"To Heck With The Organic Concept..."

Last week I listened to a podcast featuring a man named Bruce Tainio. He had an intreguing talk about microbial soil health but what he said at the end really got my attention as a consumer of virtually only organic foods.  

“We need to develop a concentrated program of nutritional balance in agriculture. To heck with the organic concept because the only thing it ensures is freedom from chemicals – maybe. As the government got in to this, as we get deeper into this organic thing and more people got in to it, I see more violations of this no chemical thing going on, yet the inspectors are not adequately picking it up. So are we going to have a safe mental image of that organic certification in the future? We've got to come up with something. Now organic doesn't mean it's nutritionally balanced. I did lots of testing getting lots of produce from the same farm - carrots, lettuce, whatever – over here they're producing non-organic stuff putting fertilizer to it. Nutritional analysis showed every case – not one exception – nutritional balance was better in the conventional than the organic because they didn't know how to stay within the regulations and how to supplement their soils in the correct matter to raise organic food. And I see this time and time again. So I play the middle of the road thing. Hey guys, don't convince me your organic's better until we get a nutritional analysis off of it, then we'll tell you whether it's better or not.”

“In this world, ¾ of the world's population goes to bed hungry every night. Three-quarters. One-third of the population, including the United States, have one assurance – we can eat ourselves to death. One-third of the population can do that, of the world. And why do we eat ourselves to death? Because of nutritional imbalance. Why are we consuming so much food? Because of nutritional imbalance. When we balance nutrition with microbes in the intestinal system of rabbits the rabbit eats 30% less food, digests it more efficiently, the rabbit gains more weight on young bunnies where you want them to gain weight. So what is this telling us? We need to pay attention to these details in our programs and not say, “Oh, we're organic.” I choose to eat organic because it's a little bit more assurance that I'm not going to eat pesticides. Only a little bit. That is getting less and less and less, sure, as this program gets bigger and bigger and bigger. I walk into situations and fields which I know that chemicals are being used and yet the certifications are still for organic. And lots of them.” - Bruce Tainio: The Acres USA Podcast, Episode 70

This morning I looked Bruce Tainio up on the 'net and discovered that he had died the last day of December in 2009. I thought the podcast was new (and maybe it was in that it was newly released from the archives of Acres USA), so am scared to know just how subverted out food has become in the intervening 16 years since Tainio died. Bill Gates is certainly doing his part. I know nothing of his company, Tainio Biologicals, Inc, which is alive and well today but Bruce was certainly ahead of his time in identifying and addressing core issues with our food.