BOULDER, CO — November 17, 2009 — Genetically engineered (GE) corn, soybeans and cotton have increased use of weed-killing herbicides — a type of pesticide — by 383 million pounds in the U.S. from 1996 to 2008, according to a new Organic Center report titled “Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use in the United States: The First Thirteen Years” announced today by The Organic Center (TOC), the Union for Concerned Scientists (UCS) and the Center for Food Safety (CFS). In addition, GE corn and cotton have reduced insecticide use by 64 million pounds, resulting in an overall increase of 318 million pounds of pesticides over the first 13 years of commercial use.

Based upon data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), report author Dr. Charles Benbrook presents compelling evidence linking the increase in pesticide use on GE, “herbicide-tolerant” (HT) crops to the emergence and spread of herbicide-resistant weeds. This report comes at a time when farmers are increasingly critical of GE crops because of drastically rising biotech seed prices and increasingly resistant weeds.

The agricultural biotechnology industry claims that the much higher costs of GE seeds are justified by multiple benefits to farmers, including decreased spending on pesticides. The price of GE seeds has risen precipitously in recent years, and the need to make additional herbicide applications in an effort to keep up with resistant weeds is also increasing cash production costs. As an example, corn farmers planting “SmartStax” hybrids in 2010 will spend around US$124 per acre for seed, almost three times the cost of conventional corn seed. In addition, new-generation “Roundup Ready” (RR) 2 soybean seed, to be introduced on a widespread basis next year, will cost 42 percent more than the original RR seeds they are displacing.

“The drastic increase in pesticide use with genetically engineered crops is due primarily to the rapid emergence of weeds resistant to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide,” said Dr. Charles Benbrook, report author and chief scientist of The Organic Center. “With glyphosate-resistant weeds now infesting millions of acres, farmers face rising costs coupled with sometimes major yield losses, and the environmental impact of weed management systems will surely rise.”

Today’s report refutes industry’s assertions that its crops have reduced pesticide use. Last April, UCS released a report ( http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/science_and_impacts/science/failure-to-yield.html) that found engineered crops have largely failed to increase crop yields, despite the industry’s consistent claims to the contrary. “Dr. Benbrook’s work shows that the overall chemical footprint of today’s engineered crops is massive and growing,” said Dr. Margaret Mellon, food and environment program director for the Union of Concerned Scientists. “That growth in pesticide use has important implications for farmers’ bottom lines, public health and the health of the environment.”

“This report confirms what we’ve been saying for years,” said Bill Freese, science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety. “The most common type of genetically engineered crops promotes increased use of pesticides, an epidemic of resistant weeds, and more chemical residues in our foods. This may be profitable for the biotech/pesticide companies, but it’s bad news for farmers, human health and the environment.”

Industry claims that GE crops are benefitting the environment ignore the impacts of the 300+ million additional pounds of pesticides required over the period covered by this study, as well as growing reliance by farmers on high-risk herbicides including 2,4-D and paraquat. In addition to the environmental harm, a report ( http://www.organic-center.org/science.healthy.php?action=view&;report_id=149) released earlier this year by TOC demonstrated that exposure to pesticides is linked to increased risk of reproductive abnormalities, birth defects and neurological problems.

The analytical work required to complete this report ( http://www.organic-center.org/science.pest.php?action=view&;report_id=159) was funded by a coalition of non-governmental organizations including the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Center for Food Safety, the Cornerstone Campaign, Californians for GE-Free Agriculture, Greenpeace International and Rural Advancement Fund International USA.

About The Organic Center

The Organic Center’s unique mission is to advance scientific research on the health and environmental benefits of organic foods, and to communicate those benefits to the public. As an independent nonprofit 501(c)(3) research and education organization, we envision improved health for the earth and its inhabitants through conversion of agriculture to organic methods. All of The Organic Center’s research reports, publications, consumer guides and videos are available free of charge on our website, www.organic-center.org.

About The Union of Concerned Scientists

The Union of Concerned Scientists is the leading U.S. science-based nonprofit organization working for a healthy environment and a safer world. Founded in 1969, UCS is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and also has offices in Berkeley, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

About The Center for Food Safety

The Center for Food Safety is a national, non-profit, membership organization founded in 1997 to protect human health and the environment by curbing the use of harmful food production technologies and by promoting organic and other forms of sustainable agriculture. CFS currently represents over 68,000 members across the nation. On the web at: http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org

Concentrations of several major pesticides mostly declined or stayed the same in “Corn Belt” rivers and streams from 1996 to 2006, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey study.

The declines in pesticide concentrations closely followed declines in their annual applications, indicating that reducing pesticide use is an effective and reliable strategy for reducing pesticide contamination in streams.

Declines in concentrations of the agricultural herbicides cyanazine, alachlor and metolachlor show the effectiveness of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulatory actions as well as the influence of new pesticide products. In addition, declines from 2000 to 2006 in concentrations of the insecticide diazinon correspond to the EPA’s national phase-out of nonagricultural uses. The USGS works closely with the EPA, which uses USGS findings on pesticide trends to track the effectiveness of changes in pesticide regulations and use.

Scientists studied 11 herbicides and insecticides frequently detected in the Corn Belt region, which generally includes Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska and Ohio, as well as parts of adjoining states. This area has among the highest pesticide use in the nation — mostly herbicides used for weed control in corn and soybeans. As a result, these pesticides are widespread in the region’s streams and rivers, largely resulting from runoff from cropland and urban areas.

Elevated concentrations can affect aquatic organisms in streams as well as the quality of drinking water in some high-use areas where surface water is used for municipal supply. Four of the 11 pesticides evaluated for trends were among those most often found in previous USGS studies to occur at levels of potential concern for healthy aquatic life. Atrazine, the most frequently detected, is also regulated in drinking water.

“Pesticide use is constantly changing in response to such factors as regulations, market forces, and advances in science,” said Dan Sullivan, lead scientist for the study. “For example, acetochlor was registered by the EPA in 1994 with a goal of reducing use of alachlor and other major corn herbicides — acetochlor use rapidly increased to a constant level by about 1996, and alachlor use declined. Cyanazine use also decreased rapidly from 1992 to 2000, as it was phased out because of environmental concerns. Metolachlor use did not markedly decrease until about 1998, when S-metolachlor, a more effective version that requires lower application rates, was introduced. Each of these declines in use was accompanied by similar declines in concentrations.”

