I often receive criticism from people about suggesting organic food as being an important factor in nutrition. I get it. A tomato is a tomato, how could they be much different?
I'd like to ask you to try something. Taste a conventional tomato from a chain store first, and then taste a locally grown, organic, heirloom tomato directly afterwards. The difference will be night and day. Why? Let's explore!
Conventional tomatoes have often been modified or bred for size, uniformity and durability so they look nice on the shelves, and more importantly survive the trip to the store. Also, commercial farms grow the same crop in the same spot year after year, depleting nutrients and minerals from the soil.
Therefore, petroleum based fertilizers are used to replenish what is known as the N-P-K, or nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous. Unfortunately any other micronutrients or minerals are often overlooked, since the plants will grow with N-P-K alone. Being made from petroleum, these fertilizers acidify and destroy the soil health, leading to salt runoff, toxic algae blooms and dead zones of pollution. Poor soil health means that the levels of beneficial bacteria and fungi that would dissolve minerals to trade in turn for the plants sugars aren't present, resulting in even less nutrient density. The technical term for this is mycorrhiza. These fungi are effectively utilized by organic farmers to increase yields and plant health.
In the wild, plants are fertilized by decayed leaf matter and animal waste. By simulating how nature works, Organic farming actually builds up nutrients and minerals in the soil year after year. Eventually leading to an improved ecosystem with healthy soil, organic farming has been shown to actually sequester up to 26 times the amount of carbon compared to a conventional farm. Organic farming even combats climate change!
Then we have pesticides. Conventional farms are the largest consumer of glyphosate, or Roundup in the world, among numerous other petrol-chemicals.
What most people haven't heard is that Roundup is one half of the chemical concoction that makes up Agent Orange, manufactured by the same company, Monsanto. For those of you who don't know, Agent Orange is a chemical pesticide the United States used in Vietnam during Operation Ranch Hand as an attempt at destroying enemy food sources. This deadly compound has caused thousands of deformed births and other health problems occurring in that area to this day. You wouldn't know that from the public relations work that Monsanto has been doing as of late, though unfortunately. Agrochemicals are a multibillion dollar business and they want to maintain those figures at all cost.
Dicamba is another pesticide that was about to be restricted by the EPA in 2016 for causing neurological disorders in farm workers and learning disabilities in children, but at the last second the decision was reversed likely due to change of administration and backdoor lobbying by chemical companies.
Genetically Modified Organisms are another hot button topic that I've never heard argued well. The biotech industry explains it as taking a "harmless gene" and inserting it into an organism. I've done this procedure in college, albeit in a more simplified manner. The process involved making a petri dish of e. Coli accept a gene from bioluminescent algae by cracking cell walls using hot and cold contrast. Sounds innocent enough, right? In fact, what is being done in the biotech industry is to take a gene from a bacteria that is resistant to damage from pesticides, and insert it into a crop, commonly corn. While is doesn't seem to be an issue, it results in the ability to completely douse those crops in aforementioned pesticides with little effect on the plant. Humans on the other hand are not genetically modified (yet), or impervious to hazardous chemicals. This high doseage of pesticides has been linked to skin cancer and higher rates of autism by Johns Hopkins University. This has also been theorized to be the source of an increase in peanut, wheat and soy allergies in the general population and may well play a role in leaky gut syndrome which can also relate to autoimmune disease. Leaky gut syndrome is caused by allergenic substances opening up the tight junctions in the intestines. When those tight junctions continue to be opened, it can allow fecal matter to leak back into the blood stream which in turn gets cleaned up by white blood cells. Those white blood cells might then see some cells in say the knee for example, and recognize them as being similar enough that they need to go destroy them too. There you have arthritis. There is a possibility that they could attack any other tissue in the body, causing many symptoms and diseases almost too numerous to count.
Aside from that, all biological factors play a part in making up the whole. If one gene is perverted, I would be willing to bet that in the next 20 years we're going to find some unintended side effects. It's akin to how doctors were encouraging people to smoke during the 1950s. Nothing happened in the short term, so the long term was overlooked.
I've heard arguments that organic farms are able to use pesticides too. Organic literally refers to compounds which contain carbon atoms, meaning that they decay over time. There's a big difference between spraying a plant with neem oil, or 2-[(phosphonomethyl)amino]acetic acid (Roundup). Neem oil on one hand, our biology has dealt with for thousands of years and decays rapidly. These artificially produced chemicals have no biological precedents and remain unchanged in the soil for over 20 years. For example, gardeners have to be careful about buying cow manure for fertilizer. Manure coming from cows that have eaten weeds sprayed with pesticides can, and has destroyed entire gardens due to the pesticide surviving through a cows digestive system (which contains not one, but 4 different stomachs, by the way).
To quote Jane Goodall, famous British primatologist, ethologist and anthropologist:
"Someday we shall look back on this dark era of agriculture and shake our heads. How could we have ever believed that it was a good idea to grow our food with poisons?"
I wholeheartedly agree.