How to tell organic from non-organic food?
March 3rd, 2009
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Well, of course, all food is organic, but when it comes to the arbitrary label that is stuck on the trendy foods, how the hell do you tell what is organic and what isn’t? After all, the food itself is not really altered by whether the nitrates or phosphates it absorbes came from exotic bat sh*t from Chile or some standard phosphate fertilizer. Much of the time, the chemicals that are put on the plants are also identical, even if one is synthetic and the other “natural.” And some fear that “organic” companies may have been spiking their fertalizer with a little bit of the synthetic stuff, which has happened before.
It would seem that milk would be even more difficult, given the degrees of separation between fertilizer, plant, cattle feed, cow and milk. So how do you verify it? Is it possible.
Well apparently it is. How? Isotopic composition analysis. Yes, you heard me right. The materials are so indistinguishable that the only way that can reliably tell them apart is the process of counting the different isotops of the elements they contain and looking for subtle variations that can produce an “isotopic fingerprint” of the element, allowing for a pretty good idea of what the original source of the element likely was.
And that is exactly what a German scientist has been trying to do. In a study of over 300 samples of ‘organic’ and conventional milk, it was determined that the two were generally indistinguishable except for two subtle variations: the first was that organic milk tended to have a very slightly higher amount of α-linolenic acid, a chemical which appears to be associated with the feed the animal is given. But this turned out to be a less than 100% reliable method of determining whether or not the milk is truly ‘organic’ because the levels tell more about the type of food that the cow is given than whether the food meets organic standards. Also, it fluctuates enough to make conventional milk appear organic on occasion, and
The second, more reliable, method involves analyzing the ratio of stable isotopes within the milk. While chemical analysis has turned out to be hit or miss, isotopic fingerprinting has generally been more successful. It’s certainly not foolproof, because it’s possible that synthetic fertilizers may be sourced from raw materials with similar ages and geological distributions to the certified “organic” stuff, but this seems to be the best thing anyone’s come up with thus far for solving this vexing non-existent problem.
As a general rule, materials from different sources around the world have slighly different ratios of stable isotopes. In this case, the ratio of carbon 13 to carbon 12 was used to determine whether the milk was consistant with organic sources of plant material. In the future, this may be expanded into other isotope families for more definitive tests.
Just so everyone knows how ridiculous this is: The way they can tell organic food from non-organic food with relatively descent condifence is by putting it through a series of chemical reactions that reduce it to purified hydrocarbons. They then break down these hydrocarbons to ultra-pure carbon which is then seperated into individual atoms which are ionized and accelerated through a series of magnetic fields. The heavier isotopes tend to be less deflected than the lighter ones. So they shoot the carbon ions through the magnetic fields thousands or millions of times and count how many are deflected by a given amount. Then they compare the ratios and determine if you were ripped off on your designer $12 a gallon milk.
By the way, if your question is “how much does this cost?” or “How much energy does this use?” I don’t have the exact numbers, but the answer to both is “a real real lot.”
Now who wants to bet that when and if this technique becomes standardized the organic agriculture interests are going to demand that the taxpayers foot the bill for the certification and test process?
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 12:19 am and is filed under Agriculture, Bad Science, Culture, Enviornment, Obfuscation, Politics. 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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March 5th, 2009 at 3:54 am
Juan said:
Time for another rant on the evils of dihidrogen monoxide, methinks.
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March 5th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Juan said:
Few points:
Organic products have higher bacterial counts of all types. We are talking factors of 10 (10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, or even 1,000,000 times more). It didn’t take long working as a microbiologist in a food lab to figure that one out. Nobody I know who works in food micro ever touches organic food. Food poisoning from bacteria sickens hundreds of millions every year and kills ten’s of thousands.
All pesticides sprayed to day have harvest intervals on their labels. This is the amount of time it takes the chemical to break down to be virtually undetectable. The majority of growers use the least toxic pesticide possible that still gets the job done.
Organic farming techniques are much worse than conventional for the environment. Weed control is by cultivation. This causes a destruction of soil structure which increases erosion, and water requirements. It lowers the yield crop increasing the amount of land needed for production. It involves massive amounts of manure for fertilizer. Requiring the collection of manure from feedlots or industrialized meat production. It also encourages the spread of invasive species that thrive in disturbed soil (mustards, etc).
The natural world is not a happy la la land where everything gets along. It is a battle for survival, any way possible.
I am a firm supporter of sustainable agriculture i.e. using science to increase yields and decrease environmental impact. The organic movement is a step back into the dark ages. Remember that in the middle ages people were of short stature not because of genetic predisposition, but from lack of adequate nutrition.
