Does New York Times food writer Mark Bittman get anything right? I doubt it. His recent commentary, “Leave Organic Out of It,” is yet another hash of uninformed opinions and misinformation.
Bittman does seem to have backed down from his rabid antagonism toward crops genetically engineered with the most modern, precise and predictable techniques. He now concedes grudgingly that they “are probably harmless” and that “the technology itself is not even a little bit nervous making.”
Bittman retreats into the deepest, darkest recesses of his parallel universe with his allusion to the “intensive and virtually unregulated use of…agricultural chemicals.” In fact, agricultural chemicals are subject to some of the most stultifying, burdensome, expansive and expensive regulation on the planet, courtesy of the relentlessly risk-averse Environmental Protection Agency. (Isn’t there an editor who reads Bittman’s copy before it’s published?)
Finally, we come to Bittman’s continuing slavish and uncritical devotion to organic agriculture: “Eating organic food is unquestionably a better option than eating nonorganic food; at this point, however, it’s a privilege” [italics in original]. That is unquestionably nothing more than silly, sentimental twaddle, especially in view of a 2012 study by researchers at Stanford University’s Center for Health Policy published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The researchers concluded that fruits and vegetables that met the criteria for “organic” were on average no more nutritious than their far cheaper conventional counterparts, nor were those foods less likely to be contaminated by pathogenic bacteria like E. coli or Salmonella. Moreover, although non-organic fruits and vegetables did have higher pesticide residues, more than 99 percent of the time the levels were below the permissible, very conservative safety limits set by federal regulators.
Read the full, original article: The New York Times Food Writer Who Is Always Out To Lunch