Although trends in concentration and use almost always closely corresponded, concentrations of atrazine and metolachlor each declined in one stream more rapidly than their estimated use. According to Skip Vecchia, senior author of the report on this analysis, “The steeper decline in these instances may be caused by agricultural management practices that have reduced pesticide transport, but data on management practices are not adequate to definitively answer the question. Overall, use is the most dominant factor driving changes in concentrations.”

Only one pesticide — simazine, which is used for both agricultural and urban weed control — increased from 1996 to 2006. Concentrations of simazine in some streams increased more sharply than its trend in agricultural use, suggesting that non-agricultural uses of this herbicide, such as for controlling weeds in residential areas and along roadsides, increased during the study period.

The USGS study is based on analysis of 11 pesticides for 31 stream sites in the Corn Belt for two partially overlapping time periods: 1996 to 2002 and 2000 to 2006. Pesticides included in the trend analyses were the herbicides atrazine, acetochlor, metolachlor, alachlor, cyanazine, EPTC, simazine, metribuzin and prometon, and the insecticides chlorpyrifos and diazinon. Additional detailed analyses of relations between concentrations and use focused on four herbicides mainly used for weed control in corn (atrazine, acetochlor, metolachlor and alachlor) at a subset of 11 sites on the main rivers and selected large tributaries in the Ohio, Upper Mississippi and Missouri River basins.

Concentrations of many other pesticides that were less prevalent than the 11 included in the study were below analytical detection limits in most samples and thus could not be analyzed for trends. Glyphosate, an herbicide which has had rapidly increasing use on new genetically modified varieties of soybeans and corn, and which now is the most heavily used herbicide in the nation, was not measured until late in the study and thus had insufficient data for analysis of trends.

A USGS Scientific Investigations Report, “Trends in Pesticide Concentrations in Corn-Belt Streams, 1996-2006,” (Analysis of concentration trends for 11 pesticides at 31 stream and river sites) and a journal article in the Environmental Science and Technology journal, “Trends in Concentrations and Use of Agricultural Herbicides for Corn Belt Rivers” (Analysis of concentration and use trends for 4 herbicides at 11 major river sites) is available online. Additional information, including data, reports and maps on pesticide status, trends and use may be found at the USGS Pesticide National Synthesis Project Web site.

USGS provides science for a changing world. For more information, visit www.usgs.gov.

http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/20091110/porter_chlorpyrifos_tiny_dose_pregnancy_impact_daughters

Excerpts from Rodale Institute story:

A new animal study accentuates the risk of ultra-low levels of the common pesticide chlorpyrifos to cause long-lasting birth defects in female offspring of exposed mothers. The daughters exhibited learning delays, disturbed brain function and altered thyroid levels. Significantly, these symptoms resulted from low toxicity exposure during late gestation — an impact route not even part of current regulatory pesticide testing.

Damage at these doses highlights vulnerability during gestation from toxins even at the parts per billion level.

In a paper published October 29 by the Reproductive Toxicology (1), a peer-reviewed academic journal, a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin, Department of Zoology, detail their findings from research on pregnant female mice exposed to minute levels of chlorpyrifos late in gestation.

The results are dramatic because of the tiny doses involved, and because of the near ubiquity of chlorpyrifos present in humans. The pesticide is highly regulated because of its known hazards to human health, but is still used widely in food production, ornamental horticulture and treating buildings for insects.

Haviland JA, et al. Long-term sex selective hormonal and behavior alterations in mice exposed to low doses of chlorpyrifos in utero.
Reproductive Toxicology (2009), doi:10.1016/j.reprotox.2009.10.008

The Haviland, et al, paper in Reproductive Toxicology will be accessible at
http://www.citeulike.org/article/6050702. (access fee)

Organic-food shoppers are making a rude discovery at their grocers’ refrigerated display case.

“White Wave Silk Vanilla Soymilk is no longer Organic,” declares a hand-lettered sign at the two Sunflower Shoppes in Tarrant County.

Silk has more than 70 percent of the market. Until this month, Sunflower routinely re-ordered it, thinking it was certified organic.

But its maker, Dallas-based Dean Foods, quietly removed the word “organic” from the familiar blue cartons Jan. 15 and switched to cheaper beans — not genetically modified but likely grown with chemical fertilizer and possibly pesticide — then called it “all natural” soy milk.

Dean did not change the product’s identifying bar code or package design, nor did it significantly alter the price — moves that would have triggered scrutiny by store owners, some of whom now feel duped. A number of other Silk products were similarly changed from organic without a new bar code, Dean confirmed.

A reintroduced Silk organic line — in green cartons — carries new bar codes but is not as widely available.

“We don’t want to be part of customer deception,” said Erika McCarthy, a member of the third generation of her family to operate the Sunflower health food stores in Fort Worth and Colleyville.

Dean says it gave advance notice to its distributors and blamed them for not following through with independent grocers like Sunflower. It released to the Star-Telegram a form letter that distributors were supposed to send to retailers explaining that the nonorganic soy milk would carry the organic product’s bar code. National distributors Tree of Life and UNFI did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Specialty food markets contacted in California, Delaware and Texas said they did not discover the switch for six to nine months.

None has yet to be notified about the reformulation of what had been their stores’ biggest-selling soy milk product, they said.

Roy Beard, who has operated Roy’s Natural Market in Dallas for 41 years, said he hadn’t realized there was a change until contacted by a reporter last week. He said retaining the same bar code “was troubling,” but “I don’t believe in soy milk anyways, although I stock it for customers.”

McCarthy said: “Did we miss something? Our concern is that if it’s going from ‘organic’ to ‘natural’ we need to be informed. But we only found out about it now.”

What it means

The “all natural” label on Silk cartons is a loose term, in contrast with “certified organic,” which has strict federal guidelines that products must meet.

“Dean has only added to the marketplace confusion between ‘natural’ and ‘organic,’ as they definitely do not mean the same thing, and ‘natural’ requires no verification whatsoever,” said Urvashi Rangan, a senior scientist at Consumer Reports.

