NY Times Exposes "Anti-Organic" Propagandist Dennis Avery
February 17, 1999 The New York Times

EATING WELL
Anti-Organic, and Flawed

By MARIAN BURROS

Dennis T. Avery wants organic food to go
away. And he doesn't
care what it takes. Four years ago, he said
that organic food
could not feed the world without destroying the
environment. Now, he
says it's lethal.

In an article in the fall issue of American
Outlook magazine, published
by his employer, the Hudson Institute, a
conservative research group,
Avery wrote, "Organic foods have clearly become
the deadliest food
choice." This is the case, he said, because
organic farms use animal
manure and do not use chemicals or permit
pasteurization. The last
assertion is untrue, as were several other
statements in the article.

The accusation might have gone unnoticed, but
excerpts from the article
were published in The Wall Street Journal and
continue to be picked up
around the country, by The Associated Press, The
Tampa Tribune and
trade industry publications.

The simplest definition of "organic" is food grown
without hormones,
pesticides or synthetic fertilizers. Avery,
however, used the terms
"organic," "free-range," "natural" and
"unpasteurized" interchangeably.

"I grant you that I've mixed together natural and
organic," Avery, the
author of "Saving the Planet With Pesticides and
Plastic" (Hudson
Institute, 1995), said in an interview last week.
"But to me they are
distinctions without significant difference in
terms of public health."

His most combative accusation is based, he said,
on 1996 data
compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, showing
that "people who eat organic and 'natural' foods
are eight times as likely
as the rest of the population to be attacked by a
deadly new strain of E.
coli bacteria (O157:H7)."

Yet some of the foods that caused the outbreak,
which he called
organic, were not, like unpasteurized Odwalla
apple juice.

Avery's claim that "consumers of organic food are
also more likely to
be attacked by a relatively new, more virulent
strain of the infamous
salmonella bacteria" was based on a Consumers
Union study in 1998
showing that "premium" chickens had higher levels
of salmonella than
regular supermarket chickens. But the premium
chickens were not
organic.

In the article, Avery took the Food and Drug
Administration to task for
failing "to issue any warnings to consumers about
the higher levels of
natural toxins their researchers regularly find in
organic foods." In the
interview, he said that that assertion was based
on a statement by Dr.
Robert Lake, an official in the agency's Center
for Food Safety and
Nutrition.

Lake denied making such a statement, saying, "We
don't go out of our
way to sample organic food, and hence I don't
think we are in a
position to say anything one way or another about
it."

Avery wrote that because "organic farmers use
animal manure as the
major source of fertilizer," there are higher
levels of harmful bacteria in
organic food. Katherine DiMatteo, the executive
director of the
Organic Trade Association, said that manure is not
the major source of
fertilizer on organic farms (it is also used in
conventional farming) and
that, when it is used, certain rules must be
followed for safety.

Avery said he had never "bothered that much about
consumer safety
aspects of organic food until O157:H7." His real
goal, he said, is to
prevent organic agriculture from becoming the
norm. "My big concern is
that we do not have room on the planet to feed
ourselves organically,"
he said.

The attack on organic food by a well-financed
research organization
suggests that, even though organic food accounts
for only 1 percent of
food sales in the country, the conventional food
industry is worried.