. Wholesale companies report a 15-20% growth per year.
Scott Kinnear, spokesman for the Biological Farmer´s Association, under whose umbrella sits the country´s largest organic certifiers, Australian Certified Organic and Organic Growers of Australia, says that people come to organic food for a range of reasons including health, taste (higher levels of antioxidants and micro nutrients add flavour to food), environmental concerns and the slow food philosophy, which focuses on traditional methods of growing and cooking food.
"When we first opened our shop in Melbourne in 1990 we had just two main groups of customers – those who were environmentally aware and those who were ill and/or had a relative who was ill," says Kinnear.
"Today the fastest growing group is families. Having kids is a strong motivator to eat well."
Pierce Cody, founder of Macro Wholefoods supermarkets, which have taken the organic movement mainstream, has been forced to double the size of aisles that carry baby related products due to the increasing demand. Cody, whose 10 stores – and growing – take a tidy slice of the estimated $450 million local organic food market, refers to his customers as "conscious consumers" and talks of them scrutinizing the labels and interrogating the lists of ingredients.
Shane Heaton, a nutritionist and organic researcher, believes that there are several drivers behind the growing push to organics. Among them he says is the move away from food additives off the back of a study by the University of Southampton in the UK that proved a link between food additives and hyperactivity in children. Another, he says, is the concern about genetically modified food.
"There are multiple reasons why organic food is preferable to conventional," he says. "Yes there are more nutrients on average in organic produce, yes there are fewer food additives, yes there are lower pesticide residues and then there are many other lesser known issues, such as those surrounding the health of farmers and their immediate community.
"Studies have come out that have shown negative health implications of the use of pesticides on farmers, workers and their families and there are wide reaching implications when you farm in an unsustainable way that it leaves a toxic legacy for future generations, wildlife and the environment." Heaton, a graduate of the UK´s respected Institute for Optimum Nutrition, says, "the key thing with pesticides is that they are regulated in a very narrow way".
"They are assessed individually and we are exposed to them in combinations. The testing for pesticide residues in Australia in foods that people buy – the testing is haphazard and not made easily accessible to the public.
He refers to a landmark paper showing the subtle yet highly disturbing effects of pesticides on children published in 1998 by Elizabeth Guillette and colleagues, in which she used anthropological and standard pediatric assessments of children to assess the impact of pesticide residues from food and the environment on their health.
Guillette compared children in two nearby isolated villages in Mexico, one in which pesticides were routinely used in their farming, and one on which they were not. Everything else was the same between these two villages – genes, diet, lifestyle, climate, culture, etc. To assess the children´s cognitive development she measured eye-hand co-ordination, shortterm memory, and the ability to draw a person. These are standard anthropological assessment tools. What she found was an impaired cognitive development in the children in the village that routinely used pesticides, as demonstrated by these efforts by four and five-year olds to draw a person. One particularly disturbing fact, says Heaton, is "every now and then another pesticide is banned that up until that day we were all assured was perfectly safe".
"So now consumers are increasingly not waiting for the regulators and science to catch up with their intuition that eating pesticides isn´t a good idea. Increasingly they are choosing organic food, and while it is still a niche market it is growing faster than any other segment of the food market."
Kinnear maintains that the European Union funded study, which has just been released, fills an important gap because while the environmental benefits have long been acknowledged proof that organic food is better nutritionally could until now not be produced.
On the issue of the high cost of organic foodstuffs Cody explains that yield per acre is a lot less in organic agriculture. "An organic orchard doesn´t use pesticides but that doesn´t mean that bugs don´t come," he says. "They have to put nets over the fruit so they make up for chemical input with man hours."
"Chemicals are a substitute for human labour," says Kinnear. "For example, weeding carrots using chemicals will cost $1000 a hectare. But doing it organically with human beings being paid $17 an hour will cost $10000 a hectare." Heaton does not buy the argument that people cannot afford it.
Pointing out that Australian Bureau of Statistics data on household spending reveals that the average Australian house spends more on junk food, cakes, sweets, soft drinks and ice cream than on fruit and vegetables he says, "organic consumers come from the full socio-economic spectrum – from the very poor to the wealthy – so it is not about household income – it is more about health consciousness".
