Do You Need to Buy Organic Produce?

For many, buying organic is a pillar of healthy eating. Even more impressive, it’s a pillar shared amongst radically different diets—vegans and paleolites alike, who normally have nothing but contempt for one another, are equally likely to praise the benefits of eating organic. In fact, eating organic has become so entrenched in the ethos of healthy eating that to not eat organic can be seen as evidence of a poor diet and be cause for concern, if not enmity.

Does eating organic really deserve the same healthy choice status as other staples of nutritionally sound diets—like eating more fruits and vegetables and reducing processed food intake—or are the benefits just marketing spin without supporting evidence? In other words, what evidence exists to suggest that eating organic is better, safer, or more environmentally friendly?

To get to this truth, we need to move beyond what the organic industry says and examine the science. What the evidence tells us may surprise you.

Defining “Organic”

Before we really begin, let’s quickly establish what organic agriculture entails so we’re clear. “Organic” is a regulated term (unlike natural, which is unregulated and thus can be used to describe literally anything on food), and when you see the certified organic label on a product you can be ensured that it was grown with several key practices in mind, including most pertinently that it was produced without…

• Synthetic fertilizers or human sewage
• Synthetic pesticides
• Genetically modified organisms (GMOs)

In addition, a farm that is certified organic must have good soil health management techniques in place, such as crop rotation.

By contrast, conventional agriculture has no regulated guidelines. Conventional farms are free to use whatever (legal) fertilizers and pesticides they wish, plant genetically modified organisms, and to not rotate crops ever, if they so desired—or conversely, to employ exactly the same methods as an organic farm. Basically, a lack of organic certification just means the farm isn’t regulated and doesn’t say anything meaningful about how the farm is run.

Similarly, an organic certification just tells you that a farm follows the basic regulations, but doesn’t give any meaningful information about their practices otherwise. In agriculture in general, there is a wide range of farming practices, and the only way to know for certain what a particular farm does is to ask the farmer.

I would also argue that “organic” has developed its own mythos in the hearts and minds of consumers that goes beyond a set of farm regulations. Michael Pollan referred to this mythos as the “supermarket pastoral“, a term that neatly wraps up what many people think organic means—idyllic farms where man works in hand with nature; a place where age-old farming practices are used to superior effect than modern, chemical applications. Consumers are thus more likely to associate the term “organic” with local, small-scale agriculture than with megafarms producing monocrops, and tend to think of organic agriculture as being more capable of producing high-quality, tasty food.

Of course, “organic” doesn’t mean local or small-scale any more than “conventional” means global and large-scale, it just describes the basic practices. Many local farms are not certified organic and have no interest in converting to organic, and much of the organic produce you buy is produced by gigantic monocrop farms that just happen to have specific guidelines for food production—that’s why you can buy the exact same prepacked lettuce in Whole Foods regardless of whether you’re in Colorado, California, or New York.

So keep in mind this definition of organic as we move on, and remember that the term “organic” only guarantees a few practices that may or may not result in the actual realization of the organic mythos.

Is Organic Food More Nutritious?

When we talk about organic food, the first thing that springs to mind is the idea that organic food is more nutritious than conventionally grown food—that is to say, many people believe organic produce has more nutrients than conventional produce and will better support health. If this were indeed true, it could be a worthy justification!

Unfortunately, organic produce does not appear to be substantially different nutrition-wise from conventional produce. Numerous studies have addressed the hypothesis, and to date three systematic reviews (1, 2, 3) of that collective body of research have all concluded that organic crops contain no greater amounts of any of the essential vitamins and minerals than conventional crops. Only a single review arrived at an opposing conclusion—it found greater levels of antioxidants in organic crops—but it was also heavily critized for its methods, most pertinently how it included weak studies that would normally be disqualified from a rigorous review for their own lack of good methodology.

