This week’s headlines: Another huge, awful outbreak of food-borne bacteria. This time the worst, so far, in modern history; perhaps 2000 sickened, and about 20 dead. At least 500 cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome.. That means liver damage—and potential death from kidney failure. More than 1000 cases of severe diarrhea. Usually it is the very young and the elderly who are most at risk of serious consequences, but this outbreak targeted young adults, mostly women.

All the known cases involved people who recently ate food in northern Germany—but scientists can’t find the source of the infections. They seldom can. The deadly bacteria appear without warning, and usually disappear before they can be traced.

At least this time we are being spared the sanctimony of the organic believers, since organic cucumbers imported from Spain were early reported as the most likely source of the infections.

People all over Europe are being warned away from eating health-protecting fruits and vegetables. Europe’s farmers are being devastated by the public’s renewed fear of eating produce at the beginning of Europe’s fresh season—and they’re demanding indemnities. The Spanish government is demanding apologies and payments for the losses suffered because Spanish farmers were accused—without undeniable proof—of sickening thousands.

In America, our response to food safety is predictable: we have a hugely expensive new Food Safety Act. We are hiring thousands more inspectors, who won’t be able to find the deadly bacteria in our food before they strike. After the people have gotten sick and/or died, many additional scientists will spend huge sums of public money failing to find the sources of the infections.

Soon, the food scare industry will be on the front pages telling us that this is the ultimate breakdown of Modern Farming, and demanding that we go back to Old McDonald’s farming methods. As they write they will know full well that the E.Coli bacteria is spread mostly through contact with infected feces. And, what do modern day Old McDonalds use for fertilizer? All food growing systems can and do harbor the bacteria, but using manure makes organic food slightly more dangerous.

All of this could have been prevented, but we refuse to use a fabulous technology that’s been known since 1904. Alarmists say it would make our foods “more dangerous.” More dangerous than liver failure? More dangerous than dead?

I’m talking—again, as I have for over 20 years—about electronic pasteurization. About streams of high-energy electronic particles basically sterilizing our ground meat and fresh produce, much as we defanged tuberculosis by pasteurizing our milk. No radioactivity. The necessary doses are so small that the food will even taste fresher—because the spoilage bacteria have been killed.

It has been approved by the World Health Organization, the American Medical Society and the medical authorities of virtually every country with a food science laboratory. But that’s not good enough for a country that resisted pasteurized milk for 40 years. It took a huge epidemic of tuberculosis to get our milk pasteurized, and an ardent group of know-nothings is still demanding the right to sicken themselves with raw, bacteria-laden dairy products

How many more must die before we protect ourselves effectively from the food-borne bacteria that have always contaminated food and always will. Preventive action is the only solution.

This is one time that being right brings me no joy.

CHURCHVILLE, VA-The Green Movement has been called “the new religion.” It surely isn’t that. Religion is a belief in a higher power than humanity. The Green movement believes nothing is more powerful than a press release from the Sierra Club or a lawsuit filed by Greenpeace.

 

The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine recently reviewed 162 scientific papers published over 50 yeas—and found that “there is currently no evidence to support the selection of organically grown foods over conventionally produced foods on the basis of nutritional superiority.” This is no surprise.

 

The first researcher to announce the health futility of organic foods was Lady Eve Balfour, one of the sainted organic pioneers. She turned her English estate into an experimental farm, to “prove” organic food was better. She finally admitted in 1977 that 30 years of testing had produced no evidence of nutritional or health differences for organic.

 

This will make no difference to the sales of organic food because organic food buyers are irrational. They think buying the most expensive foods buys longer, happier lives. No such luck. If organic were healthier, African subsistence farmers would have been outliving American housewives and stockbrokers for the past 90 years.  

 

Instead, Americans eating industrially fertilized and genetically modified crops have been outliving Somalis and Nigerians by about 30 years. We not only have ample high-yield food, but our lives are also protected by vaccines, antibiotics and sterile operating rooms.

 

There is only one known way to extend your life through eating, and that’s to eat more fruits and vegetables. The quarter of the population that eats the most fruits and vegetables has about half the cancer risk of the quarter that eats the least. The produce doesn’t have to be organic, local—or even fresh. Canned, frozen, and imported produce will serve just about as well.

