- It's expensive. You can buy 4 lbs of beautiful, huge, sweet strawberries at Costco right now for $5. Four pounds of the pesticide free costs $15.96.
- It's not as abundant. The selection is small.
- It often doesn't taste as good. When Costco switched to organic frozen corn our entire family lamented it for a year, because it simply was not as good.
- I worry about the bacteria that slip through the organic cracks. The e. coli outbreak a few years ago (in which 3 people died and 31 developed kidney failure) was traced to organic spinach.
- I am a prospective, double-blind, randomized controlled trial kind of girl. Give me some data. I don't want anecdotes, I don't want someones crazy blog or quack book. I want data telling me that going organic is worth the above mentioned hassle. And until recently, data has been seriously lacking.
Which brings me to my change of heart. This week a study was published in Pediatrics (the gold standard for pediatric literature) showing an association between the level of organophosphates in children's urine and the risk of ADHD. It wasn't a perfect study, and did not show causation (it wasn't prospective) but I think it is valid and makes some good points. (You can read more about it here or on my work blog).
Obviously, more research needs to be done, but my guess is that it is going to tell us that pesticides aren't good for us. So...I am begrudgingly becoming a Whole Foods kind of girl.
Thoughts?
