Top
10 Reasons to Go Organic
By Sylvia R. Tawse
Here are the top 10 reasons to
choose organic foods for your family:
1. Protect future generations.
The average child receives more exposure than an adult to at least
eight widely used cancer-causing pesticides in food. (“Children’s
diets are different from those of adults. One-year-olds, for instance,
eat three times as many fresh peaches, per pound of body weight,
as adults, and four times as many apples, bananas and pears. All
this means it’s easier for children to ingest relatively
large amounts of pesticides.” Consumer Reports,
March 1999.) The food choices you make now will affect your child’s
health in the future.
2. Prevent soil erosion.
The Soil Conservation Service estimates that more than 3 billion
tons of topsoil are eroded from U.S. croplands each year. That
means soil is eroding seven times faster than it is being built
up naturally. As a result, American farms are suffering from the
worst soil erosion in history.
3. Protect water quality. Water makes up two-thirds
of our body mass and covers three-fourths of the planet. Despite
water’s importance, the EPA estimates pesticides –
some cancer-causing – contaminate the groundwater in 38
states, polluting the primary source of drinking water for more
than half the country’s population.
4. Save energy. American farms have changed drastically
in the last three generations, from family-based small businesses
dependent on human energy to large-scale factory farms highly
dependent on fossil fuels. Modern farming uses more petroleum
than any other single industry, consuming 12 percent of the country’s
total energy supply.
More energy is now used to produce
synthetic fertilizers than to till, cultivate and harvest all
the crops in the United States. Organic farming is still mainly
based on labor-intensive practices such as weeding by hand and
using green manures and crop covers rather than synthetic fertilizers
to build up the soil. Organic produce also tends to travel fewer
miles from field to table.
5. Keep chemicals off your plate. Many pesticides
approved for use by the EPA were registered long before extensive
research linking these chemicals to cancer and other diseases
had been established. Now the EPA considers that 60 percent of
all herbicides, 90 percent of all fungicides and 30 percent of
all insecticides are carcinogenic. A 1987 National Academy of
Sciences report estimated that pesticides might cause an extra
1.4 million cancer cases among Americans over their lifetimes.
The bottom line is that pesticides are poisons designed to kill
living organisms and can also be harmful to humans. In addition
to cancer, pesticides are implicated in birth defects, nerve damage
and genetic mutation.
6. Protect farm worker health. A National Cancer
Institute study found that farmers exposed to herbicides had a
six-times greater risk than non-farmers of contracting cancer.
In California, reported pesticide poisonings among farm workers
have risen an average of 14 percent a year since 1973 and doubled
between 1975 and 1985. Field workers suffer the highest rates
of occupational illness in the state. Farm worker health also
is a serious problem in developing nations, where pesticide use
can be poorly regulated. An estimated 1 million people are poisoned
annually by pesticides.
7. Help small farmers. Although more and more
large-scale farms are making the conversion to organic practices,
most organic farms are small, independently owned family farms
of less than 100 acres. It’s estimated that the United States
has lost more than 650,000 family farms in the past decade.
8. Support a true economy. Although organic foods
might seem more expensive than conventional foods, conventional
food prices don’t reflect the hidden costs borne by taxpayers,
including billions of dollars in federal subsidies. Other hidden
costs include pesticide regulation and testing, hazardous waste
disposal and cleanup and environmental damage.
9. Promote biodiversity. Monocropping is the
practice of planting large plots of land with the same crop year
after year. While this approach tripled farm production between
1950 and 1970, the lack of natural diversity of plant life has
left the soil lacking in natural minerals and nutrients. To replace
the nutrients, chemical fertilizers are used, often in increasing
amounts.
Single crops are also much more
susceptible to pests, making farmers more reliant on pesticides.
Despite a tenfold increase in the use of pesticides between 1947
and 1974, crop losses due to insects have doubled – partly
because some insects have become genetically resistant to certain
pesticides.
10. Taste better flavor. There’s a good
reason why many chefs use organic foods in their recipes –
they taste better! Organic farming starts with the nourishment
of the soil, which eventually leads to the nourishment of the
plant and ultimately of our palates.
© Sylvia R. Tawse
Sylvia R. Tawse is president and
founder of The Fresh Ideas Group www.freshideasgroup.com/,
a specialist marketing firm filling the gap between the organic
industry and the media with meaningful and compelling communications
and educational events.
