Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[yarrow@sfo.com]

At 9:50 PM -0500 9/14/07, <activism98201@verizon.net> wrote:
> To answer my own question/challenge... What this article 
> (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/331421_bigfood13.html) noted 
> that I found extremely hard to believe (so much so that I didn't 
> believe it) was that no one foresaw the nutrient decline in our 
> foods:
> >

But that's not what the article (or the report it's based on) says. 
It's not saying no one foresaw, it's saying no one measured it, and 
now that we have, it's a clear trend. But I also suspect the Organic 
Center's spokesperson is being disingenuous in the quotes used in the 
article, because it has been the mission of the Organic Center to 
find this kind of information. Look in the mainstream press, though, 
and you'll still find lots of people pooh-poohing organics, seeing 
only a higher price and perceiving no benefits -- that's his 
audience. He's not talking to the people who already know that 
organics offer better nutrition, he's addressing all the skeptics who 
think labeling something "organic" is just another marketing scam or 
luxury label.

On another level, I think he's also saying that the hybridizers and 
industrial-scale farms have been short-sighted, in being focused only 
on yields and paying no attention to nutritional quality or taste. 
Yet they're the ones who own the market. (An aside: "everyone" seems 
to know that those tasteless tomatoes sold in the winter are not 
worth eating. So who buys them? Is it institutional/restaurant 
buyers, mostly? Or are they the test case for anyone who wants to 
prove that people will eat anything if it "looks" like something that 
once had some flavor?)

I think most organic growers have for a long time **suspected** that 
organically grown produce has more nutrients, but that's not the same 
thing as doing the measurements. Now the science has been done, so we 
have something to point to when challenged about the "supposed 
benefits" of organics.

Dr. Alan Greene, a pediatrician who wrote the foreword to the report, 
has been speaking at a range of conferences in the past year about 
the nutritional benefits of organics and the hazards of pesticides to 
children.