One such included study, as Science 2.0 notes, used consumer “sensory panels”—AKA, taste tests—and concluded that “[one variety of organic strawberry had] better flavor, overall acceptance, and appearance than their conventional counterparts.” This isn’t the type of study that should be included in a systematic review and expect to strengthen the results.

(Side Note: Humorously, if you read the study and not just the abstract, the other two varieties of strawberry were found to be equal or superior when grown conventionally, which implies that consumers preferred conventional strawberries 66% of the time. The study author, who happens to own an organic farm, plucked the single ripe cherry (strawberry?) from the data and put it in the abstract as the “conclusion”, even though the study really showed the opposite. This is pretty common fare in bad studies, and demonstrates why it’s important to read more than the abstract.)

When poor studies get included in systematic reviews or meta-analyses, it weakens the results. If your goal is to bend the data until you get the result you want, then it’s a great tactic—but if your goal is objectivity, then you must cull the weak studies and leave only the methodologically rigorous ones, no matter how it pains you.

So no—according to science, organic food is not more nutritious than conventional food, and not a compelling reason to purchase organic.

Is Organic Food Healthier?

Another big argument to eat organic is to reduce your exposure to toxic synthetic pesticides. On the surface, this is true—but just like the argument that you’ll get less wet by not swimming, it’s also vacuous. Organic food does have fewer traces of synthetic pesticides (because they cannot use them), but that, by itself, does not mean much.

The problem is that in order for the argument against synthetic pesticides to be effective, they must be demonstrably toxic in the quantities we consume them—but the science is very clear that they aren’t. The old adage “the dose makes the poison” is a solid rule of toxicology to live by, and when it comes to pesticides (both natural, which account for 99.99% of all the pesticides we consume, and synthetic, which account for a mere 0.0001%) it holds true.

Consider that literally every nutrient we consume is healthy or even essential in certain amounts, but dangerous in larger amounts. For example…

• Calories…
  • Too few and you starve.
  • Just enough and maintain body weight.
  • Too much and you gain fat, ultimately harming your metabolism.
• Vitamin A…
  • Too little and you go blind or die.
  • Just enough and your body functions as it should.
  • Too much and your skin will peel off like birch bark.
• Arsenic…
  • Too little and methionine metabolism is impaired.
  • Just enough (a very small amount) and everything works appropriately.
  • Too much causes cancer, comas, and death.
• Alcohol…
  • Abstinence is harmless.
  • Small amounts of alcohol may be beneficial.
  • Large amounts of alcohol cause serious health problems or death.

The dose makes the poison—there is no substance on earth that is not benign in small enough quantities. Even radiation is safe in small amounts, otherwise all those bananas you’re eating would be highly carcinogenic (because bananas, or actually all natural food, contain a radioactive isotope of potassium).

So are the synthetic pesticides used on conventional produce toxic? Absolutely, when consumed in large enough quantities—so are the natural pesticides all plants produce. The real question is whether they’re toxic in the amounts we are exposed to them, to which the answer is just as clearly “no”.  Even if you don’t wash your fruits and vegetables, there’s simply not enough pesticide residue on your food to cause harm.

Not convinced? Try out this pesticide residue calculator, which takes the highest-ever recorded level of pesticide residue on a particular crop and tells you how much of it you could eat (based on your age and sex and the safety data for the pesticides in question) without suffering a single ill effect. Using the tool, we can see that…

• A child could consume roughly 9,500 blueberries a day (nearly 30 pounds, or 7,410 kilocalories-worth) and still be safe.
• A adult male could consume 1,499 pears (I’m pretty sure this would be impossible) and still be safe.
• An adult female could consume over 2,000 pounds of lettuce (I know this would be impossible) and still be safe.

Suffice to say, the amount of pesticide residue on our food is so trace that we would need to eat a physiologically impossible amount of food to be exposed to anywhere near a dangerous level. And to reiterate, these figures are based on the maximum pesticide residues ever detected and rigorous testing (more rigorous than for any chemical in any other category) and assume that you don’t wash your produce at all, a practice which reduces pesticide residue even further or even eliminates it!

