History and Concepts of food quality and safety in Organic

History and Concepts of food quality and safety in Organic

Organic agriculture is a multifaceted phenomenon in the field of agriculture and food production. On the one hand, it is a low external input production technique originating from both traditional and alternative farming practices developed in the late 19th and early 20th century and from European and

USA contexts of intensive agriculture. On the other hand, it reflects societal debates on the sustainability of agriculture, on food quality and nutritional habits and on ethical issues like animal welfare. A growing number of scientists and policy makers qualify organic agriculture as an efficient and holistic approach to reach the multiple goals of agriculture including food security, sustainable use of natural resources and the dignity of creatures (Jaber, 2000).

Organic farming is a food production method defined at great length in many international (e.g. Codex Alimentarius), supranational (e.g. EU Regulation on Organic Farming) and national (e.g. the US National Organic Program (NOP), the Japanese Agricultural Standard for Organic Products (JAS) or the Swiss Regulation on Organic Farming) standards.

In the developed world, crop production was intensified in the 19th and first half of the 20th century by the use of commercial fertilizers. Soluble phosphorus and nitrogen triggered a first increase in yield levels. The next step in the intensification of agriculture was the widespread use of insecticides, fungicides and herbicides, a practice that also made many conventional farmers feel uncomfortable. The pursuit of yield increases also took hold in livestock husbandry, leading to changes in feeding regimes, industrialized methods for keeping animals and increasing use (and misuse) of veterinary medicines (e.g. antibiotics, anthelmintics) and growth hormones. The arrival andcontinuous expansion of organic farming has to be seen against this background of continuous intensification of food production and the associated negative impact on environment and biodiversity (Stolze  et al., 2000; Stoate  et al., 2001; Pyček  et al., 2005).

Although it is perceived by the public as a rather uniform and regulated farming method, organic farming has had a range of origins and a multifaceted development until standardization started in Europe in the late 1980s. The most important of these historical food and farming concepts are described in this chapter. Although in some cases only of historical interest, these concepts reveal the background of modern organic farming and food processing and help to elucidate some of its characteristics.

Lately, the progress in organic farming has been dominated by standard setting, their harmonization and the introduction of equal certificates. These activities were driven  by (a) fears among organic farmers that organic standards and principles may be compromised by competing strategies like integrated pest management (IPM) or integrated production (IP), (b) consumers who wanted protection from deceit and (c) emerging markets (in particular supermarket chains) in search of certified quality standards. In food markets worldwide, organic foods represented the first food standards, which defined, audited and certified a specific food production process (tracking) rather than specific product properties (e.g. size or colour of vegetables) or composition of the end product (tracing). Such a process-oriented approach in quality management was necessary as organic and conventional foods were difficult to distinguish.

History of different food concepts of organic farming

One of the earliest sources of inspiration for organic farming was the concept of naturalness  of foods. It derived from different ecosocial movements of the early 20th century like the ‘naturalist’, the ‘vegetarian’ and the ‘reform’ philosophies. Of particular influence was the German  Lebensreform  movement, which became important during the time of the Weimar Republic (1919 to 1933). Deteriorations in the living conditions of people during the transition from an agrarian to an industrialised society were correlated with the ‘unnaturalness’ of the living conditions of the cities (Vogt, 2000). Back to nature was seen as an escape and alternative. Medical doctors and nutritionists

like Werner Kollath, Max Bircher-Benner or Stefan Steinmetz propagated whole food (raw vegetables and fruits, whole meal bread or muesli). In this context, the pioneers of ‘natural’ husbandry and gardening, the Germans Julius Hensel, Heinrich Bauernfeind, Ewald Könemann or the Swiss Mina Hofstetter, experimented – among other farming and gardening techniques – with different rock powders as natural fertilizers to cure the negative effects of mineral sources of nutrients (Vogt, 2000). It can be concluded that ‘natural’ husbandry was the first concept of organic farming in Europe, which developequickly from lifestyle movements in the 1920s to an alternative farming method based on the emerging soil and agricultural sciences and on practical farming and gardening experience in the 1930s.

Such idealistic ‘back to nature’ movements also developed in other parts of Europe. Almost contemporaneously, a group of British writers including Harold John Massingham, Adrian Bell and Rolf Gardiner, promoted their vision of a revitalised countryside (Moore-Colyer, 2001). Central to this vision was an agriculture based on organic principles and this movement became one of the origins of Soil Association which was founded in 1946.

