Science… Sort of… Sort Of

Organic Compounds the Problem

Back in April I attended TEDxCLE and had a great time. I’m already looking forward to next year! TEDxCLE is an extraordinary event and I would encourage anyone to attend a local independently organized TED event or, in the absence of such, organize their own. Most of the talks were enlightening and well-presented. One talk that stuck out was Jonathan Sawyer, chef of his popular Greenhouse Tavern, but not for the reasons you might expect.

Anytime I hear “organic foods” my skeptical ears perk up. Not because I am opposed to the consumption of organic foods (I’m quite sure I eat plenty of it myself, whether I know it or not) or because I think it’s not as good as conventional agriculture, but because I think purported benefits that using these overpriced products has on the environment and health are greatly exaggerated when they are not completely made up. I also think the labeling of a product as organic or natural (and I don’t mean to conflate the two—natural has no legal definition) is more than anything a marketing ploy—a contention that Sawyer himself seems to make. Perhaps I’m guilty of the same with the title of this post (but those are the perils of attempting to be clever).

I won’t go into too much detail on the organic foods debate here. If you’d like to get all the ins and outs, Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com has done the research here and here, and has provided the citations. I’m going to focus on Sawyer’s talk and where he get’s things wrong.

Let me start by saying I agree with Sawyer on some of his fundamental points, such as the problem of obesity and corruption of the organic foods industry. I also realize that the format of TED, while desirable for many reasons, often allows little more than an overview of the speaker’s message and doesn’t provide a Q&A for the speaker to defend their claims. Sawyer as the speaker and I as the critiquer are both put at a disadvantage in this regard. That being said, let us begin.

There’s nothing natural in [American cheese] whatsoever…. There is no product in American cheese that is naturally produced by any animal. True statement.

Is it? One of Sawyer’s main points, which I agree with, is that the terms natural and organic have lost meaning and do little to inform us of what is in a food product labeled as such. How then can he propose to tell us about the “nature” of American cheese? I’d like to know what definition of natural he is using when he makes this claim.

American cheese is made mainly from milk, whey, milk protein, and whey protein—all ingredients most of us would consider “natural” and “naturally produced by animals.” Even the package of what many might consider the most unnatural version of American cheese, Kraft singles, contains these ingredients, and you’ll likely find a similar list on any version you’ll find in the store.

More importantly, the implication that natural = good and unnatural = bad is erroneous, and dangerously so. Try hiking through the woods without a wilderness guide, eating berries along the way, and you might not make it back to tell of your nature walk. And I doubt Sawyer would tell sufferers of diabetes, which he is rightly concerned about, to stop taking their synthetic medication.

I don’t mean to pass judgement on American cheese as either healthy or unhealthy, but Sawyer seems to be confused about it’s makeup and his example serves to only further the confusion over the definition of terms such as natural.

This [popcorn] represents the amount of herbicides, pesticides, growth hormones, my family of four would consume in one year…. 20 lbs a year, in a conventional, commercial diet. Now had this been pesticides I would challenge anybody in this audience to come up here right now and eat a handful of this and tell me it’s not harmful when ingested in small amounts.

I don’t think anyone claiming pesticides are not harmful in small doses would consider a handful to be small. As it turns out, once we break down the analogy it becomes clear that Sawyer simply made up the idea of a handful without any thought (or with willful ignorance) of the actual amount of pesticides an individual would ingest in a single sitting.

The first problem is that he conflates pesticides and growth hormone—two very different things—resulting in an inflated handful, or “small amount.” We’ll let that slide. He continues this inflation by including his family of four in the total amount, then making his challenge apply to individuals. Let’s do some simple math, shall we?

20 lb / 4 persons = 5 lb per person per year

5 lb / 365 days = .014 lb per day

.014 lb / 3 meals (let’s say) = .005 lb

That’s less than 3/4 of an ounce of pesticides and growth hormone combined in one sitting. I’ve never been good at this stuff (in fact, somebody should check my math), but even an English major like myself can see that a handful of that popcorn would weigh substantially more than that. Toss in the fact that a handful of pesticides/growth hormone would certainly weigh a lot more than light, airy popcorn and the whole analogy goes out the window. 3/4 of an ounce of pesticides/growth hormone wouldn’t be anywhere close to a handful. Keep in mind, we haven’t even investigated whether that initial 20 lb a year is even accurate.

This exceptionally egregious—and I’m being generous when I say—distortion of the facts is more than just shoddy math, it’s blatant dishonesty. Sawyer presumably took the time to look up the numbers and craft a demonstration in which he purposefully inflates, conflates, and makes a specious comparison in order to sway distracted audience members to ignore the facts—or so it seems to me. And the facts are that public perception that pesticides and growth hormone are hazardous in the quantities consumed has been influenced by politics and is NOT supported  by the scientific research.

One of our favorite collaborators is Farmer Lee Jones, on screen, from Chef’s Garden in Huron, Ohio. His farm exemplifies the most stringent, sustainable, and green business practices of any farmer we know. And like us, they are completely transparent about those practices… A couple great farmer friends of mine, whose produce is of no less quality of Farmer Lee Jones, would love to be certified Organic, but they simply can’t afford it. I know for a fact they do not use chemicals.

I contacted The Chef’s Garden and inquired about their use of pesticides and fertilizers. After getting passed around a bit, I was told an owner would call me back. I haven’t received that call yet, but if I do I’ll be sure to include an update here.

The fact is many of these farmer friends Sawyer speaks of probably use organic pesticides and they almost certainly use organic fertilizers. To say these are not chemicals—regardless of how those chemicals are arrived at—is just false. My guess is that he is probably referring only to synthetic chemicals. Perhaps because he believes the word chemical only applies to unnatural things, which we know means they must be bad. Whether it’s from manure, worm castings, and guano (organic fertilizer) or extracted from the air, rocks, and ocean (synthetic fertilizer), you still end up with the same chemical load of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphate.

I sympathize with Sawyer’s quest to make food healthier, but in the end he just gets too many things wrong, resulting in a talk that is at best, lazy and at worst, dishonest. He would do better to educate himself on the scientific research that is available and use that to get his message across without resorting to sensationalism an deceptive tactics.