Twice as many people have recently died in Europe from eating organic food than died in the Gulf of Mexico oil rig explosion and the nuclear power plant meltdown in Fukushima, Japan - combined.
If this were Monsanto doing the killing, there would be Enron levels of Congressional hearings but instead it's organic food and, gosh, it just must be better because it's, you know, organic, so few people are stating the obvious.
Namely that it's time to regulate that stuff.
It isn't easy. In science organic simply means carbon-based so all food is organic and the term alone is a head scratcher for figuring out who to regulate but government is rarely bogged down by knowing what they are talking about. Colloquially, when people say organic now they mean it is only covered in toxic pesticides found in nature and if some un-composted manure is in there, so much the better. Politicians understand that part.
Yet people insist they buy organic food because it's healthier. A multi-billion dollar industry has spent a lot of money on marketing to make people think that. It's not true, though. E. coli is a killer. If World Health Statistics results are accurate, in just the most recent two years E. coli has killed more people than the entire nuclear age - and that had nuclear bombs dropping on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
I get that some people are never going to accept science. Some religious people will deny evolution, and we don't want them dictating our science education, so why let environmental zealots toss out a hundred years of science education on how to make food safer? Would you let someone build a power plant today using 1911 technology?
Writing in RealClearScience, Mischa Popoff advocates something small farmers don't object to at all - routine, unannounced, organic field testing in lieu of pointless paperwork. Small farmers know Big Organic is a scam and no better for anyone - and obviously much worse for many - than any type of food, and that makes small farmers look bad by association.
Paperwork will not save lives. Testing will.
