Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives

by Michael Specter

  Perhaps that should surprise no one, since the fear of a common disease like autism will almost always outrank a fear about something like measles that people no longer take seriously. “Most parents I know will take measles over autism,” J. B. Handley said not long ago when asked, for perhaps the thousandth time, why he persists in opposing the MMR vaccine. Handley is founder of Generation Rescue, an organization of parents who remain strongly committed to the idea that vaccines cause autism. Is that really a choice we are prepared to let him make? By choosing not to vaccinate their children, parents are not protecting them from autism—as so many epidemiological studies have demonstrated. They are simply putting their children—and the children of their neighbors—at greater risk of contracting diseases that could send them to the hospital or worse. How many American children will have to die in order to make the point that vaccinations are vital? How far will we descend into denialism before the fear of disease once again overshadows the fear of vaccines?

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  The Organic Fetish

  It would be hard to argue with Dostoyevsky’s assertion that a society’s level of civilization can best be judged from its prisons. If you want to talk about aspirations, however, a supermarket might be a better place to look—and in America today that supermarket would have to be Whole Foods. It is no longer necessary to hunt for a small co-op if you want to buy organic peanut butter or grass-fed beef, of course. Thousands of stores offer organic and “natural” products, and sales are growing at several times the rate of more conventional fare, even in the midst of a recession. In 2008, that amounted to nearly $23 billion in the United States alone. Even places like Wal-Mart and Costco have heard the message; they have become the biggest organic distributors of all. But as an emblem of the nation’s growing fixation on all that is natural, nothing quite compares to Whole Foods.

  To saunter down its aisles is to wade into a world of butter lettuce, chard, black radish, winter squash, and several types of arugula. The origin of nearly every product is on display, the better to assess its carbon footprint, the burden it places on the environment, and the likelihood that the food is fresh. Signs at the meat counter promise animals raised without hormone injections or antibiotics and nourished only by vegetables. Whole Foods adheres to the “Organic Rule,” which, according to one of the store’s many informational brochures, Organics and you, is principally about integrity.

  Traditional grocery stores rarely made much of a fuss about their philosophies, but Whole Foods isn’t just about food, it’s about living a particular kind of life, an approach the company sums up nicely in the Whole Foods Credo: “Eat seasonally grown food, reduce the distances from farm to plate, shrink one’s carbon footprint, promote sensitivity and a ‘shared fate.’ ” (Eating locally produced food has become such a phenomenon that in 2007 the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary selected “locavore” as their word of the year.) The credo is not unusual. Organic products nearly always come with claims of ethical superiority. Nature’s Path, for instance, points out on its cereal boxes that traditional desires for profit and brand leadership would never “amount to a hill of beans if we don’t choose sustainable, environmentally responsible processes that will leave the world better than we found it.”

  Calls for sustainability are no longer sales pitches or countercultural affectations; they have become a governing mantra of the progressive mind. “If you are concerned about your welfare, or your children’s health, about the way animals are treated,” Peter Melchett, the policy director of the British Soil Association, said, “or if you are concerned about the welfare of farmers or the future of this planet, you should buy organic food.” Lord Melchett is one of the Western world’s best-known and most outspoken believers that organic food, deployed properly, could feed humanity.

  I enjoy shopping at Whole Foods. The products, while so costly that the chain’s most frequently used nickname is “Whole Paycheck,” are good and usually fresh. The colors are pleasing, the aisles roomy, and customers you find there seem more animated than at any other grocery store. I once stood at the entrance to the store at New York’s Time Warner Center and asked fifty people why they were willing to spend extra cash—sometimes twice the cost of more traditional fare—to buy organic produce. Most said they thought organic food, which is grown without the use of synthetic pesticides or genetically engineered ingredients, tasted better, and many believed it would improve their health; still others hoped that a wider reliance on organic food might contribute to a better fate for the earth.

  Americans seem to be thinking about their nutritional choices in a way that they never have before, and who can blame them? Our most significant health problems are diseases of indolence and obesity. We eat the wrong things. And we eat too much of them. America’s top food group, measured by caloric consumption, is “sweets,” and a dollar spent on junk food will buy many more calories than one spent on fruits or vegetables. Processed foods and mindless consumption have long been the twin pillars of our culinary experience.

  “What kind of society kills itself by eating?” a woman asked me one day while shopping at Whole Foods. “We are not only ruining ourselves, we are ruining the land. How much of this planet do we have to plow under before we stop and realize we can live on the earth without destroying it? This is a moral issue as much as it is any other kind.” That is a noble sentiment, expressed frequently within the organic movement, and it reflects a clear mission: to cultivate and eat what is wholesome and natural and to cleanse the world of its heavy reliance on synthetic, genetically manipulated, and chemically treated foods. While nowhere near as rabid on the subject as Europeans, who continue to confront transgenic crops with animosity and even violence, surveys demonstrate repeatedly that Americans consider organic foods far healthier than any product of biotechnology.

