Birds Don’t Prefer “Organic” foods? No S*** Sherlock
May 22nd, 2010
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Organic food: It’s supposed to be a whole different way of growing food to make it a lot better for you, but really it’s just a set of restrictions which limit growers to using fertilizers and insect control methods that are deemed as somehow being “natural.” Of course, the food is basically the same, other than the fact that organic foods tend to take more energy, water, land and effort to grow and are often slightly lower in proteins or other nutrients.
Study: Songbirds prefer conventionally grown wheat to organic
Increasingly each year, humans foraging in American supermarkets select organically grown food. Not so with wild songbirds searching for sustenance in the gardens of England.
Given a choice between organically and conventionally grown wheat, they opt for the conventional stuff — which is higher in protein — 55 to 60 percent of the time, a study has found.
The findings, which were published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture on Tuesday, raise yet again the question of which is healthier: organic or conventional food.
The research team, based at the school of biology at Newcastle University in England, didn’t expect the birds to prefer conventionally grown wheat, said lead researcher Ailsa McKenzie. Earlier lab studies had reported that hens and rats preferred organically grown beetroot and wheat over conventionally grown.
But the problem with earlier preference studies, said McKenzie, is that none tested animals for longer than seven days, which meant that the animals did not have time to establish a preference.
“Birds learn,” she said. “They need to associate what they’re eating with where it is to learn a preference.”
In the Newcastle study, researchers positioned two feeders — one stocked with organic wheat and another with conventionally grown wheat — in 36 English gardens. Then over a period of six weeks in 2008, they measured how much wheat birds ate by gauging every two days how much food was consumed from each feeder.
The scientists conducted a second test in early 2009, this time studying 15 gardens over eight weeks. They also tested preferences among canaries in the laboratory.
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All three trials found a preference for the conventionally grown food. In the 2008 trial, for example, the birds consumed 58,954 grams of wheat, 45 percent of it organic and 55 percent conventional.The higher protein content of the conventional wheat — about 10 percent greater than the organic wheat’s — “most likely” accounted for the birds’ liking it better, the scientists wrote.
Conventionally grown crops are usually treated with fertilizers that deliver higher levels of nitrogen to plants than organic fertilizers do, in a form that can be processed more quickly. Plants use nitrogen to produce protein.
What the findings mean for humans is unclear.
“Our results suggest that the current dogma that organic food is preferred to conventional food may not always be true, which is of considerable importance for consumer perceptions of organically grown food,” the report concludes.
Advocates of organic farming beg to differ.
“For a team of scientists to extrapolate from a modest difference in what birds selected to make a statement that consumer perception should change is ludicrous,” said Charles Benbrook, chief scientist at the Organic Center, a research organization in Boulder, Colo., that promotes “the conversion of agriculture to organic methods,” according to its website.
The results are interesting, although they don’t really prove anything new. In fact, they’re pretty much what you would expect. The ratio of 45% to 55% suggests that the birds really didn’t have a huge preference one way or the other, but in general perfected the more protein-rich food.
It is interesting, however, to find that the birds preferred the slightly higher protein from conventional wheat, as it suggests that birds are capable of detecting protein levels. This says more about bird behavior and biology than organic farming, of course. One would expect that if the two samples had been closer in protein content, such as in a crop that was less dependent on nitrogen fertilizer, the ratio would likely be closer to 50/50.
The best conclusion that can be drawn from this is that birds, are generally not capable of reading and therefore are not enticed by the marketing material produced by organic farming advocates. They may need to consider some more bird-oriented publicity programs.
This entry was posted on Saturday, May 22nd, 2010 at 12:59 am and is filed under Agriculture, Bad Science, Good Science, Misc, Obfuscation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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May 22nd, 2010 at 9:37 am
It is indeed quite surprising that they showed any preference at all.
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May 22nd, 2010 at 10:21 am
Soylent said:
I agree, but I think it’s pretty easy to explain due to the fact that the two samples were not exactly the same. I read a report about this which implied they didn’t realize this initially, because after the results were in they took a closer look at the samples to try to find an explainable and discovered the conventional sample was slightly higher in protein.
In a perfect test they should be as close to identical as possible. Protein is going to vary a bit from source to source, so I’d suggest they use several different sources for the “organic” and “conventional” feed and mix them in a ratio such that both samples are as close to identical in nutritional content as they can reasonably get.
