The Ecology of Pizza
(Page 3 of 7)
June/July 2006
By Sandra Steingraber
One herbicide commonly used in wheat fields is 2,4-D, which has been linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a potentially fatal cancer. Farmers who use 2,4-D have higher rates of lymphoma than the general population, and their risk increases with the number of acres sprayed. The death rate from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in the United States is highest in the wheat-growing region of the Great Plains. A comparison of counties in Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota showed significantly higher rates of birth defects in those counties that grow more wheat. And within those counties, infants conceived in April, May or June (the time of herbicide application) have higher rates of defects than children conceived during other months.
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Large farms are leaky farms. The nitrogen from fertilizers washes into waterways and ends up in the oceans, where it creates dead zones too depleted of oxygen to sustain life. This is how our flour-buying choices affect the health of the fish at sea.
Organic farms tend to be smaller and more diverse, a combination that provides farmers an entire armory of potential tricks with which to outwit pests. Lewis Grant, for example, farms 2,500 acres in northern Colorado. He has not used pesticides since 1985, and his wheat yields are consistently within the top 10 percent in the state. He plants wheat only in fields where it has not grown for five to six years. During the off-years, he grows some combination of millet, sunflowers, lettuce, spinach, broccoli, beans and hay. This constantly shifting vegetative landscape keeps disease and pest populations in check. In addition, at the corners of his fields, he plants insectaries — beds of particular plants that serve as habitats for predatory insects. For fertilizer, Grant uses cow manure and cover crops. When the Russian wheat aphid devastated wheat crops throughout the area, yields on his farm were not affected.
Cost of conventional flour: $0.44
Cost of organic flour: $0.77
Olive oil (Olea europaea)
At least a dozen pounds of ripe olives must be squeezed to make a quart of virgin oil. But more is concentrated than just the juice of the fruit. When insecticides are used to control the olive fruit’s nemesis — the olive fly — residues remain on the fruit. Because insecticides are lipid-soluble, they find their way into the oil. When olives are pressed, concentrations of these residues can increase by a factor of three to seven.
Paco Nunez de Prado is a seventh-generation olive grower. He oversees 100,000 olive trees on four different farms in Spain, as well as an olive oil mill and bottling plant. And he does it all organically. To control olive flies, he uses bait infused with sexual attractants. The males are trapped; the females, he supposes, “die of loneliness.” And because the pruned leaves and branches are free of pesticides, he can mix them with the residue left after pressing to make his own fertilizer.
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