If you’re still worried about pesticides, then you should also keep in mind that organic agriculture still routinely uses pesticides—just not synthetic ones—and that some of the pesticides employed by organic farms are actually considered to be more toxic than their synthetic counterparts (copper sulfate and rotenone, for example). Studies haven’t illuminated how greatly their residues remain on crops because the methods to test for these pesticides aren’t as routine; there could well be more pesticide residue, but we wouldn’t know because we don’t check for it.

But really, that final point is… well… aside from the point. Pesticides are not dangerous in the levels we are exposed to them, regardless of their origins. Synthetic pesticides (or organic-approved manually applied pesticides) account for a mere 0.0001% of our total daily exposure—we eat or drink a total of 1,500 milligrams of naturally produced pesticides daily and only 0.09 mg of synthetic ones, and 50% of those natural pesticides have been demonstrated to cause cancer in rats.

In other words, the threat from synthetic pesticides has been greatly overblown by the organic industry.

Is Organic Food More Environmentally Friendly?

By now it should be clear that there is no physiological benefit to eating organic food—the nutrition is virtually the same between organic and conventional foods, and the whole pesticide issue is based largely on pseudoscience, fear, and toxicological misunderstandings. But many humans, and many eaters of organic food in particular, are often concerned with more than just their physiological wellbeing; they want to ensure their food choices are equally good for the planet as they are for their body.

At first glance, it seems like organic agriculture should be a shoo-in as the environmentally responsible choice. Organic farming, after all, is dedicated to improving the environment, primarily through improved soil quality. Furthermore, since organic farming doesn’t use certain petroleum-based inputs such as synthetic pesticides, it would seem as though greenhouse gas emissions should be lower as well. And certainly, this is exactly the story you’ll get from anyone involved in organic agriculture.

The truth is more complicated, though. To begin with, while it’s clear that organic farms do better on average than conventional farms as far as soil health goes, the majority of conventional farms also do well with soil health, and do better than organic farms in a few areas. Based on the results of this thesis, organic farming is superior to conventional farming in terms of soil organic matter and the presence of annelids (e.g., worms), but inferior to conventional farming as far as soil pH goes (a result that has been backed by other studies and a meta-analysis).

The thesis also notes that 67% of the conventional farms examined in the region (Skagit County, WA) used many of the same good soil management techniques that organic farms did and had comparable soil qualities. There was also a high level of variance when broken down by individual farm, with several organic farms performing worse than conventional farms as far as soil health goes. Thus, even though it seems like organic farming should have the edge because it requires good soil health management, the reality is that many conventional farms manage their soil as well as or even better than organic farms—which makes sense, because soil is an asset to a farmer regardless of whether they are organic certified, and good businessmen protect their assets.

Beyond soil health, organic agriculture holds no significant environmental advantage over conventional agriculture, despite the spin of the organic industry. This is because the organic industry usually bases their findings on the environmental impact per unit of land (e.g., per acre) instead of on the more appropriate metric of environmental impact per unit of food. Since organic agriculture tends to be less productive (by an average of 25%) per unit of land, it doesn’t makes sense to base the environmental impacts off land-use—after all, the land in-and-of-itself is just a proxy; what we really care about is the food we get off that land.

When the environmental impact of organic farming per unit of food was compared to conventional farming, organic farming actually had significantly greater levels of nitrogen leaching, nitrous oxide emissions, and ammonia emissions. Nitrogen leaching leads to eutrophication of waterways—basically, it enriches them with nutrients causing plants and algae to thrive and harming fish and wildlife—while ammonia emissions lead to soil acidification and problems like forest destruction and more fish death (won’t somebody please think of the fish!).