But it’s totally clear that the “organic” material is no better than conventional, and I’m surprised that anyone even bothered to do a study of this type when the answer seems obvious. Birds don’t care if the feed came from synthetically produced fertilizer or the same chemical compounds as provided by some biomass.
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May 22nd, 2010 at 8:44 pm
So why is this news at all then?
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May 22nd, 2010 at 8:55 pm
But organic is not the same as regular food. It depends on the farmer and how he is doing it. If as in the normal scheme of things a farmer will plant and then the best surviving plants are chosen for seed. Now if there are no pesticides used then the surviving plant have to produce their own type and each successful generation makes stronger internal pesticide.
Now these ‘natural’ pesticides are not tested for safety or change in flavor. So how many generations before there is a significant change?? Will it be negative or positive?? Who knows its organic so it is good for you and don’t need testing!!!
So maybe the birds know something we don’t…Yet!!
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May 22nd, 2010 at 9:06 pm
I was wrong. I had thought there was no difference between organic and conventional foods.
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May 23rd, 2010 at 11:37 am
Joseph Hertzlinger said:
There really is not. It’s just that in this case they did not do a very thorough job of checking out their sources to make sure they were nutritionally equal. Organic food may tend to be slightly lower in protein, but it depends on a lot of factors like soil type and strain of the plant. Any two samples from different sources are likely to have some variation.
L.Long said:
Well, actually, most farmers don’t replant seeds from their crops. They buy new seeds from a seed supplier. It’s actually easier this way, even though it may cost some, they get seeds that are already assured to germinate and have been properly pollinated with healthy plants etc. This is not something that can be assured with seeds from a field-grown plant. Sometimes they even buy seedlings that have already begun to sprout in a greenhouse.
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May 23rd, 2010 at 1:00 pm
Right Russ…I forgot my time frame and went ‘back’ too far. In the 50s my grandfather would pick the BEST acre of corn for next years seed.
You are correct for the most part as most farmers are about yield with minimum work even the organic kind.
And this still leaves an interesting question…Can birds TASTE which has the best protein???
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May 23rd, 2010 at 2:17 pm
Ironic, that the illustration is not a songbird, but a gull…
…It has been my totally unscientific observation on highway construction projects in northeast Illinois that gulls prefer french fries to any other food, natural, organic or processed, and can spot one from at least 100 feet up….
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May 23rd, 2010 at 10:35 pm
I’ll go ahead and refrain from modeling my diet after a bird’s. If I chose my food based on what wild animals like to eat, I would be eating eyes, entrails, and all the fattiest parts before touching any lean meat. Mixed in to an otherwise western diet, I’d be primed for heart disease and gout.
I bet a study would show that male squirrels would rather eat out of the garbage than forage for acorns. How should I let that influence my dietary choices?
If controlled epidemiological studies on humans show that the incidence of cancer, diabetes, or heart disease decreases when “organic” or “natural” farming methods are used, then I will take note.
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May 25th, 2010 at 4:55 am
Chas, PE SE said:
When I was at uni I worked in a café / bar which served coffees, each in a porcelain cup with a little biscuit in a plastic wrapper. The gulls could easily identify their target, swoop in as soon as people had left (often not eating the biscuits) and would promptly grab them – having learnt to rip them apart and gobble up the biscuit before moving on.
But one of the most horrible things I’ve ever witnessed live was a gull which picked up a roadkill pigeon, carried it up to the top of a wall and started to chow down on his dead birdy brethren. That was pretty grim.
On Topic: Yeah, it’s pretty fascinating to find that the birds showed any clear preference at all (though 55% looks a little weak to be getting too excited over). I presume the feed was all controlled for use of certain pesticides or anything else which could have changed the flavour?
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May 25th, 2010 at 10:09 am
Chas, PE SE said:
Seagulls are amazingly persistent, and GREEDY. I was at Sea World in San Diego, and they were selling these wonderful garlic breadsticks at every food booth. Some would inevitably get dropped. Now, these weren’t little breadsticks; they were about an inch or so in diameter and maybe 8 inches long. The gulls absolutely went bonkers for them. If they spotted one, they race to be there first, pick it up, and immediately choke the whole thing down before another bird could grab it. One was interrupted and tried to fly off, which was quite awkward with half of the breadstick down his throat; he couldn’t move his head from side to side.