  There’s a lot to be said for buying locally grown produce: it can help sustain community farmers and focus attention on the quality of the environment. It tastes better, too. But is organic food healthier for you than food that contains genetically engineered ingredients or that has been harvested by robot-guided combines instead of human hands? Is it more likely to sustain the planet or the majority of its inhabitants? And are organic fertilizers and pesticides clearly a more virtuous and earth-friendly choice for the consumer than those made of synthetic chemicals? There are no short answers to those questions (at least none that are true). But there has certainly never been a study that would suggest the answer to any of them is a simple yes. There is no evidence, for example, that a single person has died or become seriously ill as a result of the accumulated residue of pesticides in their food. The same cannot be said of the toxins contained in “natural” food—as any number of salmonella outbreaks or raw milk poisonings in the United States continually demonstrate. In 2009, after salmonella and listeria contamination sent dozens of people to hospitals in six states, the Food and Drug Administration even warned Americans to avoid raw alfalfa sprouts—perhaps the signature food of a healthy, organic lifestyle.

  “People buy many things when they buy organic food,” Marion Nestle told me one day as we poked around one of Whole Food’s newest and largest stores, the 69,000-square-foot colossus in the TriBeCa section of lower Manhattan. “One thing they believe they are buying is a nutritionally superior product. The entire organic industry is desperate to show that it has more nutrient content than conventional food. There may be more nutrients in some organic products, but so what? We get all the nutrients we need. In this country that is not our problem. Calories and diabetes and sugar. That’s our problem.”

  Nestle, the author of Food Politics and What to Eat, and for many years a professor of nutrition at New York University, has been relentless in calling attention to false and confusing claims made by food companies (and permitted by the federal government). She is also a fan of organic food. “Buying what is grown with care is never wrong,” she said. “But we have to pay attention to the differences between health
claims and marketing ploys, and a lot of those labels”—she waved vaguely at the supermarket shelves around us—“purposefully confuse the two.”

  I had asked Nestle to join me in a quest to find one completely natural product for sale on the shelves of Whole Foods: something unaltered from what it would have been had we found it in its wild state. Americans often act as if the world around them was pristine until corporations began to defile it. Small-scale farming is an expression of that belief—an attempt to step away from the vast agricultural conglomerates that churn out Brussels sprouts and broccoli by the ton, as if they were auto parts or computer chips. There is, however, almost no such thing as natural food for sale in American grocery stores. Even spring water is processed (and, obviously, bottled). Salt is usually iodized. Fruit needs to be refrigerated or it will rot. Are organically grown carrots and celery, cut conveniently into snack-sized strips, wrapped in plastic and resting on a bed of Styrofoam, natural? “The first third of the store is fine,” Nestle said, referring to the fresh vegetables, meat, and fish. Most had been refrigerated and trucked in from great distances—often at environmental costs that are difficult to calculate. But still, these foods contained no additives. Then she cast her gaze across the long rows of potato chips, artisan sugars, and high-end crackers. “That, they should get rid of,” she said. “It’s junk food.”

  Nestle reached for a box of organic instant oatmeal with Hemp Plus, which was fortified by omega-3 fatty acids. The consumer information on the back pointed out that the hemp contained neither marijuana nor any psychoactive drug. If the drug-free status of the cereal wasn’t enough to entice consumers, the label also noted that both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington farmed it extensively.

  “And of course they are pushing the omega-3s,” Nestle said. “Omega-3 fatty acids are among the hottest ingredients right now.” When eaten in trout, salmon, and other fish, omega-3s have been shown to lower the risk of heart attacks. But not all fatty acids are created equal; in cereal it is hard to know which omegas, if any, you are getting and whether they will be digested and absorbed properly by the cells they are supposed to protect. “Cereal is not a fish,” she said. “And this is just another way to market a bunch of calories.”

  Organics still only account for a sliver of American food products, less than 5 percent, but that sliver is growing rapidly. Most of the crops in the United States, however, including 90 percent of the enormous soybean crop and more than three-quarters of the corn, are products of biotechnology. In 2008, 62.5 million hectares of genetically engineered food were planted in the U.S. In the rest of the world, the figure is growing by about 10 percent a year. To many inhabitants of the rich countries of the West, this suggests that we have become too reliant on technology for our food, that somehow the cold and soulless hand of science has been placed in nature’s way. That’s where the Whole Foods Credo comes in. “A shared fate” would require a sensible effort to keep destructive growth in check, and to find harmony in a world that is rapidly becoming depleted.

  It would be hard to question the judgment of people who have no desire to eat hormone-infused meat or foods that have been processed and glued together by little more than a variety of sugars and fat. One has to wonder though, about that idea, so commonly espoused by environmental organizations like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Organic Consumers Association, of a shared sense of fate. Exactly whose fate do these people think we are sharing? If it is the other billion or so residents of the rich world—the relatively few who can afford to shop at greenmarkets, eat tomatoes that still cling to the vine, and would rather dine at a restaurant that has been cited by the local health department for rodent infestations than at one that serves food trucked in from an industrial farm—then sure, our fate is shared. I have seen how most American chickens spend their lives, and nobody should help inflict that kind of misery on any living creature by buying battery-raised poultry or eggs.