 

But such knowledge isn’t nearly as powerful as superstitions like “eating organic” to avoid “depleting the topsoil.” No-till farming, with herbicides, saves far more topsoil than organic farming, but again that’s only knowledge.    

 

Greens keep telling me that humans are even powerful enough to “change the earth’s climate” Forget the sun!  During the Little Ice Age, the sun was weak and crops failed repeatedly. More than a thousand “witches” were burned to wrest control of the climate back from Satan—just in Bern, Switzerland. Wiesenstag, Germany, burned 63 women as witches in one year, 1563. Now that is superstition at work!

 

Of course, most of the “witches” were elderly widows whose husbands were no longer growing food for them. Many were mentally ill. So, maybe it was also self-serving behavior. It certainly predicted the idea of abortions as a “solution” to global warming. Even if that doesn’t stop the warming, the old planet will be a little less “crowded.” 

 

Religion in recent centuries has mostly prodded us toward treating our fellow men more humanely. The Green movement has no such lofty pretentions. If the world went all-organic, half the humans would die of starvation. Most of the remaining wildlife habitat would be plowed down to make room for more low-yield crops. That’s an even uglier outcome than we can expect from President Obama’s commitment to cut U.S. fossil fuel emissions by 80 percent. And just about as useful.

 

Excuse me now, I have to find a black cat.

 

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE, VA—It was only a matter of time before First Lady Michelle Obama sprang to the wall of the White House Organic Garden and demanded more organic food—a heartfelt campaign fully as sincere as  her husband’s ongoing demand that the affluent countries fight off man-made global warming by taxing away most of their energy. However, both the First Lady’s and the President’s campaigns share the same problem:  Both are based on politically-correct illusions.

 

Mrs. Obama’s moment came earlier this month when she invited fifth-grade students to join her at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and share an early harvest from the White House Organic Garden. The menu:  brown rice, baked chicken and fresh snapped peas. We’re sure it was delicious.

 

Mrs. Obama understandably touted the freshness of the peas—and nothing’s fresher or more local than vegetables picked from a backyard garden. Unfortunately, Mrs. Obama would have us believe that modern farming’s food is less healthful and nutritious than food grown the old-fashioned, organic way. But, then, why do Africans today, eating all-organic diets, still expire 30 years younger than their Western counterparts? Why no age adjusted increase in cancer rates, except among smokers?

 

Could it be that the health of  the First World’s offspring is enhanced, not only by modern vaccines and pharmaceuticals, but by food abundance that is protected by the same life-saving principles of chemistry applied to fending off such natural pests as potato blight, bacterial wilt, leafhoppers, and aphids?

 

Marion Burros of The New York Times sneered about a critical letter to Mrs. Obama from the Mid-America Croplife Association, defending chemicals, that “the group euphemistically called ‘crop protection products.’” Apparently Ms. Burros hasn’t spent much time with a hoe in her hand, watching the Colorado potato beetles gnaw the leaves off her potato plants and spider mites sucking the juices from her beans and raspberries.  

 

The very heart of organic farming is a refusal to use industrial fertilizer. But without nitrogen fertilizer, the planet would immediately suffer the worst famine in all history, with half of humanity dying within a year or so. We don’t have enough manure to fertilize enough food organically. Famine is a harsh recipe coming from the First Lady of a rich country.

 

Similarly, the President has said on global warming, “The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”  Fortunately for the world, not a single one of those claims is accurate.

 

• Sea levels have risen only 6 inches per century for the past 300 years—and they stopped rising in 2003.
• Any discussion of record drought should include the two century-long droughts that struck California in the 9^th and 14^th centuries. We’ve had nothing recent to match them.
• Antarctic sea ice extent has been record-large in recent years.
• The British Navy logged twice as many major, landfalling hurricanes per decade in the Caribbean during the Little Ice Age as were recorded during the “warming” of 1950-2000.
• We’ve had no “spreading famine” during the Modern Warming, just a doubling of world food prices as more corn and rapeseed were diverted from food to biofuels.

 

The global climate computer models, incredibly, have been programmed without any knowledge of the Medieval Warming, the Roman Warming and 500 previous global warmings that have arrived as part of the warming/cooling cycle every 1,500 years—thanks to the sun, cosmic rays, and low, wet clouds that deflect solar heat back into outer space.

 

The White House should double check its realities.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net