Sara Loveday, a spokeswoman for Dean’s WhiteWave unit, said “all natural” means that the drink contains no artificial ingredients and that the soybeans used were not genetically modified.

However, such soybeans are still typically grown with chemical fertilizers and synthetic pesticides when necessary, said professor Gary Stacey, associate director of the National Center for Soybean Biotechnology at the University of Missouri.

Dean carefully tests the beans for toxic residue, Loveday said.

Moreover, she said, the bean’s pod “naturally shields” it from chemicals, and a hull layer serves as a further barrier against contamination, which is true for all soybean varieties.

The new soy milk does not violate government labeling regulations because Dean rewrote its ingredient list and removed any organic reference.

But as American shoppers become increasingly concerned about food safety and the content of what they consume, the Silk product changes raise questions about marketplace integrity. Tipped off by the Cornucopia Institute, an organic-industry watchdog group, the nonprofit Organic Consumers Association launched a boycott of Silk-brand products this summer over the labeling issue. Silk products have not been affected, Loveday said.

Shannon Shipp, an associate professor and director of the ethics program at Texas Christian University’s Neeley School of Business, says he has no idea whether Dean intended to mislead consumers. The company would be on sound footing, he said, “if you assume that people carefully read the label every time they pick up a carton. But that’s not how people buy. Repeat customers are just looking at the color, not all the details. Why would they? The package itself is the proxy for all that.”

Why did Dean do it?

The company intended to avoid a price increase because of the rising costs of soybeans, transportation and other expenses, Loveday said.

Also, nonorganic varieties are considerably cheaper. Soybeans that haven’t been genetically modified cost $11 to $12.50 a bushel compared with $19 for organic beans, according to Ken Rose, editor of The Organic & Non-GMO Report. That works out to a savings for Dean of 34 to 42 percent.

Credibility damage?

Independent retailers, who were pioneers of organic food, now a nearly $23 billion industry, say they were let down by one of the country’s most established brands. Some, including the Natural Grocery Co. of El Cerrito, Calif., told the Star-Telegram that they swapped out the entire Silk line — representing $50,000 in annual sales — because of the reformulation labeling.

“I think the proper way to do it was to say, ‘Hey, we’re coming out with an all-natural line since organic soybeans are hard to find, cost too much,’ or whatever they choose to tell us,” said Bob Gerner, Natural Grocery’s founding general manager.

“But there was no warning,” said Gerner, 63, a 39-year food industry veteran. “We kept ordering what we thought was the same organic soy milk. I’m still dumbfounded they could do something like this.”

Dean, which bought Colorado-based WhiteWave in 2002, vigorously defended its actions, saying it saw no need to change bar codes on the soy milk items since using a different type of bean didn’t constitute a “major” reformulation.

But Jon Mellor, a spokesman for New Jersey-based GS1 US, the nonprofit agency that issues Universal Product Code numbers and bar codes, said changing products so they are no longer organic is considered a big enough shift to require new codes.

TCU’s Shipp said retaining the old bar code is an even bigger issue than the packaging matter.

“Why didn’t Dean call the UPC agency? It would have taken 20 minutes, cost nothing and there wouldn’t have been this problem. It’s just silly,” he said. “If this was some tiny producer in Oregon making a product change for the first time, I’d give them a pass. But Dean is one of country’s biggest producers, making this product for years.”

‘Bait and switch’?

Supermarket executives and food processors expressed surprise at Dean’s actions, saying that even when a package size is altered, a new bar code is affixed.

“Does it pass your internal smell test?” asked Doug Renfro, president of Fort Worth-based Renfro Foods, maker of Mrs. Renfro’s salsas. “My gut feeling is that switching from organic is a big change. I don’t think we’d do it. You’d want people to know it’s not organic anymore.”

Some retailers reacted to the labeling issue with unadulterated pique.

“I call it bait and switch,” said Bob Kleszics, 52, owner of the 14-year-old Harvest Market in Hockessin, Del. “I feel hornswoggled. I have never heard of a company switching from organic to conventional and maintaining the same UPC code.

“It’s clear Silk wanted to preserve the product’s look to keep customers grabbing the blue container off the shelf mindlessly. I am sure virtually nobody noticed it was no longer organic.”

Missed communications

Dean says it had developed a “comprehensive plan” to communicate the launch of nonorganic Silk soy milk products.

“We absolutely informed our retailers — without them we wouldn’t have a marketplace for our products,” a company e-mail said. “Our sales team informed retailers, distributors and brokers.”

When given examples of markets not contacted, Dean said those are independent stores that should have been contacted by their distributors.

Some big customers said they were informed directly.

Dean told Kroger, the country’s largest traditional supermarket chain, around the start of the year that its WhiteWave unit would phase in a conventional soy milk and would later reintroduce a certified organic one, Kroger spokesman Gary Huddleston said.

Maintaining the original bar code on a reformulated product, while very unusual, made no difference to Kroger since Dean had informed its dairy buyer about the changes, Huddleston said. Kroger carries Silk’s conventional soy milk but no longer the organic version because the chain has rolled out its own organic product, Naturally Preferred, he said.

But there was confusion — even among big players. Target ran a newspaper insert ad picturing the discontinued “organic” Silk blue carton as recently as Sept. 19, nine months after the change. Whole Foods made a similar mistake with an in-store sale poster in July. Neither returned calls seeking comment.

Dean’s organic products have long been under scrutiny from Cornucopia. It earlier attacked Dean’s dependence on factory dairy farms to supply organic milk for its Horizon brand. Cornucopia also discovered that Dean was using Chinese soybeans for Silk and questioned the credibility of China’s organic certification program, citing U.S. Department of Agriculture audits.

Dean confirmed that it had sourced a “small portion” of its beans from China but said it stopped at the end of 2006.

There is clearly no mutual admiration. Dean says Cornucopia “continues to spread misinformation about our business, our brands and organic in general, which confuses consumers and ultimately leads to decreased consumer demand.”

Mark Kastel, Cornucopia’s co-director, responded, “They don’t like us because we are pathological truth tellers.”

The “vast majority of organic brands that the public depends on are produced with high integrity, and problems with Dean are bad aberrations,” Kastel said.

In its e-mail to the Star-Telegram, Dean said: “We apologize for any confusion around our product offerings — that certainly was not our intention. We think offering both natural and organic products is the right thing to do for our consumers.”

