Busting common myths about organic food

If you spend any time on the internet in spaces where people talk about food, nutrition and the environment, you’ve probably seen some hot takes about organic food — that it’s not worth the price tag, that it’s all a scam or that it’s somehow worse than nonorganic. Regardless of who’s presenting them, the same few arguments tend to pop up. We take a look at those here.

Some of these claims start with a grain of truth, but often distort that to make organic look like a racket, an excuse for charging higher prices while being no better than conventional agriculture. In the broader context of organic’s philosophy, however, most of these facts don’t end up undermining the program’s standards or its integrity.

It’s also worth remembering that many of the people who start arguments on the internet are making money by doing so, whether they’re getting engagement-based money from platforms or being paid by organizations who stand to profit from eroding public trust in organic.

Myth 1: Organic uses just as many pesticides as conventional agriculture.

FACT: ORGANIC DOES ALLOW NATURAL PESTICIDES (AND A FEW SYNTHETICS) — BUT THEIR USE IS VERY LIMITED AND NOWHERE NEAR THAT OF CONVENTIONAL AGRICULTURE.

It’s a common claim among people trying to discredit organic, and it certainly does fly in the face of the first thing most people think about the label: no chemicals. So is it true?

Under the USDA’s organic rules, synthetic substances are banned, while natural products are allowed, with a few specific exemptions in both directions. That’s simple in theory, but cleanly delineating what’s synthetic and what’s natural isn’t so easy. Intuitively, synthetic would refer to anything man-made, and that scoops up most fertilizers and pesticides that are produced in a lab from chemical ingredients. But some chemicals used in agriculture are originally extracted from natural materials. If, after extraction, they’re altered in a way that changes their chemical composition, they’re considered synthetic; if they’re left unchanged, they can still be considered natural. For example, calcium compounds are often used to make soil less acidic, and those can be natural or synthetic. If that calcium comes straight from crushed limestone, it’s considered natural, but if it’s isolated from crushed stone and then treated with heat to become more concentrated quicklime, it qualifies as synthetic.

Of course, natural doesn’t necessarily equate to safe: Natural products can be dangerous, and many of these (like arsenic and certain mineral salts) are banned in organic.

There are some situations where natural products don’t cut it, and that’s why there’s also a short list of synthetic substances that are allowed under the organic rules. But a quick perusal shows that most of these are simple, familiar chemicals that are allowed for very specific reasons, like hydrogen peroxide and rubbing alcohol as disinfectants for equipment. Some chemical compounds, like copper sulfate, are allowed to help control plant diseases, but need to be used in a way that minimizes their accumulation on soil and avoids leaving residues on crops. Synthetic materials that are essential for animal health — such as vaccines, simple pain medication and topical ointments — are allowed, although using medications that leave residues in milk or meat, like hormones or antibiotics, can disqualify an animal or its products from being sold as organic.

There are also some natural substances that are used as pesticides in organic agriculture, often isolated hormones or chemicals from plant tissues that are used as insecticides. These naturally occurring biopesticides are often the launching point for scientists who develop synthetic derivatives, but organic growers can use the naturally occurring chemicals (again provided they aren’t modified once they’re extracted). These biopesticides may be chemically similar to their synthetic descendents, but they’re generally weaker, target fewer species and don’t linger in the environment. That makes their use much more limited in scope than the pesticides that conventional growers spray on entire fields.

This difference in how the chemicals are used is, in fact, more important than where the chemicals come from. Biopesticides and other natural products are often less effective than synthetics, so it’s hard to use them the same way. But in the organic growing philosophy, that’s not necessarily a problem: Crop and livestock health should be rooted in an on-farm ecosystem that suppresses weeds, pests and disease without resorting to chemical quick fixes in the first place.

Conventional agriculture, meanwhile, is wholly dependent on preemptive pesticide use, dousing entire fields of crops in herbicides like glyphosate and accelerating the evolution of superweeds in the process. Suggesting that organic’s limited use of chemicals is equivalent to that of conventional growers — who apply 280 million pounds of glyphosate alone on nearly 300 million acres of U.S. cropland annually — is a deliberate distortion of the facts.

Myth 2: Organic is actually worse for the environment.

FACT: ORGANIC AGRICULTURE HAS A LARGER LAND FOOTPRINT THAN CONVENTIONAL, BUT IT IS MUCH BETTER ON ALMOST EVERY OTHER ENVIRONMENTAL METRIC.

Agriculture’s environmental footprint can be hard to evaluate in simple terms like better or worse because there are so many factors involved: soil health, land and water use, emissions and more. Farming involves a lot of tradeoffs, and a few of these are often leveraged to make organic look worse. Conventional agriculture uses large quantities of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to grow a lot of food on a relatively small area of land. Without those chemicals, it’s true that organic farming often gets smaller yields, and therefore has to use more land to grow the same amount of food. That larger land footprint is usually the basis for the claim that organic is worse for the environment: If all food on earth were organic, we’d need a lot more farmland than we have today, accelerating deforestation and other problems.

There are a few issues with this analysis. Conventional agriculture may be more space-efficient when it comes to farmland, but its efficiency is contingent on importing nutrients the land doesn’t have in the first place, and that it can’t hold onto for very long either. What’s more, those synthetic fertilizers take a lot of fossil fuels to manufacture, and the leftovers run off into waterways, ultimately causing problems like algal blooms that deplete and kill aquatic life far afield. Factoring in the harm pesticides cause to non-target species, especially pollinators, it becomes apparent that conventional ag’s footprint stretches well beyond the land it technically occupies.