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March 5th, 2009 at 10:24 pm
THE V said:
Thank-you, it’s about time someone exposed this greenfraud for what it is.
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March 5th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
THE V said:
Thanks The V.
Lets not forget something. “Organic” farming is not so much a technique or method as it as a RESTRICTION. A conventional farmer will use whatever methods are best suited for the task. If that means synthetic fertalizer then that’s what is used. Conventional farmers can also use manure and compost, such as if they want to bulk up soil. And they do use these methods.
An organic farmer is basically restricted to certain fertalizers, pest control and other methods which are arbitrarily chosen because they are considered “natural” but in reality there’s not a lot of rhyme or reason to it. In most areas, organic farming can use herbicides that are every bit as toxic as any agricultural chemical. They can often use compounds that are natural yet they can’t use an identical compound that is refined or synthesized.
If we want to have safe, effective and sustainable agriculture we need to use the best tools for the job and not place silly restrictions on things, especially when these restrictions result in things like heavy tilling, the need for more irrigation or other potentially harmful practices.
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March 8th, 2009 at 1:51 am
I eat only organic foods and I am sure that my children are only fed organic food because I value their health and my health. I think that the non-organic foods are probably not that dangerous, but I put my family’s health as number one so I want to be absolutely sure to use organic whenever I can. I am very glad that the steps are being taken to stop the big corporations from scaming us. It is sad that they need to go to such measures to fight it, but some are not totally honest.
Organic food is better for you for many reasons. It is free of chemicals like fertilizers and insecticides which build up in your body and are linked to cancer and many other diseases. Organic foods don’t have any chemicals in them so you don’t have to worry about the concequences of them. They are healthier because they have more nutrition. Organic food grows in real soil that is full of vital nutrients that make them very healthy. Chemicals make plants grow big and fast, but not the same healthy way because it doesn’t have the same essence and it’s very possibly toxic to people who eat it. The plants are basically empty shells without nutrition.
Organic foods are not full of preservatives and artificial things and that makes them fresher and taste better too. They are from the land, not the lab and that is important to me.
They are better for the enviornment. I do not know as much about that, but I am aware that they are supported very strongly by every enviornmentalist group around.
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March 8th, 2009 at 5:41 am
I’m a bit too tired to address VickyG’s side of things at the moment, but I will later. What I will say is that what VickyG thinks is the kind of thing that a large segment of the population believes.
VickyG: You sound a lot more reasonable than many who come into this page to defend organic agriculture and “organic” consumer products as being superior. However, the belief that they are better, even if its based on what appears to be logical is actually quite baseless and really comes down to an effective marketing campaign.
There’s no reason to think and studies have confirmed they’re no more nutritious then conventional food products. There’s no significant safety advantage and they may, in some circumstances be less safe. Also, the enviornmental claims are dubious at best.
There may be some enviornmental advantages, but there are also some big environmental costs. Using exclusively organic fertilizers, for example, may reduce nitrate runnoff problems, but it can increase bacterial runoff problems, increase soil management problems and also mean more water is required. Organic agriculture can require a lot more energy which may negate the savings in energy to produce synthetic fertilizer.
There’s no firm evidence that organic agriculture has a better net enviornmental footprint and in some cases, it clearly has a worse one.
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March 8th, 2009 at 11:57 am
VickyG said:
Of all the reasons this commenter has stated for preferring ‘Organic®’ foods, this one can have some truth to it. However it is rare that this is the case with most produce sold under this description in stores.
I have a particular weakness for a type of tomato called Beefsteak. This variety does not grow very well in my area so for years I have raised my own, creating a micro-climate on the South side of my house, protected by bushes. I also start the plants indoors in the early Spring, and fuss with them throughout the season, to my family’s high amusement. My yields are very low; I am lucky to get a dozen or so good fruits in a summer, but I consider the effort worthwhile. Since pesticide use is prohibited by local by-law, I control pests by setting beer traps, collaring the plants, and washing them with a mild solution of dish soap. In other words I go the whole route to produce a certifiably ‘Organic®’ tomato.
Knowing the amount of effort that this takes, I find it impossible to believe that this can be scaled to commercial truck-farming economically when one takes into account the time and the price of labor. So it is clear to me that any produce sold under this description can really meet the mark. Even if it did, the fact remains that it would be impossible to meet the needs of a city of two million, using these methods within a ‘picked fresh’ distance from us. This is not to mention that we have a short growing season as well, and would have to produce enough to freeze for the Winter months.
The point I am making here, is that even if one believes that there is some nutritional advantage to this food, (and the very fact that it now takes isotopic composition analysis to tell the difference, means that it is not) or that it arguably tastes better, (a moot point at best) it is not sustainable. It is not even posible to feed the population we have with these methods.
