What is truly safe to eat? Is organic food really safe?

My wife and I make a genuine effort to eat healthy food. We limit fat, we eschew soft drinks, we filter our water, we grow our own heirloom tomatoes and other vegetables.  We buy organic when and where we can.  Most of what we eat is fruit, nuts and vegetables with a little bit of eggs and a very small amount of meat.

As an example, I just had my breakfast: an organic banana, a Dannon All Natural yogurt, a half handful of unsalted peanuts, almonds and walnuts and an 8 ounce glass of Welch's grape juice. 

That sounds great, and it probably is better than what many eat to start their day, but how healthy is it really?

Is it really even possible to eat healthily today?

Organic?

We buy organic when possible and we grow our own veggies without pesticides or fertilizer.

That's wonderful, isn't it? We aren't being exposed to harmful chemicals because we do these things.

Yeah, I wish.

According to this Organic Farming Compliance FAQ, farmland must not have had prohibited materials applied to it for three years before food grown on it can be labeled "organic". Is that long enough? I don't know, but let's assume that it is. Aren't we forgetting at least three or four things?

Air

Our air is polluted. Automobile exhaust, smoke stack emission, dust clouds from far away lands carrying pesticides - none of that affects the organic status. Plants take up carbon dioxide from the air and of course take up these pollutants with them. Insignificant? Perhaps so, but do we know that?

Of course we are breathing it too.

Rain

Rain brings air pollution right down to the organic farms roots. What's better: an organic farm 50 miles downwind of major pollution sources or a non-organic farm farther away? Do we know?

Water

Organic farms can't depend on rain, of course. What's in the water used for irrigation? Does a mention of sewage sludge in organic farming give you warm fuzzies?

But even so-called potable water may contain pesticides, prescription medicines and other things we really don't want to think about. Of course an organic farm can use municipal water - if it is "safe" for us, it has to be safe for plants, right?

Pesticides

Organic farms can use pesticides and some of things they are allowed to use are harmful to humans. They also may have greater environmental impact.

But we do know its better, right?

Yeah, I guess: a study of children eating organic fruits and vegetables showed that:

"Once you switch from conventional food to organic, the pesticides (malathion and chlorpyrifos) that we can measure in the urine disappears. The level returns immediately when you go back to the conventional diets"

That makes me feel safer. But we aren't measuring everything, of course. They didn't measure how much plastic residue we eat, how many hormones, how much trace medicine we ingest. They measured a few things that come out. We can't see what we don't measure and measuring what comes out doesn't count what sticks in our liver and in fat cells.

Our own farming

The veggies we grow ourselves may be even worse. We use no fertilizer and no pesticides, but we are in a community garden and our neighbors definitely use both. How much of that gets to us? I don't know.

There's something worse, though. The water supply we use for irrigation is not potable water!

It's well water and apparently there is something that prevents it being ok'ed for human use. They tell us it is perfectly safe for the plants, but honestly that does bother me some - why is it safe for plants and not for us?

Of course that same thing and worse may be true for the water used for most of the food we eat, organic or otherwise. We just don't know.

Better than nothing

Yes, of course, it is better to eat organic.  But unless we completely return to organic farming everywhere, unless we stop poisoning our air and our water and our oceans, we are still constantly exposed to danger.  We can reduce our individual exposure, but we cannot eliminate it.

Back to my breakfast

The organic banana costs 50% more than its non-organic cousins. Do I know how safe it really is? Was it, for example, sprayed with rotene - an "organic" pesticide that can cause Parkinson's disease? What chemicals are used to grow organic bananas vs. non-organic? Which have more toxicity, which dissipate more quickly, which are less easily absorbed by humans, which break down in cooking, which do not? I don't know the answers to these questions.

The Dannon Yogurt is "All Natural". Apparently that can mean very little. Apparently Dannon hasn't always been entirely conscientious about the milk it buys. Why aren't we buying Stoneyfield, which is organic?

Well, I can answer that: Stoneyfield doesn't make a coffee yogurt. They make it frozen, but not simple unfrozen. Why? I don't know, but coffee yugurt is what we like. Kind of funny, isn't it? We choose non-organic over organic just because of that. Couldn't we learn to like plain yogurt instead?

Oh, and of course the Dannon comes in a plastic cup. Does it have BPA or other things that can leach into yogurt? I don't know. Stonyfield makes a different sort of container, but is that safer? Again, I don't know.

That grape juice is not organic. Should we switch to an organic brand like Eden's Farms? Well, we tried it once. It was expensive and we didn't think it tasted as good. Oh, aren't we the fussy ones?

The nut mix? Planters Peanuts talks about "sustainablity" at their web site. Is that more important than organic? We buy the other nuts at BJ's - the packaging has that meaningless "All Natural" label. What am I really eating here? I don't know, yet again.

Degree of effort?

Plainly, we aren't doing everything we could with regard to our own eating. I may sneer at the contents of grocery carts I see when we do our weekly shopping, but we aren't being as careful as we could be. Sure, part of that is expense: the fully organic stores not only would double our food costs but are also much farther away - they'd add to our gasoline costs as well.

Is it any wonder so many people just ignore all this entirely? As a neighbor says, "Something has to kill you". I don't think that justifies burying your head in the sand and pretending none of this matters, but aren't I doing exactly that to some extent?

Sure, it's confusing, the science can be contradictory and there is so much politics and posturing involved that the truth is obscure at best. I honestly feel bewildered most of the time. We want to eat healthy food, but we apparently really don't want it badly enough.

And even if we did, even if cost was no object, we simply could not avoid exposure. It's impossible.

Your take

How do you feel about all this? Do you ignore it? Are you doing more than we are? Are you confused? Are you worried?  I'd really like to know.

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