Transcript of organic food safety report, ABC News 20/20, Feb. 4, 2000
September 29, 2000
How Good Is Organic Food?
20/20’s John Stossel Investigates
ANCHOR BARBARA WALTERS: Tonight, John Stossel has put aside his usual “give me a break” to bring you a surprising and important report. Do you think organic food is healthier and safer for you and your family and the planet? Millions of people do. Could all of them be wrong, John?
JOHN STOSSEL, REPORTER: Millions of people can be wrong, at least it sure seems oddly wrong to me, because many of you are spending a lot more money to buy products that may not be as good.
EXCERPT FROM ORGANIC COMMERCIAL: From the crispiest lettuce to apples and oranges bursting with flavors.
REPORTER: Organics are the runaway hit of the food business. They cost more, often much more. “But it’s worth it,” say customers because they’re just better for you.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Sooner or later, it’s got to be better for my health.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON 2: Safer, yes, safer and better, because I just really believe it’s better for the whole family.
REPORTER: And why is it healthier?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON 3: Not contaminated and not full of chemicals or hormones or anything like that.
REPORTER: That’s why organic food is such a hit. Organic farmers say they don’t use anything artificial, like pesticides. Everything must be natural. This leads some people to believe organics can do all kinds of things.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON 4: When my kids eat organic food their behavior is much better.
REPORTER: Organic food has become more than food. It’s a belief system.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON 5: I have a 10-year-old. Eventually, he will only want to eat organic produce.
REPORTER: Wow, organics must be special stuff. No wonder organic food sales are growing five times faster than sales of other foods.
DENNIS AVERY (Former Research Analyst): Unfortunately, you’ve been hoaxed.
REPORTER: Oops. Dennis Avery is a former Research Analyst for the Agriculture Department. He’s a leading critic of organic produce, which he says is more likely to be infested with nasty strains of bacteria. Why?
AVERY: It’s fertilized with manure.
REPORTER: Oh, yeah, manure. Organic produce is grown in compost made from cow manure. Fresh manure can contain a deadly bacteria which may find its way into organic produce. But people think it’s healthy.
AVERY: People have been told it’s healthier by organic farmers who have a vested interest in telling them that.
EXCERPT FROM AN ORGANIC COMMERCIAL: Everything we grow is organic. Grown with a lot of this and this, but none of that. So they always taste the way nature intended. (scenes of children and farm fields juxtaposed with helicopters spraying chemicals)
REPORTER: But, as Avery said, the problem with all this “none of that” is that not using chemicals and pesticides means there may be more of this around. But are these tiny little things really a risk to us? Well, yes. Dr. Lester Crawford was once Chief of Food Safety for the Government. Now, he runs the food and nutrition center at Georgetown University. Everything has a little bacteria, but that’s okay. We can handle that?
LESTER CRAWFORD (former Chief of Food Safety of Government): You can handle spoilage bacteria, but you can’t handle pathogens, those bacteria that cause disease in humans.
REPORTER: The Center for Disease Control say thousands of Americans die every year after eating food, mostly meat rather than produce, that contains organisms like e-coli or salmonella. And many more get sick? And they think they have the flu?
CRAWFORD: Approximately 76 million get sick each year with one of these organisms.
REPORTER: Seventy-six million, many of you who thought you had the flu were really sick from food. Some get seriously sick. When Haylee Bernstein was 3, she ate some organic lettuce that had been contaminated by cow manure. Her kidneys shut down. She spent months in a hospital, on a ventilator, until she was released with permanent damage to her sight.
BERNSTEIN (Haylee’s Mother): You’re talking a perfectly healthy, normal, you know, great kid, who just ate some lettuce.
REPORTER: But who says that there are more of these organisms in organic foods? We searched the records and found there have been no tests done that actually compare bacteria counts in organic versus normal food. So we did our own laboratory sampling.
DR. MICHAEL DOYLE (University of Georgia): We’re testing for two types of microorganisms.
REPORTER: “20/20” paid Dr. Michael Doyle of the University of Georgia to run the tests. He had students buy some of the foods from Georgia markets and we flew in some additional organics from California. Doyle’s researchers put the produce in these bags filled with liquid. A machine shakes the bags for five minutes. Then, the liquid is extracted and put here, on these discs. And then it’s left to sit for 24 hours to see if any bacteria grows.
DOYLE: And this is what it looks like after they’ve been growing. This is what it looks like before.
REPORTER: If the food contains the dangerous e-coli, tiny blue specs appear. Bad news, in our tests on 5% of the food, we found those specs. Which foods? Well broccoli, parsley and celery were generally bacteria free. But when they tested samples of sprouts and the pre-bagged pieces of lettuce called Spring Mix that’s where they found bacteria. A third of the sprouts had sewage contamination?
DOYLE: Yes. And the so-called Spring Greens were contaminated also.
REPORTER: By a small margin, more of the organic produce was contaminated than the convention stuff. But the real bad news for you organics buyers is that the average concentration of e-coli in the contaminated Spring Mix was much higher. And what about pesticides? Our tests surprisingly found no pesticide residue on the conventional samples or the organic.
AVERY: They’ve got us worrying about exactly the wrong thing. If we’ve got no deaths from pesticides and 5,000 deaths from bacteria, it’s pretty clear to me that we should be worrying now primarily about the nasty new bacteria.
