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SCIENCE
A food movement makes a pest of itself
SOMEWHERE in the cornfields of Britain, a hungry insect settled on a tall green stalk and decided to have a feast. It chewed into a single kernel of corn, filled its little belly, and buzzed off-leaving behind a tiny hole that was big enough to invite a slow decay. The agent of the decomposition was a fungus known to biologists as Fusarium. Farmers have a much simpler name for it: corn ear rot.
As the mold spread inside the corn, it left behind a cancer-causing residue called fumonisin. This sequence repeated itself thousands and thousands of times until the infested corn was harvested and sold last year as Fresh and Wild Organic Maize Meal, Infinity Foods Organic Maize Meal, and several other products.
Consuming trace amounts of fumonisin is harmless, but large doses can be deadly. Last fall, the United Kingdom's Food Standards Agency detected alarming concentrations of the toxin in all six brands of organic corn meal subjected to testing-for a failure rate of 100 percent. The average level of contamination was almost 20 times higher than the safety threshold Europeans have set for fumonisin. The tainted products were immediately recalled from the food chain. In contrast, inspectors determined that 20 of the 24 non-organic corn meal products they examined were unquestionably safe to eat.
Despite this, millions of people continue to assume that organic foods are healthier than non-organic ones, presumably because they grow in pristine settings free from icky chemicals and creepy biotechnology. This has given birth to an energetic political movement. In 2002, activists in Oregon sponsored a ballot initiative that essentially would have required the state to slap biohazard labels on anything that wasn't produced in ways deemed fit by anti-biotech agitators. Voters rejected it, but the cause continues to percolate. Hawaiian legislators are giving serious thought to banning biotech crop tests in their state. In March, California's Mendocino County may outlaw biotech plantings altogether.
Beneath it all lurks the belief that organic food is somehow better for us. In one poll, two-thirds of Americans said that organic food is healthier. But they're wrong: It's no more nutritious than food fueled by industrial fertilizers, sprayed with synthetic pesticides, and...