Organic farmers can import nutrients in the form of compost and manure, but these have to come from living things and usually aren’t applied at the same rates as synthetic fertilizers. This doesn’t mean that organic farms are exempt from environmental problems. Having to avoid pesticides and herbicides often makes organic farms more reliant on tilling soil to keep crops weed-free, for example, so many must be more proactive about soil health. But eschewing chemical fertilizers and pesticides as the default means that organic farms don’t have as deep a footprint as their conventional counterparts, even when they take up more space.

Myth 3: There are no health advantages to choosing organic.

FACT: PERSONAL HEALTH ASIDE, CHOOSING ORGANIC PROTECTS THE HEALTH OF FARMWORKERS AND MITIGATES SOME SERIOUS PUBLIC HEALTH RISKS.

Much of the marketing around organic products seems to play up their wholesome nature. As you’d expect, organic food does have far fewer pesticide residues than conventional food. But it’s also true that, for most people, pesticide residues from grain and produce have not conclusively been determined to be a major health risk. While experts might disagree on how tolerances for some substances are established, most limits for pesticide residues are set in a way that’s designed to protect people who might be most vulnerable to consuming them, like infants.

Ultimately, scientific studies have shown that organic food is mostly free from pesticide residues (with the little that does show up coming primarily from shared processing equipment). There’s also evidence that some organic produce has higher levels of certain vitamins and beneficial antioxidants than its conventional counterparts. What hasn’t been proven is whether eating mostly organic foods actually makes people any healthier. It’s hard to perform this kind of research in the first place, and what evidence we do have doesn’t show that choosing organic leads to consistently better health outcomes for eaters.

But this perspective only looks at the personal health angle to the food system, and that’s where it falls short. The impact of our food choices goes well beyond our own bodies, and organic does offer tangible benefits to public health. The biggest exposure risk for pesticides isn’t in consuming residues, it’s in applying pesticides and working in pesticide-treated fields. While there are some safety standards designed to protect workers, they’re not always followed, and farmworkers suffer from both acute poisonings and pesticide-linked chronic health problems. They’re also less likely to get adequate medical care, especially when they are undocumented immigrants. It isn’t just workers, either: Some pesticides are dangerous enough to threaten whole agricultural communities. Children who live and go to school near farm fields where pesticides like chlorpyrifos are used show blood levels well above normal, and have higher rates of neurological problems as a result.

Beyond pesticides, organic agriculture addresses another public health concern: While antibiotics are allowed for treating sick animals on organic farms, they’re used at far lower rates than on conventional farms, where they’re used to prevent diseases that proliferate easily in the crowded and unsanitary conditions. This overuse of antibiotics — including many that are used in human medicine, too — speeds the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Antibiotic-resistant infections already kill more than 35,000 people in the U.S. annually, and factory farms are some of the most fruitful breeding grounds for new ones. This translates directly to the consumer as well: One study found that organically produced meat was 56 percent less likely to contain bacteria strains that were resistant to antibiotics.

Myth 4: Organic is just an excuse to charge more.

FACT: UNLIKE MANY MARKETING CLAIMS MADE ABOUT FOOD, USDA ORGANIC HAS SPECIFIC RULES AND A STRINGENT VERIFICATION PROCESS.

It’s easy to understand where skepticism about food labels comes from. With so many claims being made about everything we buy, it’s hard to keep track of what they’re even supposed to mean, let alone whether they’re accurate.

This is where organic has a unique advantage. While the USDA does have to approve most food labels, it doesn’t actually set its own requirements for what those claims mean, nor does it enforce them, leaving room for companies to set their own definitions for “sustainably grown,” and other terms. But organic is different: The U.S. National Organic Program was established as part of the 1990 Farm Bill, and has set the standards for food labeled as organic since then. Organic farms have to follow stringent rules about chemical use and livestock health, implement soil and water protection measures, and avoid genetically modified crops and livestock. These claims must be verified by an accredited, independent auditor in order for a farm or food company to use the organic label.

The official “USDA Organic” seal means that the product meets all of the organic production standards, which includes higher benchmarks for sustainability and health from the farm all the way to the grocery store. USDA organic labeling can be applied to foods in a variety of ways depending on which criteria the product meets.

Anything that carries the “USDA Organic” seal must be made with at least 95 percent organic products, with the remaining 5 percent coming only from an allowed list of common ingredients, such as baking soda, that can’t be produced organically. Products carrying the “100% Organic” label must be made exclusively with organic ingredients. Finally, foods that carry a label stating “Made with Organic Ingredients” must contain at least 70 percent organic ingredients by weight — but they cannot use the official seal.

These stringent rules make organic one of the most trustworthy labels on the market today, especially for domestically produced foods. There have been some concerns about organic fraud, especially in grain, where there have been instances of traders reselling conventionally raised grain as organic and taking a high profit. There have also been a few notable instances of organic fraud in imported foods: Foreign farms can also be USDA organic certified, but the USDA’s reliance on third party auditors has led to a few fraud and corruption cases. In recent years, the agency has introduced new, even more stringent verification rules to help organic maintain its status as a reliable standard for products made in the U.S. and abroad.