Organic = Safer?

One story does not a trend make, but consider this feature about how shoppers are looking to organic food and produce as a safe haven from recent FDA recalls.

From the Myrtle Beach Online story:

Helen Shuler wasn't exactly sure how she could justify paying a couple dollars extra for organic pasta or soup. Usually, the 63-year-old snowbird is on a tight budget and picks her groceries based on cost.
But Shuler estimates she spent 20 minutes on the organic and health food aisle on a shopping trip this week at Bi-Lo "to see what the organic craze was all about."
Her motivation? "I don't know what they're going to recall next," she said. "It seems like organic food might be safer."
In the past eight months, consumers have been inundated with warnings about contamination of some of their most basic foods, starting with spinach on Aug. 30

The fear of getting E. coli is what has increased business for Vicki Hunt, owner of Nature's Health in Loris.
"I've had people switch to more organic foods," she said. "But other people, now they're not eating salads and not eating greens, and that's just terrible. They're still scared of the spinach."

Later in the story....

The extensive publicity and the back-to-back timing of the contaminations could paint a misleading picture, said Jim Rushing, a Clemson University horticulture professor who works to maintain the safety of food from South Carolina's fruit-and-vegetable industry.
About 90 percent of consumers were aware of the spinach recall, according to a study by the Food Policy Institute at Rutgers University that was released in March. Of 1,200 consumers surveyed in November, a fifth said they had stopped buying bagged produce and half said the recall caused them to wash food more thoroughly.
But consumers should be no more worried about the threat of food contamination now than they were a year ago, Rushing said.
"It's important to try to keep the risk aspect into perspective," Rushing said. "I think it's important for consumers to be reminded that we have the safest and most abundant food supply of anyone in the world. We also have a better health care system, ... and we have a better way of tracking where these [contaminations] come from."

TK: I agree the U.S. has the safest and most abundant food supply in the world. But if consumers should be "no more worried than a year ago," the industry does not have that luxury.