How many times have you seen a recipe for a cake that called for
two cups of high-fructose corn syrup? Or been sitting at the dinner
table with your parents and asked your father to pass the
sodium-lactate?
Who has ever had a craving for Yellow #40 or partially
hydrogenated soybean oil?
The obvious answer to these rather stupid questions is at least
a partial explanation for the rise in popularity of organic foods.
Organic foods are no longer for the health-crazed lunatics; they
are now sought out by an ever-increasing margin of the general
public, including college dormitories. Domestic sales alone have
grown fantastically from $1 billion in 1990 to $12.2 billion in
2004.
In the United States, the list of ingredients on most
mass-produced foods reads like the inventory of a chemical lab,
crowded with incomprehensible 11-letter words with a
disproportionate amount of x’s and y’s. And while I am
far from being a health nut, I would at least like to eat something
that I can pronounce. What, for example, is disodium inosinate, and
why is it in my soy sauce?
There is a group on campus, the Food Systems Working Group,
whose members have asked themselves that same question, and are now
trying to do something about it. They have created a UC Sustainable
Foods campaign and are pushing to have organic food brought to the
UCLA campus and the dining halls, a concept not without precedent.
At UC Santa Cruz, 10 percent of the produce in the dining halls is
organic, and UC Berkeley has a new certified-organic salad bar
which has proved extremely popular.
That I am trying to control how much potassium benzoate I
consume is the least of the arguments as to why more organic food
is a good idea. Personally, I think that just having organic
produce is not enough and that all the food should be organic, but
four years at UCLA has conditioned me to expect progress at a
glacial pace.
To say that I much prefer organic food does not mean I live on
brussel sprouts and lean-cut turkey breast. There are organic
vegetables; there are also organic cupcakes and organic
cheeseburgers. The difference is that with organic products, you
are eating food, and with the other, you are eating food,
pesticides, insecticides, hormones and laboratory chemicals.
Outside of those who still dismiss the whole concept of organic
foods as some quack fraud, the only reason they cite for not going
organic is the cost. Organic foods often cost more because of their
labor-intensive farming methods.
But paying farmers a higher wage to go through their field and
hand-weed as opposed to spraying herbicides is not out of line.
Nutritionist Dr. Joseph Mercola explains in an article on
organic food that traditional farmers use insecticides to get rid
of insects and disease, and control weed growth by applying
synthetic herbicides. Organic farmers, on the other hand, use
slower, natural ways of dealing with the same problems, such as
crop rotation or introducing natural insect predators.
Mercola goes on to report that “the (Environmental
Protection Agency) considers 60 percent of herbicides, 90 percent
of fungicides and 30 percent of insecticides to be
carcinogenic,” and that these chemicals can cause
neurotoxicities, disrupt the endocrine system, suppress the immune
system, and disrupt reproductive functions, being linked to
miscarriages.
The literature available is abundant from nutritionists and
concerned government agencies like the EPA and FDA. No one wants to
eat a chemical that is designed to kill plants and insects.
Unfortunately, the health risks are long-term and cumulative, and
therefore easy to ignore. But I’ve decided that for me, there
is no better time than the present to start avoiding poison.
Organic food is important because it is healthier, and doubly
important for the dorms because for those students with meal plans,
this is all they have.
Hot plates are outlawed in the dorms. I once got in trouble for
having a coffee maker. The student handbook specifically says that
no cooking other than use of a microfridge unit is allowed.
If heat is a fire hazard and students are literally not
permitted to cook for themselves, then they should not be forced to
eat food sprayed with chitin synthesis inhibitors or injected with
bovine growth hormone.
Buying groceries with a meal plan is a redundant money pit. With
the money we pay this school, I can’t help but feel that
healthy food should be the norm and trash should be the option.
There certainly must be a way to have a meal plan and eat well at
the same time.
E-mail O’Bryan at jobryan@media.ucla.edu. Send general
comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.