One of my favorite bits in “Finding Nemo” is the gulls, who have just one line. “Mine! Mine! Mine!” It’s so true.
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May 25th, 2010 at 11:52 am
While conventional foods may be higher in protein, it is worth noting that organic farming methods take their fertilizers from more diverse and mineral rich sources (compost, fish slop, manure), and tend to benefit from that. Conventional farming depletes the soil of minerals, focusing only on the “essential” nitrogen and phosphorus for growth.
Also, be careful with the words “organic” and “conventional”. Remember which has been around for centuries and which has showed up only a few decades ago.
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May 26th, 2010 at 4:45 am
Adam, organic farming is an arbitrary set of restrictions that didn’t exist before the 20th century and weren’t popular until the last few decades. The fact that many of the methods used for conventional farming 500 years ago would have been classified as organic is irrelevant; they’d have used modern methods if they only knew how.
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May 27th, 2010 at 9:16 am
While the thought is amusing, I’m calling this a crock. 55/45 is not conclusive.
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May 30th, 2010 at 5:22 pm
Viva la difference!
http://www.organic-center.org/reportfiles/5367_Nutrient_Content_SSR_FINAL_V2.pdf
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May 31st, 2010 at 12:07 am
I’ll have to go with Josh on this one, to small a split for a conclusion.
This study needs to be run for a year at least, and the feeders have to change from one grain to the other every few days to eliminate bias.
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May 31st, 2010 at 4:09 pm
DV82XL said:
I suppose. Although it would depend on what you’re studying. This comes down to being more revealing of bird behavior and memory than anything else. If they are indeed selecting one food over the other due to protein, changing it every few days might be too often for them to develop a preference.
What would be interesting is to see if over time they develop a liking for one food over another. I’d imagine this would take a few days at least. Then wait a while and switch them. If they were indeed remembering which food was higher protein then I’d expect they’d continue to eat from the feeder which had held the higher protein food initially, but after a few days they might realize it had been switched and start preferring the other feeder.
I guess it depends on what you want to demonstrate here. I think this experiment was done with the hypothesis that birds might show a preference to organic grown product because it was somehow magically superior. Clearly they do not.
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May 31st, 2010 at 6:16 pm
I probably should have been clearer about changing the food. I was presuming that the experiment was done with two feeders side-by-side, and I was attempting to control for any bias in the equipment.
Birds can be very fussy when they have a choice, and four parrots I keep will always go for the higher value food (as a function of mass) when given a choice. This is only logical because, like everything that flies, extra weight needs to be avoided. I’m sure evolution programmed that in early on. Mind you, I have made this observation with foodstuffs where the difference in nutritional value was fairly large.
However, again this experiment described in the lead article is high school level, and its results should be treated as such.
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June 3rd, 2010 at 8:27 pm
ill eat only the food i grow or a friends produce if possible. we use no pesticides, herbicides, or petrol based feterlizers. ive never been sick in my life. is it luck? maybe. GMO/MONSANTO?!?!?!? never herd of ‘Em
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June 4th, 2010 at 12:18 pm
I am bemused by the assumption that protein content is what drives the choice.
“I assume P, therefore P.” That seems like the opposite of science. Sure, it’s
plausible, but isn’t the whole point of this cybernook that plausibility ISN’T ENOUGH?
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June 11th, 2010 at 2:04 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Lets state the obvious, If you don’t know any better you will be choosing the better tasting option. Such examples are children and sweets and uneducated adults and fat free foods and diet beverages. Who cares if they chose the conventional? Organic isn’t always meant to taste better. It is just better for you. If you care about your health you have to sacrifice taste sometimes. I doubt this had anything to do with protein until after they found the correlation. We could use another nutrient and it would be just the same. Maybe seagulls like the taste of pesticides? Who really knows? This study is not legit.
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October 27th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
L.Long said:
Organic food is produced by organic standards. Organic food production is highly regulated, unlike the private gardening.Historically, organic farming is relatively small, family-owned operation, which is why organic food was once only for small stores or farmers markets. “Organic processed food usually contains only organic ingredients. If the non-organic materials are present, at least a certain percentage of the entire food production and animal ingredients are organic.
Regards
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