April 1999
The most popular question I hear at the trade shows and over the telephone is: "What does it take to be organic?" Agriculture is complicated enough already, but digging into the concepts of organic agriculture deserves years of study and practice. During a brief conversation at our busy booth during the Ottawa Farm Show, I could only cover the basic rule: the land must be chemical free for the last three years and continue likewise during the production of organic crops.
Such a summary does not properly serve the objectives of organic food and organic agriculture. Even the standards for organic production tend to limit themselves to chemical free farming and the inherent requirements to succeed without synthetic inputs: crop rotations, soil life, environmental protection, and the absence of chemicals in food processing. But organic means much more. To keep a long story short, organic food is NEAR, NAKED AND NATURAL!
Food is NEAR when local people eat local food. I think all farmers would like to see their produce eaten locally, but organically minded people would make a special effort. The average food molecule in North America allegedly travels about 1500 miles. Imagine the cost and resources spent on moving food from the farm to a distant processor, then to an even more distant wholesaler and distributor, and back to your home town on the retailer's shelf. It requires significant fossil fuels, pollution, subsidized transportation, and spoilage to cover the distance. The economic imperative of long-distance food is economy of scale; the economic imperative of organic food is a direct producer-consumer relationship. The direct contact maximizes freshness and quality, improves mutual understanding, gives power to consumers and producers instead of the large food processors and provides a better price to both parties.
Food is NAKED when it is not over packaged. When a significant portion of the sale price of a food item goes to packaging, handling, advertising (besides the transportation and distribution mentioned above), then the farmer ends up with a survival income and the consumer complains about the cost of food. Over-packaging also increases garbage disposal costs and space. Recently, studies have shown that some plastic bags and plastic lined cans are releasing dangerous toxins into our food.
Finally, food is NATURAL when it is not overly processed. Home cooking is the solution to healthy nutrition, good tasting food, and a lower cost of food. We spend so much time working out of the home, for someone else on a stressful job, only to use our salary to pay someone else to cook for us in the form of convenience restaurants, canned and frozen foods, packaged foods. Processing destroys several nutritional qualities of food; hence our processed food has been fortified in many ways to replace lost minerals and vitamins. Secondly, natural food is also whole food for the same reason that whole wheat bread is preferable over white bread. Finally, the notion of natural food comes back to the main technical requirement of organics: chemical-free production and processing.
These notions of organic food are strangers to no one. We view advertising every day where some multinational food corporation is proposing so-called wholesome, natural, home-cooked food that has travelling thousands of miles, was processed many times, was packaged in tins and repackaged in cartons and over packaged in bulk lots and sold through several intermediaries.
While the organic standards focus on production and processing methods to protect the environment and avoid toxic inputs, they pay little attention to marketing and distribution methods, transportation distances, and nutritional content. It is up to the organic enthusiast to minimize the distance between the consumer and the producer, to maintain the nutritional integrity of the food, and to reduce the amount of resources consumed in the production of food.
A contribution by Tom Manley
President of Homestead Organics