op-ed on the spinach incident from Center for Food Safety

1Popeye Still Eats Organic

As the number of seriously ill victims of the spinach e.coli food poisoning mounts, public health officials and food safety experts are seeking to determine the source of the problem. Unfortunately, the problem is not new. The FDA itself asserts that an outbreak of e.coli 0157 in lettuce as recently as October 2003 caused two deaths in California. Initial reports by the FDA have trace the potential point source of the new contamination to at least one handler of greens, Natural Selection Foods, that grows and processes organic salad greens and spinach. The company also processes non-organic spinach. As this troubling chapter in food contamination unfolds so to has the attempt of a few vested interests to spin the incident to their advantage. Jumping in to exploit the situation are public relation advocates paid to attack the organic food industry. In an article entitled “What Would Popeye Do” one such organization quickly trumpeted that the recent events will undercut “claims of superiority” for organic food.

The supporters of this anti-organic spin reads like a who’s who in the industrial agriculture business. Their profits depend on the continued promotion of practices such as synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, genetically engineered seeds and production hormones. Certified organic agriculture, which is the most dynamic sector in farming today, shuns industrial agribusiness’ potentially toxic and harmful inputs. As more and more consumers’ go organic this fast expanding sector presents a serious threat to conventional interests ability to shape the future of American agriculture. As a result, the spinach event has become an appealing opportunity to trash a new rival business sector.

Unfortunately for the flacks, and fortunately for consumers and the future, the attempts to undermine organic has no factual basis. The company linked to the spinach outbreak revealed that all the packages of spinach turned over to health officials from infected patients were from non-organic spinach. Contrary to indicting organic, it now seems that the conventional production of spinach is more likely the source of this tragedy. The results of the PR attack on organic are thus reminiscent of several years ago when a national news show was forced to retract claims concerning e.coli contamination in organic greens because its reporter had used false and misleading information.

In fact the whole idea that organic agriculture is somehow more susceptible to contamination simply does not hold up. There is no scientific basis whatever for this claim. Moreover, a 2004 study in the Journal of Food Protection concluded their was no statistical difference between contamination in vegetables grown in conventional and organic system. But there are other big differences between organic and industrial dominated agriculture and recent scientific research is making organic look better and better by comparison. Peer reviewed studies have shown that organic fruits and vegetables can be higher in cancer fighting anti-oxidants and are less likely to carry dangerous pesticide residues. Organic production decreases our consumption of potentially toxic food as it prohibits the use of antibiotics and hormones to fatten and plump up chickens and livestock, prevents the application of sewage sludge on farm lands, and, unlike conventional agriculture, mandates strict standards for the use and application of manure as a fertilizer. Even with this approach of limiting industrial-style inputs organic yields are found to be comparable. Recent studies even find that organically managed soils sequester more carbon than conventional managed soils and represent a future step in our effort to combat global warming.

Clearly, the immediate focus must be to ensure that anyone exposed to the contaminated spinach gets proper medical attention and that all spinach growing and processing, conventional and organic alike, be conducted in a manner that prevents future e.coli contamination episodes. But we must not let any attempted spin around this tragic event keep us from embracing the continuing expansion of organic production. Organic means healthier soils, farms and consumers and represents an extraordinary success story in modern American agriculture. What a shame it would be if we let a few mavins of misinformation exploit this food borne illness event to derail organic’s future and its numerous potential benefits to us all.


Joseph Mendelson is legal director for the Center for Food Safety a national non-profit organization consumer and environmental organization http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org