Organic Valley

LA FARGE, WI – CROPP Cooperative and Stonyfield Farm today announced a new phase in their partnership, a creative measure designed to sustain organic family dairy farmers and preserve consumer choice.

Beginning January 1, 2010, CROPP will manage the organic milk supply for Stonyfield fluid milk products and invite the farmers producing that milk into CROPP Cooperative. It also will license the Stonyfield fluid milk brand and oversee its sales and retail distribution.

For more than 11 years, CROPP has supplied the organic milk for all other Stonyfield products. The addition of the fluid milk business builds on this partnership.

Stonyfield will continue to build and promote its fluid milk brand via its marketing and consumer-based initiatives. HP Hood, which had been managing the milk supply for the Stonyfield brand, will continue as the primary processor of that milk.

“Key to this strategy is the partnering of CROPP, Stonyfield and Hood to produce a quality product, while also focusing on helping family farmers preserve their livelihood,” said Stonyfield Farm President and CE-Yo Gary Hirshberg. “Our goal is to maximize each of the partner companies’ strengths while working to create a greater market for the organic milk produced by family farmers.”

“This broader partnership with Stonyfield keeps organic farmers organic, keeps organic land organic, helps keep toxins out of our bodies and our earth, and gives retailers and consumers a much needed alternative,” said George Siemon, CEO of CROPP Cooperative which produces a variety of products nationwide under the Organic Valley and Organic Prairie labels.

“In our more than 20 years in business, we have seen the overall dairy supply go up and down many times, but our confidence in the organic way has never changed,” added Siemon.

This arrangement does not impact the availability of the brands’ current product offerings and hopefully will help increase its availability in new markets. It also does not affect the pay price or hinder future growth opportunities for any of the 1,333 current members of CROPP cooperative.

The farmers currently producing milk for the Stonyfield brand will have several options moving forward. These include continuing to supply for the Stonyfield brand through the remainder of their current contract, applying for membership with CROPP Cooperative or seeking another market for their milk.

CROPP Cooperative: Independent and Farmer-Owned

CROPP Cooperative is America’s largest cooperative of organic farmers. Organized in 1988, it represents 1,333 farmers in 32 states and one Canadian province. Focused on its founding mission of saving family farms through organic farming, CROPP produces a variety of organic foods, including organic milk, soy, cheese, butter, spreads, creams, eggs, produce and juice, which are sold in supermarkets, natural foods stores and food cooperatives nationwide under the Organic Valley label. CROPP also produces for a full range of delicious organic meat under the Organic Prairie label. For further information, call 1-888-444-MILK or visit www.organicvalley.coop, www.organicprairie.coop and the cooperative’s farmer website, www.farmers.coop.

About Stonyfield Farm

Stonyfield Farm, celebrating its 26th year, is the world’s leading organic yogurt company. Its all natural and certified organic yogurt, smoothies, milk, cultured soy, frozen yogurt and ice cream are distributed nationally. The company advocates that healthy food can only come from a healthy planet. Its organic ingredient purchases keep over 100,000 farm acres free of toxic, persistent pesticides and chemical fertilizers that can contaminate soil, rivers and drinking water. To help reduce global warming, Stonyfield since 1997 has offset all of the C02 emissions generated from its facility energy use. The company also started a nonprofit called Climate Counts (climatecounts.org) which shows people how they can help fight climate change by the way they shop and invest. Stonyfield also donates 10% of its profits to efforts that help protect and restore the Earth. For more information about Stonyfield Farm, its products and initiatives, visit www.stonyfield.com.

Of all the changes coming to Francisco Baez’s cramped corner grocery store in Newark’s North Ward, he is most excited about the new scanner system at the two checkouts.

But Newark officials, who are paying for the new equipment, are most interested in the new refrigeration units that will be installed near the front of the store. Those new refrigerators, to be filled with fresh fruits and vegetables, are part of a new effort by Newark — with variations in other cities across the country — to improve the diets of low-income residents.

Until recently, small corner grocery stores were seen by public health officials as part of the obesity problem.

The stores, predominantly family-owned, offered convenience, but the accent was on snack chips, canned goods and sugary drinks. Now, because they are often the sole source of groceries in areas with no full-size supermarket, the stores are becoming linchpins in public health campaigns.

“If you are educating people to make good choices, but those choices aren’t available nearby and they don’t have a car to drive out to the suburbs to the supermarket, or an hour to ride two buses to get there,” said Kai Siedenburg, of the Community Food Security Coalition, a group based in Portland, Ore., that promotes access to healthy food, “then it’s really hard for them to make good choices.”

Store owners in Cleveland, New York, Louisville and elsewhere are being approached by public health organizations and economic development agencies with offers of new equipment, marketing expertise or neighborhood promotions to encourage them to stock more fresh produce, whole wheat bread and other healthy offerings.

Newark’s program combines community health concerns with targeted grants to reinvigorate stores and neighborhoods.

“Bags of chips and cans of soda are the options in too many of our small groceries and bodegas,” said Stefan Pryor, a deputy mayor and chairman of the Brick City Development Corporation, Newark’s economic development agency. But, he added, “With the thin margins that small groceries operate under, it’s unrealistic to expect them to make the investment themselves.”

Other initiatives do it differently. The Cleveland Corner Store Project encourages small groceries to sell fruit near the check-out — prime locations where candy and chips are usually found — and promotes these stores with sidewalk signs and posters and at neighborhood health events. New York’s “Healthy Bodegas” initiative has reached out to 1,000 stores in a variety of ways, including helping owners secure zoning permits to allow fruit and vegetable displays on the sidewalk. In Louisville, two small groceries were awarded $20,000 this year to expand their offerings of fresh produce.

The idea of using corner stores in campaigns to improve diets has spread from a few cities over the last decade — among them, Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Hartford and Oakland, Calif. — to “probably a hundred or more organizations that are now either starting interventions or that are in the planning stages,” Ms. Siedenburg said.

Rural areas, too, that have lost local supermarkets to distant big-box retailers are looking for ways to encourage convenience stores to offer healthier choices.