These problems could be remedied if organic farming had better yields, but as the meta-analysis points out, the results of carefully controlled trials (such as those by the Rodale Institute, which always paint a rosy picture of organic production) that claim organic farming can yield similarly to conventional farming rarely pan out in the uncontrolled environment of a commercial farm. If that doesn’t make sense, consider the difference between losing weight on a carefully controlled diet in a lab, with the constant monitoring of scientists who are well-versed in all the appropriate protocols and responses, and losing weight with the same diet in the real world where it’s you and your very human foibles that must control all those factors.

The meta-analysis concludes not by suggesting that organic agriculture is worthless, but rather that the best system environment-wise would be one which combines aspects from both organic and conventional agriculture—that is to say, a system where good soil health management techniques are combined with practices that would increase the yield per unit of land, which could include both the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers as well as better organic fertilizers (ones that would release nutrients in a more timely manner and thus prevent nutrient leaching, such as anaerobically digested manure).

And doesn’t this make sense—that the best system is one where we take full advantage of improving technology and also use the best-known practices for soil health management? The unfortunate reality, though, is that organic agriculture (as a regulated system) is dogmatic and resistant to change. So while the future of conventional agriculture is likely to only grow more environmentally friendly—especially as new breeds of GM plants become developed with desirable traits such as nitrogen fixation, water conservation, and improved yield—organic agriculture will remain rooted in an increasingly antiquated past.

Is Organic Food of Higher Quality?

Okay, so organic agriculture doesn’t produce food that’s more nutritious, it’s disingenuous about the dangers that pesticides pose, and it has created a false dichotomy around conventional agriculture, making it seem as though only organic farming is capable of being environmentally friendly—but what about food quality? Many proponents of organic are convinced that organic agriculture produces better looking, better tasting crops, and that alone could justify an increased price.

Unfortunately, unlike the previous entries, there’s not a truly objective way to measure quality. Sure, we can measure certain objective characteristics, like color or sweetness or size, but none of these (or combination of these) determines “quality” or “worth” anymore than we can determine the quality or worth of a painting simply by analyzing its use of color, form, or content. In both cases, they are a measure by which we judge the sum, but there’s also a lot left out that could dramatically influence a individual’s own subjective feeling about the quality or worth of a food or painting.

In other words, we cannot approach a discussion of quality in food with the same objective focus as we did the topics in the rest of this article—and regardless, we don’t even have any decent studies that attempt to measure quality, either. We have sloppy studies like the strawberry one I already mentioned, but it did little to illuminate the issue since…

1. It was sloppy. It used a blind taste test, which may seem like an objective measure but usually is not (more on this below); and
2. It didn’t even find that organic berries were superior, but rather that only one of the three varieties tested was superior. For the other two varieties, there was either no preference or consumers preferred the conventionally grown berry.

Does that mean that quality doesn’t really exist or shouldn’t be considered when purchasing food? Of course not! It’s clear that there are better looking foods out there, and everyone has had good and bad tasting berries. But it does mean that organic food, produced by a system that doesn’t change any objective measure of food quality such as nutrient content, is no more likely to produce the food you prefer than any other method of production.

So instead of purchasing organic as a proxy for quality, choose your food based on other characteristics. Choose the foods that excite you, like heirloom tomatoes and Romanesco broccolis, or purple potatoes and carrots, or local apples and peaches. Sometimes they’ll be grown organic, sometimes conventionally—but regardless of how they’re grown, there is a legitimate, tangible difference between these pieces of food and those pieces of food. You can’t say the same about the $6 organic spinach vs. the $1.50 conventional spinach.

If you want to take it even a step further, get out of the grocery store and visit your farmer’s market. Grocery stores must stock foods that have decent shelf life and are resistant to bruising—yes, even the “grown local” foods that your neighborhood Whole Foods carries are selected because they will last and can withstand the rigors of a thousand people touching them daily. Farmer’s markets (with produce picked within a couple days) have no such restraints, which means they are free to grow cultivars that favor other characteristics such as taste, aroma, and appearance. These are the types of differences that improve “quality” or “worth”, not arbitrary methods of production!

