Organic standards deliver on food quality, bolstering further values from local sourcing, worker fairness and humane treatment

This week’s New York Times story disclosing that the plants linked to salmonella-tainted peanut products had also been approved to process certified organic peanuts has raised lots of questions. It touched on the huge package of perceived values that many farmers seek and that many consumers unconsciously—and some consciously—expect with the USDA organic seal. Much of what happens to organic food is covered in current regulations, but some good things are not part of those requirements, such as a labor standard for farmworkers.

What is done well on organic farms has to be protected throughout the audited chain of custody that is part of the organic certification process—a level of scrutiny that is not required of non-organic products. Non-certified farms and processors, local or distant, each decide their level of transparency in response to consumer questions about what is required of organic entities.

Organic food production systems create conditions that allow for safe and pure food to be harvested, but that same high quality must be maintained through processing to deliver the farm’s achievement to the consumer. Every additional step requires the same high commitment to quality with the capability to deliver it consistently.

Problem magnified in factories: Contamination at a processing plant is unacceptable, and everybody involved should change whatever needs to be changed to detect it, stop it and report it quickly. Problems at such a plant are magnified because a lot of product can be exposed to the same small source of contamination, and product from multiple sources can be commingled, allowing a little contamination to go a long way, as in the E. coli 0157:H7 spinach incident).

At the Peanut Corporation of America, lots of things went wrong from the standpoint of fundamental common sense, elemental food safety and timely reporting to a responsible adult with the power to stop the madness. Plant food-safety protocol, such as it was, failed to produce a healthy product; company executives covered up that failure and, reportedly, willfully distributed suspect product; and, it seems, an organic certifier sat on information from an inspector that may have helped to expose what was going wrong, had it been reported in a timely fashion.

Jeff Moyer is farm manager at the Rodale Institute and is 2009 chair of the USDA’s National Organic Standards Board. He’s spent decades growing, handling and marketing organic crops for livestock and human consumption, and learning how to improve the quality of the final product at every step of the way. He had these thoughts on food safety and other quality assurances that organic food customers find of interest. 

• Not being perfect is not the same being “at risk.” Realizing that organic food is not magically protected from pathogens should not be an alarming discovery. All other things being equal, organic sourcing brings to market highly-traceable, high-quality food being raised in a way that reduces human health risks from agricultural chemicals.

  Anything we take into our bodies carries some risk, because we live in a world of incredibly complex biological interactions. Information we read and observe helps us assess that risk, but efforts to make food totally “safe” by making it dead give us food without vitality. Irradiating at-risk food rather than improving production and processing is only a bandage for a dysfunctional and unsustainable system. Further, seeking sterile food environments (in fields cleared of buffer strips to remove all wildlife or in food itself) creates other problems because it tends to compromise essential biodiversity needed for holistic pest management on the farm and human immune function within our bodies 

  The organic system eliminates and reduces many known risks that the non-organic system doesn’t approach. It is based on what creates more life on the farm and what creates higher quality in food products.

• All farm production and processing is “local” to someone, so just being close isn’t an automatic food-safety protection. Local food is a good thing because it can be fresher, you can ask questions to the extent of your understanding, and you can see how things are grown and processed. You can influence the people you relate to, and decide to not consume what you find questionable. Anything that goes wrong is limited and traceable in its potential impact because of a transparent link between farmer and consumer, or via a local processor/handler receiving product from a known, limited set of sources.

  All those benefits rely on shared understandings of what constitutes human health, wholeness and agricultural success, as well as acceptable means to achieve them. In the absence of organic standards specifically applied to a given farm or processor under annual review, there’s more to find out and less that one can take for granted.

• Humane treatment is receiving organic attention. While the USDA’s rule does not specifically set out to govern humane treatment, its standards already have feed and housing regulations based on the requirement that livestock be allowed to exhibit natural behaviors. Aspects of this include space requirements, ability to express herding (cattle) and flying (poultry) instincts, as well as the recently published rules that require specified amounts of pasture access and dry-matter intake from pasture.

  Moyer reports that the NOSB is working on a more-detailed animal welfare guidance document that may be submitted to the NOP by November. The process requires the NOP to then issue its own document, subject it to public comment, then issue final language that becomes part of the National Rule, which governs what farmers must do to be in compliance. At present, consumers can ask any meat supplier for humane certification from animal welfare groups (Animal Welfare Approved  is a family-farmed sustainable humane label). The Food Alliance also includes a humane standard in its overall voluntary certification process—as well as a standard on safe and fair working conditions (next item).

• Fair labor requirements are not a part of the organic standard. Moyer says consumers expecting organic food to carry the assurance of fair labor conditions will need to look beyond the NOP to a second label. Scientific Certification Systems’ “Certified Fair Labor Practices”   covers U.S. farms, and Trans Fair USA  works with overseas farms importing products into the U.S. There are also some local and regional efforts in this direction. ~ Greg Bowman