These are good times for those who grow and sell organic foods. But there may be trouble in paradise.
Prompted by a quest for safer, healthier diets and a cleaner environment, more American consumers are buying the bountiful harvests of organic farmers. Last year, U.S. spending on organic foods reached close to $10.4 billion, making this the fastest-growing segment of the American food industry. Amid scares over mad cow disease, mercury in fish and produce tainted with harmful bacteria, new customers are joining existing ones in embracing organic foods as a sanctuary from harm and a surer route to long life and good health.
But as organic products -- and their claims to superiority -- have grown more common, scientists, policy analysts and some consumers have begun to ask for proof. Where's the evidence, they ask, for the widespread belief that organic foods are safer and more nutritious than those raised by conventional farming methods?
The short answer, food safety and nutrition scientists say, is that such proof does not exist. Indeed, by one well-established measure of healthfulness -- contamination with fecal matter and potentially harmful bacteria -- some organic foods may pose greater risks to consumers.
As food fights go, this one might not be as raucous as the cacophony over low-carb diets or reshaping the food pyramid -- yet. But since 1989, when organic-food activists raised a nationwide scare over the pesticide alar in apples, many scientists have seethed quietly at what they perceive as a campaign of scare tactics, innuendo and shoddy science perpetrated by organic food producers and their allies.
Now, many of those experts, who had been content to pursue their research in academic anonymity, are being called to testify before congressional committees and weigh in on a swirling public debate about America's diet. As they begin to find their voice, the organic food industry may find them about as welcome as a plague of aphids. And it will take more than cow manure and dried chrysanthemum leaves to make them go away.
Dr. Joseph D. Rosen, a Rutgers University food science professor on the cusp of retirement, is one of the organic food industry's newest pests. For years, Rosen said, he kept his head down, conducting and publishing narrow research on how to measure pesticide residues in food. But he was moved to begin speaking out in 2002, when Consumer Reports inveighed against proposals to irradiate meat -- a measure Rosen believes could prevent more then 350 deaths per year due to food-borne illnesses.