REPORTER: I took our test results to Katherine DiMatteo of the Organic Trade Association, which represents organic growers and retailers. You’ve seen our research.
KATHERINE DIMATTEO (Organic Trade Association): Yes, I have.
REPORTER: Does this bother you?
DIMATTEO: No. You found more samples of some pathogen contamination in some products. It’s not a sample that would be scientifically valid.
REPORTER: But the organics were twice as likely to have e-coli and had larger amounts.
DIMATTEO: It was a snapshot sample at a given point in time, and it was only the salad mix that actually showed up twice as likely.
REPORTER: The salad mix is this stuff.
DIMATTEO: Yes, that’s correct.
REPORTER: So maybe we shouldn’t buy this.
DIMATTEO: I think the wisest thing for people to do is to wash all their products, all their produce, after they bring it home from the grocery store.
REPORTER: That’s good advice, wash it well, especially if it’s organic. But that raises another question, how do you even know if it really is organic?
DIMATTEO: The only guarantee that I would give a customer is to say buy a certified organic product.
REPORTER: How much of the organic food is certified?
DIMATTEO: I would say right now about half.
REPORTER: So the other half is, who knows what it is?
DIMATTEO: That’s correct who knows what it is.
REPORTER: The industry mostly polices itself sending inspectors to farms to make sure they don’t use chemicals and so on. The rule we should most hope they obey is the one that tells farmers, before you use manure, heat it and dry it out for 120 days. But Avery says lots of organic farmers don’t.
AVERY: They say they do all this stuff that makes it safe. They don’t. And they’re not even using thermometers. They’re out there dumping stuff in piles and guessing.
REPORTER: Shouldn’t we do a warning that says this stuff could kill you? And buying organic could kill you?
DIMATTEO: I think that, that would be impractical, unnecessary, and unfair.
REPORTER: Well, if organic produce isn’t always clean, is it at least more nutritious, as so many customers think?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON 6: I know that it has more nutrients, which is what I’m interested in getting when I eat food.
REPORTER: Is it more nutritious?
DIMATTEO: It’s as nutritious as any other product.
REPORTER: Is it more nutritious?
DIMATTEO: It is as nutritious as any other product on the market.
REPORTER: There’s a sales campaign to dream about. The organics industry admits organics are no more nutritious than other food, but the customers think it is.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON 7: I just ate lunch here. I feel strong and healthy. My kids they’re just better.
DIMATTEO: Organic agriculture is not particularly a food safety claim. That’s not what our standards are about.
REPORTER: But your customers think it’s better for you.
DIMATTEO: I don’t know that that’s true.
REPORTER: Sure it is. “20/20” did a poll on organic foods and found 45% of the public think organics are more nutritious.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON 8: There’s no question why it’s the best thing for you, because it’s the best thing for you.
REPORTER: Half the people said healthier. They’re not.
DIMATTEO: Well, I think that organic agriculture and its products are healthier for the environment.
REPORTER: For the earth?
DIMATTEO: For the earth.
REPORTER: Okay, that’s another argument. Organics are no healthier, but they’re better for the planet. All because they don’t use chemicals. But does that really mean that organics are better for the earth? Avery says no, because organic farmers waste so much land. They have to, because they lose so much of their crop to weeds and insects.
AVERY: Agriculture takes a third of the earth’s surface right now.
REPORTER: Imagine, he says, if overnight all our food supply were suddenly organic to feed today’s population. . . .
AVERY: We’d have plowed down half of the world’s land area not under ice to get organic food.
REPORTER: In fact, says Avery, it’s today’s conventional farmers, the nonorganic ones, who have performed an environment-saving miracle, by taking nitrogen from the air to make chemical fertilizer, and by using the often criticized pesticides and genetically engineered seeds. They feed more people on less land.
AVERY: Today’s modern farmer produces more food on less land and the food he produces is safer than it’s ever been. And, his reputation has been trashed all over the western world by organic farmers who claim they’re better, but offer no evidence.
REPORTER: The modern farmer using pesticides and artificial fertilizers is doing a good thing?
AVERY: A very good thing.
REPORTER: I would think people who pay more for organic food are suckers.
DIMATTEO: I think that people pay more for food all the time, because of their individual personal choices. Sometimes people will pay several dollars for a cup of coffee.
REPORTER: Or $7 a pound for garlic. And lots do it because they think it’s better for the earth or more nutritious.
AVERY: They’re all wrong. My daughter-in-law cried when I told her this information. She still won’t tell her neighbors why she doesn’t go with them to the organic store any longer. Organic food is less good for you and less good for the environment.
ANCHOR BARBARA WALTERS: John, I have to tell you, I may cry too, because I’ve been buying organic food. It is more expensive. But it isn’t dangerous?
REPORTER: No, I wouldn’t go that far. We found bacteria on only 5% of the foods, organic and nonorganic, so wash you produce. You should wash all produce but the food supply is pretty safe. The amazing part though, is that it is twice as much money or more, and it’s no better and maybe worse, yet people buy it. And you can get more information about organic food on my web page, John Stossel at abcnews.com. You can also voice your opinion, even if it’s a hostile one.
ANCHOR: Or you can send a sweet message. Maybe someone has one. Do that at abcnews.com. Now I have a message for you. We’ll be right back.
END
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