In other words this is not a choice to return to more ‘natural’ foods, but an ultimate statement of elitism, the wide adoption of which would drive up the price of food, and condemn the poor to malnutrition.
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March 8th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
DV82XL said:
the whole “preservative” thing is more of an invented issue than a real one, especially for something like produce. You can’t really put preservatives into a whole fruit or vegetable, you could add them to processed foods, sure, but not to something like a tomato. What would you do? Put numerous injections into it?
The standard ways of preserving fresh produce are to keep them in a cool shipping container and keep them in a good moisture balance where they’re not dried out but not soaking wet either. Then there’s modified gas packaging, which is often as simple as just adding more CO2 or nitrogen and reducing the oxygen levels a little to reduce bacterial growth rates and such.
As far as I know, these are all premissable by organic standards anyway. Irradiation is another way to increase shelf life and is considered one of the better ways of preserving freshness effectively – that’s not allowed on organic products
There are also some modified gas packages that some people get all scared of, but all research and tests show that they don’t leave any residue of any kind on the products.
As far as preservatives in prepared and processed food: they’re not necessarily as scary or as common as most people seem to make them out to be. Canned food, for example (GASP! Can you imagine any of the organic nuts eating something from a can???) almost never contain anti-spoilage preservatives and if they have any preservatives at all, it’s just stabalizers that keep the food from losing its texture or something over time, but even these are rarea. Canning eliminates the need. Canned foods are sterile and last damn near forever as they are.
Of course, anything that is frozen also does not require any preservatives.
Some preservatives used in foods include sulfates which act as antioxidents. They’re actually naturally occuring but may be supplemented in food that is prone to oxidation-based degradation. There are other aditives used to prevent seperation of emulsions or to stabilize food or keep it crisp, but the whole notion that foods are injected with massive amounts of nasty petroleum-based preservative chemicals is fantasy.
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March 8th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Commercial fruit is generally picked green while it is firm enough to withstand mechanical handling. Packaging under CO2 or shipping in CO2 flooded containers is not to preserve, but to force ripening en route.
I want to make it very clear that I am all for commercial fruit and vegetables – I am old enough to remember when any tomato you saw in a meal in the Winter, had come from a can – but there is a marked difference in taste and texture between a vine-ripened tomato, and one that is not. I also know that I get to have these for about two months of the year, unless I want to pay their weight in silver for a hot-house grown one. So I balance my expectations (when it comes to tomatoes) with harsh reality, and am damned thankful I get tomatoes at all off-season.
The point I was trying to make in the previous post, is that this penchant for ‘Organic®’ food is not a back-to-nature type of action, but essentially an elitist one.
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March 8th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
The most beautiful tasting tomatoes I’ve ever had the pleasure of devouring were picked out of my friend’s vegetable garden and devoured on the spot in the early morning. Absolute perfection!
I’m increasingly enamoured of the concept of urban vertical farming. If we really want to lessen the load on the natural world, we need to look at credible options for removing food production from natural settings and transfering it to artificial environments under our vigilance and control.
http://www.verticalfarm.com/
Dr. Despommier apparently has strong enough ties to environmentalism that he first advocated ‘renewable’ power sources for his concept, but I can forgive him that if the basic concept ends up working. This idea is tailor-made for nuclear power and process heat.
Is it too much to hope that some time this century the scourge of famine, and the conflict between humanity and the natural ecosystem for land and water, will be matters of interest only to historians?
The opposite of this approach is greater reliance on n atural systems and the stressing of them this inevitably entails, especially if it is decided to mandate primitive ‘organic’ practices for food production.
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March 8th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
DV82XL said:
That’s true for some packaging, but there are also modified gas packaging that is done to lengthen shelf life and reduce spoilage. I’m not just talking about produce, which makes up a comparatively small part of the diet of most, but other things like bread, chips, pasta, packaged meals etc may be kept in oxygen free atmospheres or oxygen reduced atmospheres. They’re sometimes bagged in dry nitrogen.
There are also some methods for preservation that alter the atmosphere by adding absorbing agents that neutralize and bind ethylene gas that the fruit may produce during ripening.
But I do agree that the practices are not perfect. They are pretty damn good, and the fact that I can get fresh strawberries and tomatoes in the winter is impressive. They don’t taste bad at all, they’re fresh and preferably good, but they do not reach the level of freshness of what I can get in the summer at an orchard or something. Those are especially good, but it has nothing to do with them being ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ and is simply the fact that they didn’t need to be picked while under ripe and shipped in cold storage for several days or more.