The concept of the vitality of food was raised for the first time by Rudolf Steiner in his seven lectures in 1924 (Steiner, 1929). The emphasis of his lectures was less ecological or agronomical, but focused on describing his views on the deterioration of modern food quality. As part of a wider ‘holistic’ philosophy called anthroposophy which covered education, art, social theory and science, Steiner developed a spiritually based plant, animal and human nutrition theory, where the real quality of food was not linked to compounds and their metabolisms, but to the spiritual forces which are supposed to ‘bound’ to them. Many agricultural practices he introduced (e.g. biodynamic preparations, the consideration of lunar or cosmic rhythms when cultivating, sowing or harvesting) aimed to influence these spiritual forces, which were in Steiner’s thinking vital for all organisms (Endres and Schad, 1997). Subsequently, anthroposophic scientists introduced the term ‘vital quality’ (Balzer-Graf and Balzer, 1991; Bloksma  et al., 2001).

The efficacy of the specific biodynamic agronomic measures introduced by Steiner has been studied extensively over the last 75 years, but focused mainly on investigations into the way that lunar cycles and biodynamic preparations affect yield, the composition and the nutritional quality of crops. The relative efficacy of these measures is often considered to be less than that of other agricultural measures like variety choice, the intensity of organic fertilization, soil tillage and/or other permitted plant protection measures. To conclude, the improvements achieved by these specific biodynamic techniques are small, often not reproducible and therefore, from a scientific point of view, obsolete. However disenchanting the lack of activity of these specific measures might be, the overall management approach taken by biodynamic farming as a whole is a surprisingly effective and efficient one. In addition, long-term biodynamic soil management has been shown to achieve greater improvements in soil biological activity, structural stability and inherent fertility than more ‘mainstream’ organic management practices in the long-term field trial DOK where bioDynamic, Organic and conventional (in German Konventionell) plots have been compared since 1977 (Mäder et al., 2002).

Since Steiner’s aim was to improve ‘immaterial’ qualities of foods, anthroposophic scientists have developed analytical methods, which aim to visualize this kind of ‘inner’ quality. This is done by preparing watery solutions of the plant, meat or milk (= juices) which are then brought into reaction with metallic salts like copper chloride (copper chloride crystallization method) or silver nitrate (two different capillary picture methods). The quality of the pictures is either interpreted by visual evaluation or by computerized image texture analysis (Meier-Ploeger  et al., 2003). Both interpretations are reproducible and the results are often correlated with standard food analytical quality parameters (e.g. for a case study comparing organic and conventional apples, see Weibel et al., 2000). The main concept of analysing the pictures created by such methods is that crops grown under optimal biodynamic conditions should have a higher degree of ‘order’ and should be better organized and structured. However, there are currently no sound scientific data that validate and calibrate such methods against standard food composition and metabolic profiling analyses and no studies that demonstrate that consumption of food showing a greater level of ‘order’ when assessed by ‘picture forming methods’ results in improved animal or human health. Another important concept introduced by Steiner was that of ‘holism’ or ‘integrity’  of food and farming (Steiner, 1929). Steiner saw a farm as an organism with an inner structure and functionality and not purely as a business with different lines of production. He stressed greatly the common bonds between physiological processes in soils, plants and livestock. This was one reason why organs of cattle (e.g. cow horns or bovine peritoneum) played an important role in the production of biodynamic preparations which aimed to improve soil fertility and plant quality. He believed that, like an organism, a farm has to be managed as a whole unit in its full complexity and integrity.

Steiner was influenced by the theory of ‘emergent properties’ which was developed in the 19th century and which is still used today to characterize very complex systems and phenomena, in nature, physics or engineering (Fromm, 2004). An emergent property can appear when a number of simple subsystems operate as a collective and show more complex and often unexpected behaviours which cannot be explained by adding up the behavior of the single subsystems. As a consequence, biodynamic farmers are very sceptical about isolated partial interventions (e.g. phytomedical treatments) and rely very much upon preventive and long-term strategies of farm management.

The concept of self regulating and healthy systems was introduced by the English pioneer Sir Albert Howard who stated in the 1930s: ‘[E]vidence for the view that a fertile soil means healthy crops, healthy animals, and healthy human beings is rapidly accumulating. At least half of the millions spent every year in trying to protect all three from disease in every form would be unnecessary the moment our soils are restored and our population is fed on the fresh produce of fertile land’ (Howard, 1942). Lady Eve Balfour, the founder of the Soil Association in Great Britain later described the same concept: ‘The health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible’ (Balfour, 1943). To some extent this concept of a self-regulating nature dovetailed with the idealisation of nature by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Albert Howard’s words:

The crops and livestock look after themselves. Nature has never found it necessary to design the equivalent of the spraying machine and the poison spray for the control of insect and fungus pests. There is nothing in the nature of vaccines and serums for the protection of the livestock. It is true that all kinds of diseases are to be found here and there among the plants and animals of the forest, but these never assume large proportions. The principle followed is that the plants and animals can very well protect themselves even when such things as parasites are to be found in their midst. Nature’s rule in these matters is to live and let live (Howard, 1943).

 

Source: Handbook of organic food safety and quality

Edited by

Julia Cooper, Urs Niggli and Carlo Leifert

2007, W OODHEAD   PUBLISHING   LIMITED

Cambridge, England