Food Safety: Protecting Organic Food Against Pesticides

While food safety regulations don't necessarily discriminate against non-organic food grown with the heavy use of pesticides, there are certainly many of us who think they ought to. And while organic food isn't necessarily safe food (nor is it  always chemical-free food), it sure seems a lot safer than some of its conventional chemical-ridden counterparts. One pesticide use case that got a lot of media attention in 2010 was California's decision to allow the use of a known carcinogenic pesticide on it's strawberries, which constitute one of the largest strawberry crops in the nation. Such allowances and sketchy decisions may diminish trust in the integrity of our food safety regulations as it is, but add to this the often slippery nature of pesticides and GMOs, and you'll really think twice next time you're at the market.

One of the biggest cases that sustainable agriculture has made against the use of GM seeds is that they don't stay put. An organic farm that swears against using GMOs can easily be contaminated if its neighbor farmer is planting Round Up Ready crops next door. Wind and birds carry seeds without checking to see whether or not it's been genetically modified; nature isn't so choosy. Similarly, pesticides travel, causing problems not only for the environment that they seep into, but also for those farmers who choose not to use pesticides and to raise organic produce instead.

Such was the case outside of Santa Cruz, California four years ago. Jacobs Farm, a 120-acre organic herb farm that sells to Whole Foods, was suddenly told by Whole Foods that some of its herbs had tested positive for pesticides. As it turns out, the pesticides applied to fields on a nearby conventional farm in liquid form had simply volatilized and were carried over to Jacobs Farm in water vapor (via fog or wind.) It isn't hard to imagine that this simple chemical process can happen quite easily and does happen all over the place. A recent appeals court decision sided with the organic farmers against, Western Farm Service, the company that applied the pesticide. The farmers are suing for damages.

While not all pesticides are prone to travel by air, it is probably more common than we think. And if the chemicals don't volatilize, they may very well travel by other means, seeping into groundwater, running downstream in creeks and rivers, causing environmental problems as well as threatening the purity of organic agricultural efforts. True food safety, after all, depends less on seemingly isolated decisions to allow or ban specific chemicals or genetically modified seeds in specific states or regions. Very often nature doesn't deal with borders or fences, and so the safety of our food system and the integrity of organic or sustainable agriculture depends much more on the integrity of the whole. If we start looking at our food system as a greater piece of the whole, we'll start to address the real issues, and start to get to the root of food safety.

photo credit: grant haynes