Of course, if I absolutely wanted to have vine-fresh tomatoes and stalk-fresh corn, then I could get it any time I want either by, as you said, getting it from locally grown crops from a hot house or from getting it shipped in express from the Southern Hemisphere. Which actually I’ve seen. There is at least one place I’ve seen that claimed to have fresh produce shipped in from South America in under 24 hours from being picked. They didn’t have a huge selection but if they didn’t have what you want, they would have just about anything for you the next day, when their next pallet of stuff came in from FedEx international.
Oh… it was organic too, of course.
This was in Soho, the part of New York City where young, artist-types moved because it was cheap and there was descent space avaliable, until it got trendy and all the ones who made it trendy were evicted so the uber-rich could buy their way into hipness. Now I don’t think most aspiring creative young types could afford to eat anywhere in Soho.
But if you want a ten dollar apple that was picked yesterday in Argentina, you can get that…
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March 8th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
Finrod said:
Like hydroponics, (which in my youth were going to replace farms outright) urban vertical farming is the solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. There is no food shortage on this planet – just a distribution one, and that will remain the case through a doubling of the current population. Every year more than 470 billion pounds of edible food is available for human consumption in North America. Of that total, over 100 billion pounds – including fresh vegetables, fruits, milk, and grain products – are lost to waste by retailers and consumers. The overall cost of all this loss easily totals hundreds of billions of dollars.
There is an endless list of reasons, including laws meant to protect suppliers, (while ostensibly protecting consumers) refusal to use radiation to the fullest extent posible, and poor food recycling initiatives. But the bottom like is that in The West farmers can produce more food than the market can handle, to the point where a one-fifth loss can be absorbed and we still run a surplus.
While I can see a time where vertical food production may be the answer – I don’t think we have gotten there yet
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March 8th, 2009 at 9:27 pm
DV82XL said:
Australia has traditionally been considered a net food exporter and indeed one of the pillars of the global food industry. It was therefore quite shocking to many of us that during some years of the recent drought we were reduced to having to actually import grain.
I am not nearly so sanguinely confident about global food security as you appear to be.
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March 8th, 2009 at 11:16 pm
Finrod said:
Local shortages notwithstanding, there is vast surpluses that rot in storage every season, silos full of spoiled wheat have been a common occurrence in Canada off and on for decades, as have been non-production payments to farmers in the EU. The issue is distribution and politics – the technical aspects of food production are not. GM crops and modern techniques could end malnourishment in Africa inside of ten years; irradiation can extend the shelf life of many foods indefinitely, the techniques have been known for a long time.
I am not sanguine about food security, as I am irritated at the general stupidity of practices in the sector. At any rate grain production in factory-farms is going to be the last thing done because of the vast space needed for these grasses. Open-land farming will be competitive for cereal crops for some time to come.
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March 8th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
Finrod said:
I really fail to see the value of vertical urban farming given that we are not really running out of land to grow crops on. Water resources, top soil and other factors may be limiting, but just sheer area to sprawl out onto is not in short supply. Especially in Australia.
Building vertically is expensive. The reason its done in cities is because of limited space and the price of real estate. You build your structures up and fit a lot more on the lot you have. Also, you build certain things in cities which get value from the location. Housing is built in cities, because they have a large need for it. Businesses like stores, entertainment and services are built there because they have the population to serve. Offices are built there becasue that’s where the population of workers is and that’s where other offices are built so you can have access to other companies you deal with etc etc.
There’s no good reason to build a farm in a city. What the hell is the point of that? They don’t even really build factories in cities anymore. There are factories on the outskirts or in areas that may have special advantages like ports and such, in industrial parks and such, but why in the hell would you buy a lot in midtown Manhattan to make a factory? Why would you buy a lot in downtown Sidney for a big warehouse? Why would you buy a lot in the center of London to build a farm?
You wouldn’t. These are things that take up a lot of space and they have no real advantage in being placed in the center of a densely populated city.
And like I said, you only build upward when it’s cheaper than building outwards, which is when land is limited. For example: parking lots. Parking lots are big and sprawling in suburban malls. In cities, they have high rise garages. Would you ever build a high rise garage in the countryside? No. Of course not. What’s the point of that?
I can see the value of possibly building indoor farms, like big dome greenhouses, it would keep moisture in and extend the growing season. But I don’t see why that would mean you want to build upward and stack them upward.
The only place I think urban farming might be worth doing would be to grow some specialty stuff, like herbs or fruit, which would be expensive, but like I said, there are places where yuppies pay ten bucks for an apple brought in by jet plane. That is the only demographic that might support vertical farming. The kind willing to pay high cost for ultra-fresh food. You can’t beat the freshness of food that is grown in the same building as it is sold.
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March 9th, 2009 at 2:32 am