“There are all these neat programs popping up,” said James Johnson-Piett, a consultant to Newark’s program who previously worked with the Food Trust, a nonprofit group that developed some groundbreaking initiatives in Philadelphia.

The movement is driven, in part, by a decades-old problem: the paucity of food shopping options in poor neighborhoods. In Newark, with three supermarkets for a population of 279,000, the city says nearly 40 percent of the money spent on food by residents is spent outside the city.

Campaigns to entice supermarkets, with their expansive produce departments, not to mention scores of local jobs, have met with mixed results. In Philadelphia, a ShopRite opened last year in a low-income neighborhood with help from a Pennsylvania program that provided a $1 million grant and $7 million in federal tax credits. New York is considering a similar plan that would include tax and zoning incentives, but few other cities have such a program in place.

Joseph F. Ritchie, who until recently was executive director of the Brick City Development Corporation, said big chains were used to building stores of 50,000 to 70,000 square feet in the suburbs, and typically wanted larger lot sizes than were available in city neighborhoods. (Mr. Baez’s Food Plaza store is about 3,000 square feet.) He said that the chains worried that local residents would not buy the high-margin prepared foods and delicacies that buoy a supermarket’s profit. Finally, he said, there were worries about crime.

But lately, concern over urban “food deserts” has become a rallying cry, as a drumbeat of medical studies link obesity and diet-related illnesses like diabetes and heart disease to a lack of access to healthy food. Last year, The American Journal of Epidemiology reported that people with no supermarket near their homes were up to 46 percent less likely to have a healthy diet than those with more shopping options.

“In the absence of making gains with supermarkets, we’re trying to take what’s already there and make it better,” said Jerry Jones, executive director of Hartford Food System, a 31-year-old nonprofit group in Connecticut.

The group encourages store owners to replace 5 percent of their junk food and soft drinks each year with regular groceries, including low-salt selections and produce. In return, it provides the stores with market research on what neighborhood shoppers are looking for and negotiates low prices from a big produce wholesaler.

Forty small groceries have signed up and are entitled to display a sticker that says “Healthy Food Retailer,” Mr. Jones said. In 2008, after the program had been under way for about year, the Hartford Food System took measurements and reported an overall 8 percent switch of food inventories from junk food to regular groceries.

This low-budget approach is echoed in Cleveland’s corner store program, a joint effort of the city’s public health department and Case Western Reserve University.

Earlier this year, Anne Gross, who with her husband, Gary, has run the Convenient Food Mart in the city’s Near West Side for 36 years, agreed to push aside some of the candy at the front of the store and make room for two wicker baskets of fruit. The program provided colorful signs encouraging healthy eating.

It also promoted her store with events like a cooking demonstration in her parking lot with samples of banana bread, free cookbooks, and sign-ups for local cooking classes.

The result: a 20 percent increase in fruit sales this last summer. “Bananas are No. 1,” said Mrs. Gross, 65. “After that, cherries have done very well.”

Matt Russell, a coordinator with Case Western’s Center for Health Promotion Research who asked Mrs. Gross to participate, said a big part of any initiative was choosing the right store owners.

Selling produce also takes more work than bags of cookies or chips. “There’s obviously some risk in taking on new products for these stores. We’ve talked to them about issues like spoilage,” Mr. Russell said. “It’s different than a lot of the products they already sell. You know, a can of soup can sit there for a long time.”

In Newark, the Fresh Food program met with 80 store owners before choosing Mr. Baez to be the first of a handful to quality for a grant, Mr. Johnson-Piett said.

“These are folks who are saying, ‘I think I can move fruits and vegetables.’ That’s what you want to hear,” he said. “You can’t spend all your time trying to cajole people to do something they don’t want to do.”

Mr. Baez said he liked the idea of offering customers an expanded selection of produce. “Will I make any more money?” he asked. “I have no idea.”

In Cleveland, Mrs. Gross still sells her customers beer, doughnuts, lottery tickets and other essentials. “As a business person, I have to provide to them what they want,” she said. But she said she is willing to try to improve the community’s health, one banana at a time. “Even if it just changes a couple of people’s habits,” she said, “it would be a huge benefit.”

Washington — A program to test pesticides to make sure they do not affect human hormone systems will be compromised by an Office of Management and Budget order allowing data from studies by pesticide companies to susbstitute for new studies, according to some scientists involved in developing the new program.

Thirteen years ago Congress required the Environmental Protection Agency to screen pesticides for hormonal effects such as reproductive and developmental problems by 1999. Pesticides have been implicated in the appearance of male fish laying eggs in the Potomac River.

But the program to test the chemicals on animals such as tadpoles and rats is only now set to begin, and some scientists say it is already being rendered ineffective.

“What the OMB is asking the [EPA] to do is to accept all the old data from pesticide manufacturers defending the safety of their products,” said Theo Colborn, a scientist who served on panels that designed the testing program and selected the tests that compose it. “This looked like, to me, a very desperate attempt to cover up a decade or more of about 1000 studies and research on the effects of chemicals on the endocrine system,” which regulates many bodily functions.

The OMB, which oversees administration regulatory policies, told the EPA “to the greatest extent possible” accept existing data on the toxicity of the pesticides in lieu of conducting new tests on the 67 chemicals selected for investigation.

“I would view it as a smart, good government way of not making people do costly and duplicative tests,” said a senior OMB official, who noted that the tests can cost up to a million dollars.

But this instruction angered some environmental scientists, who contend the submission of previously conducted tests would allow the pesticide makers to selectively submit industry-financed and outdated studies that show the pesticides are safe. The pesticides should undergo the new battery of tests, they say.

“OMB is telling three federal advisory committees and dozens of scientists that they don’t know what they’re talking about,” said Peter deFur, an environmental scientist who sat on the three panels that selected the tests and designed the program. “It’s either hubris or ignorance.”

But the OMB defended its directive, noting that the EPA’s program already contained provisions allowing pesticide companies to submit existing data.

OMB spokesman Tom Gavin said. “A lot of the concerns were expressed from a lack of understanding about process and from a lack of understanding about the intricacies of the federal government.”

“Where data didn’t exist or wasn’t applicable, we’ve given the agency the full authority it needs to get the information,” Gavin said.

