Buy cheap, not organic

When I have to go grocery shopping I like to browse around the aisles and compare products… When I have to go grocery shopping I like to browse around the aisles and compare products for price and quality, so that I can be sure I’m getting a good deal. But more and more often, I’m noticing a trend within supermarkets and food stores: organic foods.

I’m not saying that organic foods are bad. I just don’t really understand the deal. As I search through the grocery store I come across two seemingly identical products, such as pears. I can walk up to a produce display full of pears.

The one on the left will say “pears” and a price. The one on the right, however, will say “pears – CERTIFIED ORGANIC!” and a price about one and a half times as much. To my untrained eye both displays contain pears that are, for all intents and purposes, identical, except for pricing. So I buy the plain old, cheaper pears instead.

But there’s something nagging about organic foods. All the people who say they’re good for you and environmentally friendly have a way of getting under my skin. I look at these organic cereals and peanut butters and whatever else and get this nagging sense of guilt, a feeling that if I wasn’t so cheap on groceries I would buy this stuff.

The only thing is, I wouldn’t really. I don’t really care too much about what I eat, so long as it’s on a plate in front of me and someone calls it food. I believe MSG is a tasteful flavoring additive, and there’s no such thing as a bad artificial preservative.

After all, if someone is going to sell it for people to eat they’re going to make sure that people can actually eat it and not, you know, die.

So I don’t really get the organic foods craze. I can’t quite wrap my brain around paying more for products that actually have less to them. If an organic cereal is the same as a regular cereal but only without the preservatives, additives and artificial flavorings that the regular cereal has, it should cost less, not more! These companies are making a killing off of selling us two-thirds of a product for double the money!

OK, maybe that’s a bit cynical. But it is true that in most studies, including one done by the Canadian Produce Marketing Association – in other words, the people responsible for selling produce and therefore having a vested interest in making it look good – found no proof that organic foods offer different nutritional values or taste differently from their conventional-food counterparts. In other words, for the consumer these products are exactly the same as the cheaper ones.

But many people don’t eat organic foods for the taste or health benefits, which is good since there actually aren’t any. Instead, they say that they eat organic foods because they’re more environmentally friendly: They don’t release pesticides, are better at sustaining a natural ecosystem and are generally more environmentally sound.

The only thing about this strictly natural approach to farming is that it doesn’t work as well as a modern conventional farm. Despite the sometimes nasty side-effects of pesticides, they’re really almost necessary for crop yields to stay high, as are fertilizers and ripening chemicals. Indeed, the differences between the farming techniques are dramatic: Many studies estimate that organic farms yield between 10 and 50 percent lower production values than similarly sized conventional farms.

What that means is that organic farms have to increase their size to reach the same yields as conventional farms, and in the process they use more land and resources and – surprise! – hurt the environment as much or more than conventional farms. And that’s not just my criticism, but Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug’s, who is also a famed agronomist and “green” farm scientist credited with saving more than a billion people from starvation with his farming techniques (and also won the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, just in case you weren’t convinced).

So forgive me for passing up the organic foods at the supermarket. In fact, maybe everyone else should do the same thing. I mean, conventional foods taste the same, are no worse for your health, cost less and are actually better for the environment!

It almost makes you think that there might be a reason people moved away from the “organic” farming techniques humans had used for the first 4,000 years of history. What a crazy thought, huh?

If you want even more reasons why organic foods don’t make any sense, e-mail Richard at rab53@pitt.edu.