Organic foods are fruits, vegetables, grains, and dairy products that are grown without using chemicals, like man-made pesticides and fertilizers. The food also cannot have chemicals added to it later or be exposed to radiation (food manufacturers sometimes do this to oils and other foods to keep them from going bad while they wait on store shelves to be sold). To be considered organic, plants themselves also can't be genetically altered. Organic meat comes from animals that have had no hormones or antibiotics.

People like organic foods because they consider them more pure, healthy, and tasty. With no additives there is no chance that you will be eating chemicals that you don't want in your body. The National Research Council (NRC) has found through a study that children and babies take in the pesticides from the foods they eat and the pesticides build up in their bodies. A study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that pesticides stayed on fruits and vegetables even after they'd been washed and even peeled! To protect their kids and themselves from this, many people eat only organic foods.

Organic Is Green

Many people think that growing foods organically is better for the environment. Farms that grow organic foods have no chemicals running off their land into lakes and streams. Birds that land in organic farm fields are not exposed to chemical pesticides. Butterflies and honeybees can live on or near organic farms without being killed accidentally by pesticides meant for farm pests. Even the people who work on organic farms have a healthier environment. Exposure to pesticides can make workers feel sick and over a long period of time can make someone very ill. According to the World Health Organization, three million people are poisoned every year by pesticides and 220,000 of them die. About 10 percent of the 70,000 chemicals used in the United States can cause cancer. Chemical pesticides should at least make people wonder.

Why Do They Use Chemicals?

The reason pesticides and fertilizers are used is that people think they make food easier to grow. Farmers lose less food to pests and they can add nutrients to the ground that are lost from growing crop after crop, year after year. Organic foods are more expensive to buy, partly because there are less of them available. As people ask for more and more organic foods, more will be raised and sold and hopefully over time we will find organic foods everywhere.

Frankenfoods

Everything about us from the color of our eyes and hair to our height is mapped out in our genes. It is the same in plants. The fruits and vegetables that we grow have genes too. That is what makes an apple red or green, sweet or sour, crispy or soft. Those genes can be changed if we want a special kind of trait, like sweeter taste. Farmers have been doing this for hundreds of years. Instead of letting their plants be pollinated by the bees in any way that happens, the farmer takes the pollen from a plant with sweeter fruit and uses it to pollinate the plant with better color. After a while they get the fruit they want and they use that plant over and over. A new kind of apple has been made! This is a form of genetic engineering.

Food scientists have taken this a step further by adding genes to plants in the laboratory to give them the traits they want. They can add genes that keep plants from growing moldy in the field or allow them to survive dry weather or even kill the insect pests that eat them. Scientists have also added vitamins to plants, like rice, so when people grow them they get more vitamins right in their food.

The good side of GM (genetically modified) food is that there is more food being grown, with less waste and much less pesticides used. For poor countries, where some people can only afford rice to eat, the vitamin rice is helpful.

The bad side of GM food is that people are afraid of what the genetic engineering of plants may do in the long run. They have nicknamed them “Frankenfoods” after the Frankenstein monster in the fictional story who was put together from spare parts! Will it make it harder for small farms here and in poorer countries to afford seeds? Will it change plants forever in ways that they would not have naturally done? Will it affect the people who eat them in some way we don't see yet? All these questions have made some countries ban GM foods or put strong limits on them. Some people won't eat them at all. Only time will tell if GM foods are completely safe or will be accepted by people as the next stage in food production.