Organic Food Promotes Health & Ethical Choice

Charleston Gazette (West Virginia)
April 20, 2003, Sunday
"Does eating an organic food diet increase one's health and spirituality?"
By: Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Association

LITTLE MARAIS, Minn. - Organic foods are booming like never before.
Thirteen million of America's 106 million households, comprising 30 million
people, are buying organic foods, clothing or body-care products on a regular
basis..

At current rates of growth, most food sold in U.S. grocery stores will
be organic by the year 2020. Similar trends are evident in Canada and
Europe.

There are a variety of health, environmental and ethical reasons why
more and more consumers are turning to organic foods, which prohibit the use
of genetic engineering, pesticides, irradiation, chemical fertilizers,
hormones, animal drugs and intensive confinement of farm animals.

Consumers are concerned about untested and unlabeled genetically
engineered food ingredients in common supermarket foods. Most supermarket
chains in Europe and Japan have already removed genetically modified organisms
from their product lines. According to polls, 90 percent of U.S. consumers
want labels on genetically modified organisms, mainly so that they can avoid
buying them.

Consumers are worried about pesticide and drug residues routinely found
in Non-organic produce, meat and dairy products. Consumer Reports found that
77 percent of non-organic produce items in the average supermarket contain
pesticide residues.

A recent scientific study found high levels of organophosphate pesticide
residues in the bodies of school-age children eating conventional food,
whereas children consuming mainly organic food had low levels.

Ninety-four percent of all U.S. beef cattle have hormone implants,
banned in Europe as a cancer hazard. Thirty percent of all U.S. dairy cows are
injected with controversial genetically engineered Bovine Growth
Hormone,
banned in every other industrialized country in the world.

Consumers are concerned about irradiated foods. Congress is moving to
remove required labels from irradiated foods and replace these with misleading
labels that use the term "cold pasteurization."

The USDA now promotes the use of irradiated meat in school lunches. The
European Union has recently banned the use of nuclear or electron beam
irradiation for meat and whole foods.

Consumers worry about filthy slaughterhouses, diseased feedlot animals,
E. coli, salmonella, and fecal contamination. Recent studies have found up
to 90 percent of nonorganic poultry and beef in supermarkets is
contaminated by E. coli, salmonella, or campylobacter bacteria - many strains of which
are antibiotic-resistant.

Consumers also worry about

the routine practice of grinding up animals and feeding them back to
other animals, a practice that has given rise to a form of human mad cow
disease in Europe, as well as a spreading epidemic of mad deer disease in the
United States.

Consumers are concerned about purchasing foods with high nutritional
value. Studies show that organic produce contains more vitamins and important
trace minerals.

On the environmental front, consumers are concerned about pollution of
their drinking water and the nation's lakes and rivers by the 12 billion
pounds of nitrate fertilizer and a billion pounds of toxic pesticides used by
conventional, non-organic farmers every year.

A related concern is the routine use of toxic municipal sewage sludge as
a fertilizer on conventional farms.

On the ethical front, consumers are concerned about economic justice for
small farmers and farm workers, as well as the preservation of family
farms.. The only small- and medium-sized farmers in the United States today
getting a decent price for their products are organic farmers.

Consumers also care about humane treatment of animals. Organic farming
prohibits intensive confinement of farm animals and guarantees them
access to the outdoors.

For all these reasons, American consumers are turning to organic foods,
part of an overall movement toward healthy living and ethical consumerism.