Industry officials cheered the OMB decision. “I am particularly gratified that EPA will allow citation of existing data in response to test orders,” said Jay Vroom, president of the pesticide trade group CropLife America, in a statement. “These positive measures will greatly facilitate the testing process.”

For deFur and Colborn, however, the OMB directive is a capitulation to industry groups. Pesticide makers “have done everything they could to make sure that EPA wasn’t going to put this program in place,” deFur said. But it is common practice for the EPA to look at existing data when making regulatory decisions, said a senior scientist involved in the creation of the testing program, who was granted anonymity to discuss interactions with pesticide companies.

“I get data. I look at it. If it’s junk, I tell them,” the scientist said, declaring that agency scientists can effectively separate good data from bad.

Genetically modified squash plants that are resistant to a debilitating viral disease become more vulnerable to a fatal bacterial infection, according to biologists.

“Cultivated squash is susceptible to a variety of viral diseases and that is a major problem for farmers,” said Andrew Stephenson, Penn State professor of biology. “Infected plants grow more slowly and their fruit becomes misshapen.”

In the mid-1990s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved genetically modified squash, which are resistant to three of the most important viral diseases in cultivated squash. However, while disease-resistant crops have been a boon to commercial farmers, ecologists worry there might be certain hidden costs associated with the modified crops.

“There is concern in the ecological community that, when the transgenes that confer resistance to these viral diseases escape into wild populations, they will (change) those plants,” said Stephenson, whose team’s findings appear on October 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “That could impact the biodiversity of plant communities where wild squash are native.”

Stephenson and his colleagues James A. Winsor, professor of biology; Matthew J. Ferrari, research associate; and Miruna A. Sasu, doctoral student, all at Penn State; and Daolin Du, visiting professor, Jiangsu University, China, crossed the genetically modified squash into wild squash native to the southwestern United States and examined the resulting flower and fruit production.

Unlike a lab experiment, the researchers tried to mimic a real world setting during their three-year study.
The researchers then looked at the effects of the virus-resistant transgenes on prevalence of the three viral diseases, herbivory by cucumber beetles, as well as the occurrence of bacterial wilt disease that is spread by the cucumber beetles.

“When the cucumber beetles start to feed on infected plants they pick up the bacteria through their digestive system,” explained Sasu. “This feeding creates open wounds on the leaves and when the bugs’ feces falls on these open wounds, the bacteria find their way into the plumbing of the plant.”

The researchers discovered that as the viral infection swept the fields containing both genetically modified and wild crops, the damage from cucumber beetles is greater on the genetically modified plants. The modified plants are therefore more susceptible to the fatal bacterial wilt disease.

“Plants that do not have the virus-resistant transgene get the viral disease,” explained Stephenson, whose team’s work is funded by the National Science Foundation. “However, since cucumber beetles prefer to feed on healthy plants rather than viral infected plants, the beetles become increasingly concentrated on the healthy — mostly transgenic — plants.”

During a viral epidemic, the transgene provides modified plants with a fitness advantage over the wild plants. But when both the bacterial and viral pathogens are present, the beetles tend to avoid the smaller viral infected plants and concentrate on the healthy transgenic plants. This exposes those plants to the bacterial wilt disease against which they have no defense.

“Wild and transgenic plants had the same amount of damage from beetles before viral diseases were prevalent in our fields,” said Stephenson. “Once the virus infected the wild plants, the transgenic plants had significantly greater damage from the beetles.”

Results from the study show that over the course of three years, the prevalence of bacterial wilt disease was significantly greater on transgenic plants than on non-transgenic plants.

According to the researchers, their findings suggest that the fitness advantage enjoyed by virus-resistant plants comes at a price. Once the virus infects susceptible plants, cucumber beetles find the genetically modified plants a better source for food and mating.

“Our study has sought to uncover the ecological cost that might be associated with modified plants growing in the full community of organisms, including other insects and other diseases,” said Ferrari. “We have shown that while genetic engineering has provided a solution to the problem of viral diseases, there are also these unintended consequences in terms of additional susceptibility to other diseases.”

Adapted from materials provided by Penn State.

On a sunny morning in July, Alicia Jabbar’s tank top is wet with sweat along her spine from the nape of her neck to the small of her back. She climbs onto the horizontal ledges at the bottom of a metal stake next to an ankle-high tomato plant. Jabbar, who’s wearing two ponytails under a baseball cap, has to use all of her body weight to push the stake into the earth. When she’s done with a row, she stands on tiptoes in her running shoes to drop a metal cylinder with two handles on the top of each stake.

Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang. The noise echoes off the trees.

“Twelve more rows,” she says.

“What time is it?” her friend Jessica Stanley calls. She’s busy looping string from a box at her waist around the stakes to support the tomato plants.

“Ten-thirty, and we’re halfway done,” Jabbar, 26, replies. They’ve been working since 7 a.m. and staking for the past two hours. “Sore back?”

Stanley says with a sigh: “There’s no way to avoid it. I try to move my hands in a different way — doesn’t matter. Well, I guess I’ll pound with you.”

Stanley, 26, who’s working in a camisole tank top, lives in an uninsulated barn on the farm and spends more than 50 hours a week weeding, mulching, harvesting and selling at farmers markets.

Just a year ago, she was making $110,000 a year at Cisco Systems in Herndon, often telecommuting from the two-bedroom condo she owns in Georgetown. Now, she makes $7 an hour. She and Jabbar, along with Jabbar’s fiance, Steve Hirschhorn, work for Chip and Susan Planck on Wheatland Vegetable Farms in Loudoun County.

They’re part of a growing pool of young, educated, politically motivated workers drawn to farming. Books such as bestseller “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” in which Michael Pollan championed the local food movement, are sparking interest in sustainable agriculture, or small-scale farms that embrace humane and eco-friendly practices. Such operations are getting a boost from Community Supported Agriculture, a system that lets customers pay in advance for a weekly share of a nearby farm’s crop; the number of members participating in CSAs grew 50 percent between 2007 and 2009. The number of farmers markets in the United States has jumped by almost 13 percent over the last year. Even the White House now has its own organic garden.

Some young workers are looking for a career change; others are in it for a season or just a summer. Their passion for small farms is real — but so is the physically exhausting, often tedious labor that comes with it. And reconciling theideals of local food and farming with the reality of sore backs, sweaty days and low pay isn’t easy.

