Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Is Organic Food Worth the Price?
By Gene Franks
 http://www.purewatergazette.net/value.htm

    Americans are among the most starved people on this planet. In spite of
all the chemical supplements and new foods, we are living on a diet that is
deficient in the essential factors of life. We have an epidemic of extreme
malnutrition and a nation where over 65% of the American people are
chronically ill. Our diet lacks the vital force of the more primitive basic
foods.--Viktokras Kulvinskas.

     

    The Gazette challenges readers to learn more about food. Survival in
our age of high-tech misinformation requires, in fact, that we become
passionate amateurs in the art of feeding ourselves. Allowing food industry
professionals to make food choices for us is not only unwise and
unhealthy--it is positively boring. Nourishing our bodies is one of life's
basic pleasures. Procuring and preparing food should occupy a larger share
of our time and get a larger share of our resources. Eating well is fun,
and we should indulge ourselves in excellent foods.

    The degree to which we can indulge ourselves in food, of course,
depends upon our individual resources. I confess that this article will not
solve the problems of the very poor, who are required by necessity to
settle for the less expensive foods, just as they settle for less in other
areas of life. I know no cure for this. But everyone, even those who cannot
buy organically grown produce, can eat as well as their resources allow.
Potatoes cost less than potato chips; yams cost less than Snickers bars;
excellently filtered water costs far less than sodas.

    A big part of the American food myth is that food should be cheap. It
should not. Food should, in fact, get top billing on our list of spending
priorities. To buy cheap food in order to afford an expensive lawnmower
demonstrates a perverted value system.

    Organically grown foods are among the items many view as unaffordable.
This is the narrow view of the issue, based only on the purchase price.
John Ruskin, an English thinker and artist so famous they named a cigar
after him, pointed out that when an item purchased for what seems a low
price fails to fulfill the need it was intended for, the purchaser has not
saved money but has in fact wasted the full purchase price. Because of our
food-should-be-cheap conditioning, an organically grown tomato may seem
expensive; but a delicious, locally grown, fresh-from-the-garden,
chemical-free tomato is a great bargain when compared with the tasteless,
ether-reddened blob of mush offered at half the price by the Killer Tomato
industry.

    The reasons for buying organic food are many. Some that are often
mentioned (this listing is indebted to the Spring 1992 issue of Organic
Times) are the protection of children (they are more vulnerable than adults
to pesticide poisoning); prevention of soil erosion (perhaps our most
severe problem in the long run); the protection of water quality
(pesticides, herbicides, and commercial fertilizers are formidable water
contaminants); energy savings (organic farming is essentially labor
intensive, while conventional farming is one of our major energy wasters);
prevention of chemical poisoning of farm workers (remember Cesar Chavez);
helping small farmers (organic farming favors the small producer, while
conventional farming is designed to eliminate family farms and put all land
in the hands of large corporate "farmers"); support of a true economy
(although organic foods might appear more expensive, we, as taxpayers, pay
dearly for the pollution cleanup, pesticide testing, irrigation projects,
soil depletion, hazardous waste disposal, farm subsidies, etc. resulting
from conventional agriculture); promotion of biodiversity (the disastrous
practice of monocropping is the hallmark of meat-based conventional
agriculture); and, certainly not least important, the provision of more
nutritious, better-tasting food.

    Although organically grown produce has shown itself repeatedly to be
superior to conventionally grown food in "food chart" nutrients, there are
certainly intangible nutritional benefits not yet recognized or measurable.
Nutrition is a science in its infancy. In spite of the know-it-all posture
assumed by many nutrition professionals, most university "nutrition
science" is more theory than fact. As a single example, consider the broad
disagreement among experts on the very basic question of whether or not the
body assimilates inorganic minerals from water.

    One of the intangible "ingredients" that makes organic food much
superior to conventional is what some writers have called "information."
Homeopathy should have taught us by now that there are unseen, intangible
essences at work in nature that defy explanation by orthodox material
science. Although no one has explained it, information, the wisdom of the
soil, the wisdom of billions of years of experience, takes on physical
substance in food grown under natural conditions. It is like spirit
becoming flesh.

    According to nutrition writer John David Mann, ancient foods like
naturally grown microalgae are rich in information. "A food that goes back
over four billion years," he writes, "clearly has a rich store of valuable
genetic information." Other writers have speculated on how this ancient
information is passed to food consumers. Orthodox Science, our nation's
leading religion, scoffs because it cannot explain the mechanism, just as
it initially scoffed at belief in roundness of the planet and the
circulation of blood.

    Mann says that organically grown foods are information rich: "Beyond
their mere avoidance of chemicals, they contain the value of the skill and
craftsmanship of their production; the care taken to preserve the soil on
which they're grown; the traditional methods they embody; the preservation
of genetic diversity; and even the social value of the small-scale,
family-farm economy that underpins their production."

    The importance of eating food that has been grown in real soil, or in
pure, natural water in the case of algae, rather than the chemically
created artificial growing surface of conventional farming is that soil
imparts its information to the plant. Genuine organic soil is not only rich
in trace elements not available to commercially grown plants, but also in
micro-organisms which,  the old Roman poet Lucretius reminded us, "hand on
the torch of life, like runners in a race," passing on from generation to
generation the wisdom of the soil and the experience of the ages. It is
through the living soil and through the ancient plants that grow in it that
we are rooted to the earth. "The statement that the earth is our mother,"
writes Nobel laureate Rene Dubos, "is more than a sentimental platitude,
since . .  . we are shaped by the earth. The characteristics of the
environment in which we develop condition our biological and mental being
and the quality of our life. Were it only for selfish reasons, therefore,
we must maintain variety and harmony in nature."

    No mater how much USDA would deny it, a tomato grown from an heirloom
seed in rich, chemical-free soil, nourished by natural light, clean water,
and a full complement of micro-organisms and trace minerals, has valuable
information and other intangible benefits that can never be listed in
Handbook 8. That its monetary cost should be greater makes sense.