The Evils of Organic Food

[S.Annadana]

Mitchell Gerskup @ August 12th, 2008
In my recent article about Consumer Reports, I mentioned that there was no evidence to support the hypothesis that organically grown foods are any safer, tastier, or more nutritious than are their non-organically grown counterparts. Accepting this premise, you might say that it is still a legitimate choice to purchase organic food to support a more “natural” method of farming. Aside from the fact that this is quite fallacious, it is also very wrong.

The fact is that here in Canada — and in other countries that have modern farming practices — we have the most plentiful, healthful and safe food supply in all of recorded history (though you would not know it by talking to a naturopath). So much, in fact, that one of our biggest problems right now stems from an overabundance of food and the resulting over-consumption of certain types of foods. Short of obesity-related health problems, we live in a time and place where people are living longer than ever before.

Enter the organic food crowd, who believe that we are being slowly poisoned by the pesticides and antibiotics in our foods. The truth is even if evidence surfaced that eating non-organic food is harmful (none exists, to date), any negative health effects due to pesticide or antibiotic consumption would be vastly overshadowed by the health benefits accrued by modern farming techniques. In a way, organic food proponents bear some resemblance to anti-vaccine proponents. People who have never had to deal with nation-wide pandemics of measles or polio fail to see the importance of vaccinating their children and maintaining herd immunity against the diseases. Similarly, people who have grown up in a country with an abundant supply of safe and healthful food fail to appreciate all of the harms and waste that we have been able to eliminate through modern farming techniques.

The other problem with organic food is that even if we wanted to, we simply could not feed all of the people in Canada using organic farming techniques, let alone the world while maintaining affordable food prices (if you think increased food prices due to rising oil costs are bad…). Short of a mass extinction, there appears to be no way to reconcile this huge problem. Organic farming would only ever work as long as a small percentage of the population consumed organically grown foods — but proponents of organic foods believe that all food should be grown organically.

So why is organically grown food bad?


Good farmland is at a premium all over the world. Even in Canada — breadbasket to the world — we have a shortage of prime farmland real estate. This is primarily because good farmland tends to be found around rivers and large bodies of water — the same bodies of water that gave rise to early transportation routes and therefore human settlements (and later cities). Urban sprawl, especially around major North American cities like Toronto, is leaving us with a shortage of farmland. In Canada, we have yet to run into a shortage of actual farmland, but being forced to use less ideal locations means a lower yield on food crops, and higher transportation costs. Other parts of the world are not quite as fortunate; and suffer from a shortage of all types of farmland (ideal and non-ideal). In order to grow organic food, we are forced to divert farmland to the purpose, and the resulting product is not as efficient.

Organically grown food is less intensive (i.e. less efficient) than non-organically grown food1. This is because, by definition, organic food is grown without modern farming techniques2. Failure to use modern fertilizers, pesticides and antibiotics mean that crops and livestock are more susceptible to pests, diseases, and spoiling. This means that more of the food (and land) is wasted, and the result is that the organic farms cannot produce as much food, per acre, as normal farms. Lack of reliance on genetic modification, pesticides, and modern growing techniques mean that organic food can only be grown on ideal farming locations. The absence of the modern techniques that help expand the conventional growing range of crops results in less overall farmland that can be used to grow organic crops. This means that in order to grow organic foods, conventional crops must be relocated to less ideal farmland, resulting in lower yields and higher transportation costs due to increased distance from towns and major cities. The result is that everybody ends up paying more for food; not just the people consuming organic produce3…

…or at least it would if any more than a tiny fraction of our population actually consumed organic produce. Fortunately, organically grown foods are still a relatively niche market, and the vast majority of people who consume organic foods do not consume organic foods exclusively. Demand for organic foods has not reached a point yet where it has an adverse affect on conventional food crops, but with the green movement in full swing, resulting in an uncritical and fanatical drive to embrace anything “natural”, this might not be the case in the near future.

It simply is not worth paying a premium price for organic food; and with non-provable (and often mystical) health benefits, it seems impossible to justify why anybody should. However, that does not mean that other methods of farming, worthy of a higher price tag, do not exist. Unlike organic food, locally grown food is a worthwhile pursuit, although not something that can (or should) replace modern mass farming techniques. Locally grown food, being grown nearer the consumer, is often fresher and tastier than food that has to be picked before it is ripe, and then shipped long distances. Assuming the use of modern farming techniques, local foods can also be cheaper than conventional foods, due to fewer storage and transportation costs. Of course, advocating that we only eat locally grown foods is almost as silly as advocating only eating organic foods, but at least locally grown foods have a real qualitative difference in taste and quality that organic foods lack.

P.S. Can you tell which of the vegetables pictured above are organic? Neither can I.

Some studies have shown organic farming techniques to produce crop yields similar to conventional farming techniques; however, this requires farming techniques that are substantially more expensive, and not feasible for feeding large populations. ↩
This is not to say that modern organic farming techniques do not exist; merely that they ignore most of the recent developments in agricultural science. ↩
This is somewhat analogous to what has been happening with ethanol crops driving up global food prices. ↩

The Evils of Organic Food