There has been a fair amount of hoohah about a Stanford Study
that suggests that organic foods are no more nutritious than
conventional foods. This shouldn’t be a shock, but many health
claims have been waved about over the years that say otherwise.
The Atlantic’s Brian Fung rightly points out that only over the
last few years has the discussion shifted to imply that
nutritional content is why we grow organic – in fact, that’s not
how the organic movement started. The reality is that such
claims are hard to evaluate – what varieties are you comparing?
Is this industrial or small scale organic? But in a way, I don’t
think it matters much. Buying organic is also a statement about
public health. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of
antibiotics. Conventional farms have been putting the stuff in
animal feed for decades — even though we’ve known since the
1970s about the health hazards that the animal use of
antibiotics poses for humans. Reducing society’s chances of
inadvertently creating a superbug is a go