E coli panic putting organic food under the microscope
A common feature of these panics has been that the overblown figures and doomsday scenarios never seem to materialise.
There were the inflated claims of the perils of an obesity epidemic which would soon surpass smoking as the greatest cause of premature loss of life. Tough measures were demanded and we saw campaigns to ban junk-food advertising, the routine weighing of school pupils and even the forcible removal of children from “overfeeding” parents, not to mention Jamie Oliver’s school dinners, served with generous helpings of hectoring and bourgeois moralising. The truth is that life expectancy continues to rise everywhere except Zimbabwe and North Korea. While extreme obesity is certainly a problem, a bit of puppy fat does no one any harm and the fat-but-fit have similar life expectancies to the thin-but-sedentary.
Remember SARS? The outbreak in East Asia in 2003 caused widespread global alarm even in countries that were not affected by the disease. Sales of face masks rocketed, even in Western countries which suffered no SARS-related deaths and only had a handful of confirmed cases of infection, all contracted in Asia.
Worse was the avian flu (H5N1) panic of 2005. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated that the global death toll could be anywhere between 2 million and 7 million. The consequences were going to be worse than global warming, AIDS and terrorism all rolled into one.
Again, the reality was somewhat less dramatic. There were in fact fewer than 500 confirmed human cases of avian flu, half of which proved fatal. An appalling tragedy for those 200-odd people and their families, but a pandemic? Clearly not. The economic consequences for the poultry and tourism industries, however, were out of all proportion to the actual threat.
Swine flu came and went much the same way except this time Mexico became the centre of attention. Even though thousands of people die from flu-related syndromes around the world every year, an unhealthy amount of attention, resources, speculation and worrying is expended on any new exotic flu. Inflated figures emerge, pandemic threat alerts are raised, and countries suffer economic backlashes. The overreaction causes more harm than the disease itself.
In the case of swine flu in 2009, the head of the WHO declared: “All of humanity is under threat.” As many as 50 million, even 100 million deaths were predicted. As it happens, around 10,000 people died around the world from swine flu. Yes, that’s pretty horrific until you remember it represents just a small proportion of those who die from “normal” flu, year in and year out.
Time and again, these threats are treated not as a medical issue to be dealt with through scientific solutions, but as an anxious disaster movie-like parable of the perils of modern life.
The difference this time, of course, is that it’s the “good guys” who are in the firing line. For years we have been told that processed food will cause us cancer, that factory farming will poison us, and that “chemicals” sprayed on crops will cause our children to have all sorts of abnormalities. Now, however, it’s an organic farm in northern Germany producing bean sprouts that’s under investigation — although tests so far have proved negative.
Already, despite there having been just 23 deaths — 22 in Germany and one Swede who had recently visited Germany — the whole world has gone into panic mode with sales of vegetables slumping as far away as Canada. The EU has done what it does best and called an emergency meeting to agree yet more subsidies for the poor afflicted farming community.
Shouldn’t Europe’s agriculture ministers instead have stood shoulder to shoulder and told people outside northern Germany to keep eating their greens? E coli sounds very scary but it’s just another form of food poisoning, something which, sadly, kills, hundreds, if not thousands of people every year.
What the agriculture ministers dare not do, of course, is suggest that consumers steer away from the organic vegetable counter and the farmers’ market for a week or two until the situation becomes clearer. The percentage of vegetables eaten which are produced organically might be tiny but the organic lobby has a powerful voice out of all proportion to its numbers. The underlying temper of our times is that anything processed or industrialised can be seen as adulterated and harmful, while anything that appears to be natural or close to nature can be regarded as pure and uncorrupted. The precise facts about residues, nutrition or environmental impact are rarely discussed. The good news is that ordinary folk contain an innate wisdom. They don’t need agriculture ministers in hock to various lobbies to tell them what to do. Organic food sales will drop for a few days, weeks or months as sure as eggs are eggs.
And a little caution about some of the fantastic claims made about the benefits of organic food might be no bad thing. The simplistic assertion that organic is always more nutritious than conventional food was always likely to be misleading.
FOOD is a natural product and the nutritional content of different foods varies for any number of reasons, including: freshness, the way the food is cooked, the soil conditions it is grown in, the amount of sunlight and water crops have received, and so on. The differences created by these things are likely to be greater than any differences brought about by using an organic or non-organic system of production. Frankly, some of the organic food industry’s main claims are simply smoke and mirrors.
For instance, the over-reaction to the dangers from manmade pesticides is in sharp contrast to the complete ignorance shown towards naturally-occurring poisons. Everyday foods are full of natural pesticides. That’s hardly a surprise, since we tend to choose as crops things that seem resistant to pests and disease. And given that some of the things that manmade pesticides are designed to eliminate — like poisonous fungal growths — are pretty dangerous, is spraying crops with them necessarily a bad thing? The organic movement has flourished because it is in tune with the zeitgeist, which favours the small and the local and hankers for alternatives to industrial-scale farming and what is seen as an over-cosy relationship between big producers and supermarkets.
We live in times where anything manmade is seen as tainted, dangerous for our health and the environment. Organic products have sold because of their “natural” glow. They suggest an awareness of the environment and personal health, a desire to live within the limits of nature.
We are told that we are powerless in the face of invisible forces over which we have little control. Worse still, any attempt to tame the natural world and to resolve informally any potential tensions in everyday, human interactions is seen as irresponsible. But if the E coli outbreak is proven to have originated from an organic farm, perhaps we can have a serious discussion about organic’s much-vaunted but scarcely proven advantages to human health.
