Feeling Organic

The New York Times has had a series of articles recently that touch on one of my sore points, the idea that organic food is somehow better for you and the planet than conventional agriculture. This is problematic, because A) it simply isn't supported by the evidence and B) it replaces critical thinking about food policy.

First, from September 3rd, 2012.

"[Stanford University Scientists] concluded that fruits and vegetables labeled organic were, on average, no more nutritious than their conventional counterparts, which tend to be far less expensive. Nor were they any less likely to be contaminated by dangerous bacteria like E. coli.

The researchers also found no obvious health advantages to organic meats.

Conventional fruits and vegetables did have more pesticide residue, but the levels were almost always under the allowed safety limits, the scientists said. The Environmental Protection Agency sets the limits at levels that it says do not harm humans.

“When we began this project, we thought that there would likely be some findings that would support the superiority of organics over conventional food,” said Dr. Dena Bravata, a senior affiliate with Stanford’s Center for Health Policy and the senior author of the paper, which appears in Tuesday’s issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine. “I think we were definitely surprised."

This study prompted some self-doubt from the usual suspects I know on Facebook, but they rapidly recovered and decided that organic food wasn't about nutrition, or chemical exposure, but about sustainability and the environment.

Of course, organic agriculture is still agriculture, and used land, water, and other resources. From December 30th, 2011.

"Growers here on the Baja Peninsula, the epicenter of Mexico’s thriving new organic export sector, describe their toil amid the cactuses as “planting the beach.”...

The explosive growth in the commercial cultivation of organic tomatoes here, for example, is putting stress on the water table. In some areas, wells have run dry this year, meaning that small subsistence farmers cannot grow crops. And the organic tomatoes end up in an energy-intensive global distribution chain that takes them as far as New York and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, producing significant emissions that contribute to global warming."

And then today, Nicolas Kristof got to the heart of the matter.

"Let me introduce Bob Bansen, a high school buddy of mine who is a third-generation dairyman raising Jersey cows on lovely green pastures here in Oregon beside the Yamhill River. Bob, 53, a lanky, self-deprecating man with an easy laugh, is an example of a farmer who has figured out how to make a good living running a farm that is efficient but also has soul.

As long as I’ve known him, Bob has had names for every one of his “girls,” as he calls his cows. Walk through the pasture with him, and he’ll introduce you to them."

This is what organic is really about, not any kind of health or environmental virtue, but the belief that you can have a personal relationship with your food, and thence the land by buying organic. Milk doesn't come from a store, it comes from Farmer Bob and his happy cows. The organic label on your granola bars and cage-free eggs are link to the Jeffersonian yoeman farmer of yore.

This is utter bunk. What percentage of organic consumer actually go back to the farm? How much of what is on organic labels is faux-folksy marketing verbiage from big business? Perhaps my favorite reductio ad absurdum of the local-organic food movement was an article I saw in a magazine (that I sadly can no longer find) about a service in San Francisco that dispatches hipster farmers on fixies to take care of your urban garden if you're too busy to weed, water, and harvest it yourself for the low price of ~$30/hour.

Why does this annoy me? Food is serious business, everybody on earth depends on agriculture to survive, and the fights over organic-vs-conventional are an elitist distraction that prevents progress on real issues relating to global food justice, sustainability in the face of climate change. There's a reasonable argument to be made that the 2009 Russian drought triggered the Arab Spring, as authoritarian regimes could no longer buy off their restive populations with subsidized bread. This year's American corn crop is pretty much also a write off, with unpredictable but not good effects.

I'm not a food policy expert by any means, (for that see www.shapingsciencepolicy.com), but tangling up naturalistic values with the basic infrastructure of survival is not a winning strategy. If you really care about minute levels of pesticide exposure, get the FDA to draft new rules based on solid studies. If you think that the food pyramid is bunk, and most food is toxic junk, develop a deep base of credible experts to run a more independent USDA. Politics is slow and frustrating, full of compromises and delays, but if your not involved, it'll be left to the hucksters and the sharks and the industry representatives.

I get that people feel lost and disconnected from traditional values and from the land, but guess what. You're not a farmer, and unless you spend a significant amount of time working in the dirt, you won't be. You're just another anonymous 21st century consumption unit like the rest of us, and putting different food in your maw won't give you the values you seek. Changing the world by buying the right stuff just makes new categories for the ad men to use to divvy us up.

Innovation, but why?

Ancient peoples worshiped many gods, but modern civilization bows before a single principle: Innovation. As President Obama said in Tuesday's State of the Union address, “In America, innovation doesn't just change our lives. It is how we make our living.” He went on to use the word innovation ten more times, making it the major theme of his speech. Innovation is more than just a word, its influence can be seen in the ways that major institutions, such as business and the military, have re-organized themselves around a state of permanent innovation. In the following, I will examine two paths to this state, and its consequence for the scientific community and society at large.

Carlson traces the development of the corporate research and development lab. The first innovators were inventors, craftsmen who improved devices increment by increment. But as a systemic source of innovation, these small inventors typical of Industrial revolution were hobbled by a lack of capital, and the limitations of human knowledge. While tinkering with existing devices and principles was within the reach of many ambitious craftsmen, truly novel principles and the means to bring advanced technologies to market were out of reach.