***

Chip and Susan Planck have owned their 60-acre spread in western Loudoun County since 1979. Stanley said she and her friends chose Wheatland Farms because they wanted to work for “someone who was profit-driven and making a life of it, doing well.”

In the past few years, Wheatland has had far more inquiries from young people looking to try their hand at farm work. Even without a Web site, Chip was getting three inquiries a week as late as July.

Katherine Adam, agriculture specialist at the National Center for Appropriate Technology, said there were only six sustainable farms on a list for prospective student workers in 1989. Now there are 1,400, with 236 added from January to May. More than 3,000 workers spend their summers or a whole growing season on these farms.

“The whole zeitgeist about this stuff is changing. We couldn’t ask for a better climate for our business,” Chip says. He likes hiring college kids, because over the course of a season they can see the food through from start to finish; they plant the seeds, pick the produce and sell it at the farmers market. He smiles as he flips through a photo album with group pictures of 15 to 20 workers standing in front of a wagon. “It’s almost like hiring yourself.” Chip says fondly, “How could you not enjoy this group of people?”

But he admits they weren’t all good workers. If someone was a bit of a slacker, the rest of the crew had to work around it. Since many recruits have never even gardened before, it takes some time before they become efficient in the field. Despite a greater pool to pick from than ever before, there’s a risk that even the most idealistic worker will become disenchanted once the reality of long hours of hard work sets in.

That retention risk made it difficult for Stanley, Jabbar and Hirschhorn to get hired. “A lot of them didn’t want three people who knew each other,” Jabbar says, because farm owners feared if one left, they all would. “I’m quitting my job and moving across the country! I’m not quitting after two weeks,” she says indignantly.

She’d worked as a business analyst for Williams-Sonoma in San Francisco, earning $80,000 a year. But she felt she was just marking time until she discovered what she really wanted to do with her life. Stanley felt the same way. “I was making a ridiculous amount of money and not working very hard, to be honest.”

It was during a 2008 vacation that the college friends started to talk more seriously about how to escape. They wanted outdoor jobs, and their feelings about the politics of food — such as their belief that industrial farming is headed for collapse, and is a culprit behind obesity and global warming — drew them to farming. But it’s more than that. Jabbar says its appeal is “a simplicity of life.” Joined by Hirschhorn, they decided to learn how to grow food so that they could launch their own farm in 2010.

Jabbar, Stanley and Hirschhorn keep a blog, iheartnature.com, that documents their experience at Wheatland. In her first week, Jabbar wrote: “The first few days were rough and I was addicted to taking Tylenol in the morning, afternoon, and night — most of you know I hate taking medicine so that in itself is a lot for me.” She said on the seventh day, after six hours of staking tomatoes, she was chanting in her head: “You can do this, you can do this, you can do this.”

The trio and their fellow workers live together in a converted barn on the farm and cook together in a cabin-kitchen. They get to know other workers from neighboring farms and swap stories. It’s a tightknit community, although Stanley, Jabbar and Hirschhorn’s background of corporate jobs sets them somewhat apart.

“I feel I don’t have a lot in common with them. Nobody I know is even considering going into the jobs they were in. Seemingly to me, they have a much more extravagant lifestyle,” says co-worker David Giusti, a 23-year-old graduate of Oberlin College with a curly ponytail and beard bleached blond by the sun. This is his third summer at Wheatland, and he has spent time studying sustainable agriculture in Vermont in between. Next year, he plans to rent land from the Plancks and farm for himself.

Stanley says that some customers raised an eyebrow when she wore her engagement ring to the farmers market. Women would see the glittering diamond and say, “You’re a farmer?”

Jabbar, Stanley and Hirschhorn spend their off-the-clock hours refining their business plan to get their own farm started — investigating land prices, considering financing options. The hundreds of thousands in equity Stanley has in her Georgetown condo will help, but they’re realistic about the risk involved. In the middle of the summer, they imagine buying at the end of the year, but by late August, renting is sounding better.

“We think it might be good to test the waters to make sure we really love it,” Stanley says. “If it turns out this isn’t for us, great, we haven’t put a huge investment in it.”

***

While Stanley, Jabbar and Hirschhorn are gearing up to attempt a future in farming, others are just in it for an alternative summer experience or a working vacation. But for Dave Kane, 27, a season on Upper Marlboro’s Clagett Farm is about starting over.

Earlier this year, he quit his sous-chef job in Florida, where he’d stayed after graduating college. “Florida’s just not really a fun place. Well, it can be, it can be too fun,” he says. His social circle — mostly other restaurant workers — included a lot of heavy partiers. “I need to be done with that, put that behind me. Quit drinking, make a new start.” Looking for a way out, he moved home to Calvert County to live with his parents.

In March, he went to Clagett to try some of the tasks and interview with the farm’s managers. Once his hour-long tryout was over, Kane was free to go. But he stayed — the job wasn’t done yet, he told them. They decided right then to hire him. He even worked for a month without pay until the farm could pay him $9 an hour.

The fields are familiar territory for Kane. His father had run a University of Maryland livestock research farm in Carroll County. They moved away when Kane was just 7, but those early years of dad picking him up from soccer practice on horseback made a deep impression.

“I had a cowboy for a dad. It just made me want to be one. When you’re that young as a kid, you think that’s what a man’s supposed to be,” Kane says. He chuckles at his own romanticism — after all, his father ended up working with databases at the National Archives.

When he’s in the fields, Kane is as silent as the Marlboro Man. A Stetson hat shades his eyes. A tooled leather belt, clasped with a large metal belt buckle decorated with a steer, holds up his 32-inch-waist Levi’s. He’s back into that size after losing 30 pounds in three months from the manual labor.

On a sunny day in early July, Kane leads a group of suburban Maryland teenagers. In addition to producing enough fruit and vegetables to feed 400 people all summer and fall, Clagett, which is supported by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, also has a mission to educate about organic farming, so it hosts tours throughout the season.

Kane speaks to the teens volunteering on a camp field trip only when he has to. He takes off his work gloves, shakes a plant to get a potato bug to show them, and says, “They all need to die,” before pinching it between his fingers. “Ohh!” the girls cry.

