Almost Natural

By Carl Milsted

Organic food is expensive - especially if you like meat. I truly pity the pocketbook of those who try to stay “Atkins friendly” and go organic at the same time.

I am a well-paid professional so I can afford organic, though the prices make me wince at times and I often drop back to conventionally grown foods. But what about the poor? How can I be a true progressive and advocate organic at the same time?

The answer is: I cannot. Cheap food is a progressive cause.

More to the point, I don’t very much mind some of the artificial aspects of conventional agriculture. Whether ammonia fertilizer comes from a fertilizer or from pig urine, it is still the same chemical. I don’t go in for the “residual life force” or “vibrations” schools of thought. Yes, there are other chemicals in organic fertilizer that are not in the synthetics, especially trace minerals, but synthetics can be made better to include these minerals. For fertilizer, fully organic is nice, but I am not convinced it is worth the price unless you are quite well off.

My big concerns are elsewhere: animals being raised under inhumane indoor conditions, while being fed recycled waste products, antibiotics, and hormones. Feeding animal protein to plant-eaters like cattle is an abomination. The genetic modifications being done on plants are quite scary. The partial hydrogenation of vegetable oils worries me far more than a few preservatives or whether the oil seeds were grown using organic fertilizers.

Alas, to find foods that meet my criteria, I usually have to pay for the entire organic package. It is hard to find humanely raised meat without antibiotics, hormones, or animal waste; unless it is meat grown with organic feed. It is hard to find snack foods without partially-hydrogenated vegetable oils unless those foods are completely organic.

So I pay the price and frequently go organic. Those who cannot afford to opt for the abominations.

Some of you reading this may differ on which aspects of naturalness of food are more important. That is fine. That is why we have markets: so people can choose which values they are willing to pay for.

But we do not have a true market in standards of food growing. A true market requires that consumers are aware of what they are getting. Unless you know the farmer you are buying from, you cannot truly know how your groceries are produced, except through some feel-good words on the label (like “free range”) which may or may not have real meaning, or that the food was certified under a very limited set of certification categories.

To make the market work, we need better truth in labeling. We need multi-dimensional certification, with a continuum of values in each dimension. Dimensions for plant foods could include: fertilizer, herbicides, insecticides, genetics, and environmental impact. For animals they could include: habitat, hormone use, antibiotic use, organicness of the feed, naturalness of the feed (for that animal), and genetics of the animal. We could display these using a bar graph, with a separate bar for each dimension. We could also use color codes ranging from brown to deep green.

Such a system could be implemented by either a government or by a private certification board (much as UL certifies the safety of appliances). And yes, the latter approach could be made to work. A dishonest certification board would soon go out of business as soon as they were found out. Meanwhile, growers who do follow some of these standards want consumers to know this, so it is in their best interest to fund a standards board to verify this fact.

The market for colleges provides a good analogy. A college is largely a certification agency for job-related skills. A college that gives out too many ‘A’s has the value of its ‘A’s decline. Honor codes can work in a college because it is in the interest of the students in general to maintain overall excellence.

Some purists in the audience may not like the idea of compromise. However, compromise is reality. Even current organic standards contain many compromises. I can find seedless grapes and watermelons that say “organic” on the label. Seedless fruit is genetic engineering, albeit using a more primitive technology than modern GMOs. I can find “organic” corn-fed beef. Corn is not a natural food for cattle; grass is. I can find organic “free range” eggs where chickens freely roam - in barns. I have even seen organic margarine.

A truly natural food is one that can be found in the wild. If I were to go out into the woods and eat wild blueberries and blackberries, I would be eating truly natural foods. They same would be the case if I were to shoot a deer - assuming that the deer was in a big forest far away from any farm. And I would not be eating truly naturally unless I was to eat the deer raw. Cooking causes a huge number on unnatural chemical reactions.

Like it or not, very few of our foods are truly natural. “Almost natural” is the best we can do in practice. The real question is which compromises with artificiality do we make to make our foods cheap, safe and tasty. (Some truly natural foods are dangerous! Parasites are natural! So are many toxins in plants.)

By making a range of naturalness available, more ordinary people could afford abomination-free meats. This would save more animals from a cruel existence than all the PETA protests to date. Even current organic shoppers could raise their standards: better habitat meats may become available, or more heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables.

And all this could be done without a single change in the law. Anyone interested in setting up a new standards organization?

Dr. Carl Milsted is a Senior Editor of the Free Liberal. More of his work can be read at holisticpolitics.org.