  It doesn’t take a visionary, however, to understand that the other five billion or so residents of this world, more than half of whom live on less than two dollars a day, can’t afford organic products, and lack the land it would take to grow them. Farmers in developing countries often see their crops rot in the fields long before they can be eaten or rushed across rutted dirt roads to markets many hours away. To those people, the Western cult of organic food is nothing more than a glorious fetish of the rich world—one with the power to kill them.

  IT’S HARD to find anything positive to say about Thomas Malthus. After all, his dour view of the world has consistently been proven wrong. In 1798, he argued that the earth’s population was rising exponentially and the food supply necessary to feed it was not. He famously promised “famine . . . the last, the most dreadful resource of nature.” It took another 125 years for the world’s population to double, but only fifty more for it to double again. Somehow, though, the food supply remained adequate. Mass starvation has often seemed inevitable, yet it has almost always been averted. Why is that? How could Malthus, not to mention the many apostles of doom who followed, have been so wrong? The answer is simple: science and technology have repeatedly saved humanity.

  Over the past two hundred years there has been a progression of technological leaps that Malthus could never have imagined. The astonishing advances in human welfare, and in our ability to address poverty, have largely been the result of the discovery of effective antibiotics and vaccines for more than a dozen deadly diseases. But steam power, steel plows, and agricultural success were no less essential. We simply get far more out of every crop than seemed possible when Malthus was alive. The result has been one of the modern world’s greatest achievements: good food for billions of people at prices that got lower every year.

  By 1940, however, that system was beginning to fail in many countries: Mexico, China, India, and Russia all seemed on the verge of famine. Even parts of Europe were threatened. Once again, experts braced themselves for the worst. “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now,” Paul Ehrlich wrote in The Population Bomb, which was published in 1968. “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971.” He also insisted that “India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.” Once again, technology—and human imagination—interceded (as it has for hundreds of thousands of years, at least since some distant ancestor turned a stone into an ax). Between 1960 and 1985—during which time Erlich published his book and the Club of Rome issued The Limits to Growth, its modern echo of Malthus’s grim assessment—food production in most of the world’s poorest countries more than doubled.

  The revolution began as a single experiment by one man, Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist, who while working in Mexico had spent years crossing the local wheat with Japanese dwarf varieties to produce plants that could respond better to irrigation and benefit more consistently from fertilizer. That approach was quickly applied to corn, beans, and rice, and the results could soon be seen planted across hundreds of millions of acres throughout Latin America and Asia. The impact is still hard to believe: despite a 300 percent increase in the population of the earth since the end of the Second World War, by far the fastest such growth spurt in human history, available calories per capita have risen by nearly 25 percent. India not only survived the 1960s (with help from the United States) but has since seen its population double, its wheat production triple, and its economy grow ninefold. India has also become one of the world’s biggest rice exporters. The lives of billions of people have been transformed.

  All technological advances have costs. Many are painful and most are unanticipated. The Green Revolution was no exception. With little thought devoted to land management and driven by an almost limitless reliance on water, the environmental impact has been staggering. For decades, India and China have been digging wells and damming rivers from one end of Asia to the other. The d
ams have displaced millions. Wells have liberated a generation of farmers from their dependence on rain, but clean water doesn’t flow forever. As the population grows, particularly in the world’s two most populous countries, the freshwater dwindles, and that leaves people with just one choice: dig. Drill too deep, though, and saltwater and arsenic can begin to seep into the ground, and when that happens nothing will grow on that land again.

  For the first time since 1960, we are in a race to see whether the planet can provide enough food to feed its inhabitants. There are really only two ways to increase the amount of food a country can produce. Either you coax greater yield out of land already devoted to farming, or you find extra space to grow more. Historically, agriculture has alternated between the two strategies; for the past century, however, there has been a lot of both. Today, crops are grown on nearly 40 percent of the earth’s land, and it takes 70 percent of our water to do it. Farming is, by its nature, an assault on the earth. Tilling, plowing, reaping, and sowing are not environmentally benign activities and they never were. Moreover, it has been estimated that pests, viruses, and fungi reduce agricultural productivity throughout the world by more than a third. You can’t turn a crop into edible food without killing pests. And you can’t kill them without poison—whether man-made or natural.

  There is only so much war you can wage on your environment, however, and we have just about reached our limit. Physical expansion is no longer a meaningful option because we have run out of arable land. Three-fourths of the farmland in sub-Saharan Africa, where a third of the population suffers from chronic hunger, has become nutritionally useless, and more than 40 percent of the African continent suffers from desertification. “Globally, we’re losing soil at a rate twenty times faster than it is formed,” writes David R. Montgomery, a professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington and author of the 2007 book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. Montgomery estimates that farming is responsible for eroding as much as 1 percent of the earth’s topsoil every year. If that doesn’t change we could literally run out of soil within a century.