Carlson traces the dawn of institutional innovation to the telegraph. As Western Union spread across the country, competing with local firms, railroads, financiers, and anti-trust lawyers, it became apparent that the difference between profit and extinct lay in harnessing the latest in electronics technology, usually by buying patents off of private inventors. Thomas Edison parlayed his success as an inventor into an immense private workshop, however General Electric and its chief scientist, Elihu Thompson, created the modern model of corporate R&D in 1900. Frustrated by the amount of coordination between scattered factories required to build an experimental car, he convinced the GE board to create a permanent lab conducting basic research.

At first, the purpose of the lab was purely defensive, to protect GE products from superior competitors. But as time passed, industrialists realized that new knowledge could be used offensively, to create new markets, to trade with competitors, and to improve public standing. Compared to the 'random genius' of inventors, management preferred scientific innovation because it seemed predictable and controllable. This basic pattern, with the added details of intra-industry collaboration and Federal support of risky technologies, has continued through the 21^st century, although in real terms, large R&D labs have been responsible for surprisingly few breakthroughs, with much of the most creative work coming from smaller companies, a model best demonstrated in biotech and computers, where small start-ups with one piece of very valuable IP are purchased and developed by larger conglomerates.

A second side of institutional innovation is the military, which supports up to half of the basic research conducted in America. War and technology have long been closely intertwined, as brilliant explored by William McNeill in The Pursuit of Power. Perhaps the first noteworthy institutionalization of innovation was the British shipbuilding industry circa 1900, where an “Iron Triangle” of shipyards, admirals, and hawkish liberal politicians pushed steel to its limits with ever more powerful battleships. But it was not until WW1 that innovative warfare had its first chance to shine. Innovation was applied haphazardly, in the form of machine guns, poison gas, aircraft, tanks, submarines and anti-submarine warfare, but there was little coordination between scientists and soldiers. A new weapon would make an initial splash, but quickly add to the stalemate. The war was eventually decided by a German economic collapse.

Many of the scientific institution of WW1 were dismantled in the interwar years, but WW2 was above and beyond a war won by cutting edge science. Radar, operations research, airpower, and of course the atomic bomb were all products of Allied scientific knowledge, while jet fighters and rockets rolled off of Nazi lines at the close of the war. Federally supported labs, and defense companies who sold solely to the government proliferated, too many to name. With an obvious and immediate clash between the Allies and the Soviet Union at hand, neither side disarmed their scientific apparatus. Both sides sought to avoid a qualitative defeat, or worse, technological surprise, investing ever larger sums in military R&D, and leading to the domineering “military-industrial complex” of President Eisenhower's farewell address.

For scientists, these twin processes have been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, science has obtained a great deal of funding from industrial and military sources, orders of magnitude more than the pure 'pursuit of truth'. Yet, scientists have lost their autonomy, tied either to market forces or military imperatives. Biomedicine has improved healthcare, but also exponentially increased costs. The process of introducing a new drug is more akin to marketing than science or medicine. Through the military, “Science has known sin,” to paraphrase Oppenheimer's haunting phrase. Where for a period from about 1850 to 1945, the scientist could truly claim to represent a universal humanity, working towards the ends of destruction has permanently damaged scientific prestige and credibility. The values of science are subordinated towards petty, nationalist ends.

For society, pursuit of innovation has lead to the threat of man-made extinction through nuclear war. The process of action-reaction in the arms race brings us ever closer to the brink of annihilation. From the market side, the permanent churning of the basic constituents of society has created an immense dislocation. Skills and jobs can become obsolete in less than a decade. With new-found material wealth came a crass materialism. The objects around us change constantly, their principles of operation becoming ever more opaque. The deep sense of unease pervading American society might be reasonably traced to chronic future shock. Innovation is a god, but it has become Moloch, concerned solely with profit and military might.

So, to return to the State of the Union. I've read it several times, and I feel conflicted. It's a good speech, certainly, and I agree with many of the specific policies he outlines for a continued investment in innovation, yet there is a certain hollowness to it, a failure to grapple with the crux of why we innovate. The main drive to innovate is material, the jobs of the 21^st century should be located in America, yet we don't know that innovation will bring back jobs, at best we know from the lessons of the past that a failure to innovate will mean the loss of more jobs. But the ultimate hollowness came at the end. President Obama made a deliberate callback to the space race, with the phrase “Sputnik moment,” but President Kennedy knew where we were going; the moon, in ten years.

Obama's answer to Kennedy, “I'm not sure how we'll reach that better place beyond the horizon, but I know we'll get there. I know we will.”

That's certainly true. We'll definitely make it to the future the old-fashioned way, by living it, one day at a time. But that's no guarantee that the future will be any place we want to live. Right now, all we have is a notion that America must be wealthier than China. As individuals, as a nation, and as a species, we must decide what is beyond that horizon, and we must build the institutions of governance to take us there.