And that’s all I have to say about quality. Choose foods based on the same factors you’ve always chosen them: appearance, taste, aroma, price. Don’t choose foods because you think the label or high price determines quality—that’s just marketing.

Side Note: Why Are Taste Tests Worthless?

Imagine I told you could accurately predict coin tosses 100% of the time. So you flip a coin and I guess heads, and what-do-you-know, it comes up heads—I’m right! Of course, there was a 50% chance, and I just happened to guess correctly. Maybe we flip it again, and I’m right again, but probability tells us this isn’t particularly impressive. How many times would you need me to accurately predict the results of a coin toss before you thought I was truly able to accurately predict the results? Such is the way with taste tests.

If I gave you six strawberries—one organic and one conventional from three varieties—and asked you to tell me which ones you preferred, there’s a 50% chance for each one that organic will “win”. It may well be that the organic berry does taste better, or it could just have been a fluke. To really know whether the results are accurate, you would need many berries from each of those six unique combos to be tasted and rated individually, after which you could measure your results for consistency. If you consistently thought that the organic berries from one variety were better than the conventional berries, then we would be able to say with relative accuracy that you preferred the organic berry.

But other problems still exist, such as the subjectivity of taste. Some people prefer sweet strawberries, some prefer tart. Some prefer garnet reds and some prefer ruby reds. Some want berries that you can pop into your mouth by the handful and some want ones that you have to take bites out of. There’s no objectivity to these differences, they’re just subjective preferences, and thus it becomes hard to “rate” things like berries or wine without considering that what you prefer may not be what others prefer, and that just because you prefer something doesn’t make it objectively better.

So when it comes to scientifically determining quality, taste tests aren’t very helpful, especially not when they’re run as they usually are. If you want to convince me, you’ll need to create a taste test with at least 10 samples from each unique combination and then be consistent. But at least in wine testing, the most high brow and famous of taste tests, consistency has been notoriously hard to find—so I won’t hold my breath!

There Is No Objective Benefit to Eating Organic—Save Your Money for Better Food

Don’t fool yourself into believing organic agriculture is better than conventional agriculture, pure and simple—it’s not. What the organic industry is better at is misdirection and the creation of false dichotomies. To recap…

Organic food claims to be more nutritious—it’s not. Numerous meta-analyses demonstrate no difference between conventional and organic produce in terms of nutrition.

Organic food claims to be safer—it’s not. Organic producers use pesticides just as frequently as conventional producers, and those pesticides are just as “toxic” as conventional ones. It doesn’t matter if your farmer uses pesticides, though, because the amount that remains on your food, even in the worst-case scenario, is thousands of times lower than the safety threshold.

Organic food claims to be better for the environment—it’s not. Organic farms only routinely beat out conventional farms in terms of soil organic matter, but even then the results are highly variable and most conventional farms use good soil management techniques. Due to the lower yield of organic farms, several farming off-products (nitrogen leaching, nitrous oxide emissions, ammonia emissions, and soil acidification) are greater issues for organic farms than conventional ones.

Organic food claims to be subjectively better—it’s not. Food appearance, quality, and taste has a lot more to do with cultivar than production technique, and since organic food doesn’t differ from conventional food in any objective way, we shouldn’t expect it to differ consistently in any subjective way either.

Based on this, should you give up on organic and never buy it again? Perhaps not. Just use your judgment, freed of the biases the organic industry has worked so hard to plant. Organic food doesn’t deserve to be a pillar of healthy eating, because it doesn’t improve health in any objective way—but sometimes the foods you want to eat are only available in organic, and that’s okay.

Basically, buy food because you want to enjoy it, not because you think it’s healthier, safer, or better for the environment (none of which are true). Your food decisions matter, but buying organic doesn’t.