He pushes a wheel hoe through the dirt and weeds, and dirt makes little clouds ankle high. Only the muscles in his forearms — and the fact that when the teens use the hoe, the dirt barely stirs — betray the effort. Every once in a while, a sarcastic sense of humor peeks out. “There’s so much space that could be turned into soccer fields,” says one boy of the 200-acre farm.

“Or Wal-Marts, or parking lots, or an airport. That’d be cool,” Kane replies.

“They told me that was part of the job, wrangling school groups,” he says later. “It’s not my favorite.”

He prefers a solitary stint in a field, just thinking. “You can get into a work meditation mode, where you kind of clean your mind, if you’re doing something kind of simple and repetitive,” he explains. He thinks about “where I’m going, where I’ve been.” He falls silent, clenching his jaw as he decides how much he wants to reveal. “I had some situations with a live-in girlfriend in Florida. Think I need to let go, but it’s hard to let go.”

Being busy helps. In addition to working five days a week at Clagett, he works full time as a $12-an-hour line cook at Sam’s on the Waterfront restaurant in Annapolis. He helps create specials and amuse bouches, such as a shot-glass amount of heirloom tomato gazpacho with avocado creme fraiche. He spent months looking for an apartment but had trouble finding a place in Annapolis that fit his $650-a-month budget. It was discouraging, but Kane considered moving out of his parents’ house a critical part of moving on. “Once I’m out, I’ll feel completely whole. Just like I’m an adult again. I’m only dependent on myself,” he explained. By the end of September, he’d finally found a place with a roommate, and now he’s preparing to move.

Kane has no plans to be a full-time farmer in the long term. But the farming experience has given him a greater appreciation for the food he cooks. After seeing all the hard work that goes into creating a tomato or a cucumber, “I really try to make vegetables a feature of the dish. Not just something to put on the plate to fill up space.” He’s hoping for a promotion at the restaurant. But he won’t leave the farm completely behind — he’ll volunteer there over the winter and might come back part time next season.

***

When the harvest peaks in late summer, the workload gets more intense at Wheatland, where Jabbar, Stanley and Hirschhorn are picking vegetables seven days a week. As the nights turn cold in the fall, the trio puts plastic up around the barn where they sleep, remembering how they took it down in the spring. “It kind of feels like a full circle,” Jabbar says.

Stanley goes to Colorado to visit her fiance at the end of August. She looks into a land rental there, but it isn’t a good fit. Her parents still wonder if she knows what she’s getting into. Her mother works on the farm with them for a weekend in September. There are a lot of things you could do that are related to this, Stanley recalls her mother saying: “This is really hard work!”

But the physical labor is normal for Stanley now — on her rare days off (one every other week), she misses it.

She, Jabbar and Hirschhorn are still moving to Colorado in December. But their hopes of getting their own farm running by next season have dimmed. To start producing in the spring, they’d need to be tilling now or planting a cover crop. So 2010 will be a year of looking for a property, buying tractors, preparing the land — and, they hope, finding jobs on organic farms in the Boulder area in the meantime.

“It’s definitely a bitter pill to swallow,” Jabbar says, but she recognizes that more experience will be helpful before launching a business.

Despite that, they’re still committed to their path. They went to see “Food, Inc.,” a documentary critical of industrial agriculture, and Jabbar says she came out with renewed confidence about her future in farming. “Dude, I’m totally doing what I want to be doing,” she says. “I’ve never felt so enthusiastic about how I spend my hours in a day as when I got out of that theater.”

Mara Lee is a Washington journalist. She can be reached at wpmagazine@washpost.com.

If you believed a certain baby formula would make your child smarter, would you buy it?

Infant formula manufacturers are banking that you would. That’s why, since 2002, several companies have fortified their products with synthetic versions of DHA and ARA, long-chain fatty acids that occur naturally in breast milk and have been associated with brain development.

The oils are produced by Martek Biosciences Corp. from lab-grown algae and fungus and extracted with hexane, according to the company’s patent application. Hexane is a neurotoxin.

A growing number of parents and medical professional believe these additives are causing severe reactions in some babies, and it has been repeatedly shown that taking affected babies off DHA/ARA formula makes the problems go away almost immediately. The FDA has received hundreds of letters to this effect by upset parents, even as products containing the additives are being marketed as better than breast milk.

Karen Jensen says that due to health complications she was unable to breastfeed her daughter, and so fed her daughter Neocate, a formula with DHA/ARA.

“At two weeks, my daughter would often stop breathing in her sleep and was having various other serious health conditions. She cried constantly and couldn’t sleep due to gastrointestinal upset.”

After many trips to the hospital, a CT scan, an EEG, time on an apnea monitor and thousands of dollars in bills, “we tried the Neocate without the DHA/ARA in it. Within 24 hours, we had a brand-new, entirely different baby. She had no abdominal distress, no gas, she smiled and played, and for the first time ever we heard her laugh.”

Jensen’s story is echoed many times over in similar letters urging the FDA to ban DHA and ARA from baby foods, or at the very least to put warning labels on the product advising that some babies may experience adverse reactions like bloating, gastrointestinal distress, vomiting, and diarrhea.

While only a fraction of babies seem to react in this way, it’s a common enough occurrence to have earned DHA/ARA baby formula the nickname “the diarrhea formula” in the neonatal unit of an Ohio hospital.

In 2001, the FDA expressed concerns about the safety of adding DHA and ARA to infant-formula additives and notified Martek of the agency’s plans to convene a group of scientists to study these concerns.

Martek wrote back: “… convening a group of scientific experts to answer such hypothetical concerns would not be productive.” Within months, the FDA wrote to Martek that it would allow DHA and ARA in infant formula, without any scientific review of its own.

While quick to protest hypothetical safety concerns about DHA/ARA, Martek was ready to pounce on the hypothetical benefits of its oils.

In a 1996 investment brief, Martek explained, “Even if [the DHA/ARA blend] has no benefit, we think it would be widely incorporated into formulas as a marketing tool and to allow companies to promote their formula as ‘closest to human milk.’ ”

Mead Johnson Nutritionals took this opportunity to heart, drawing the ire of breastfeeding advocates when it began promoting its DHA/ARA Enfamil Lipil as “The Breast Milk Formula.”

Mead Johnson was also involved with a report in current issue of the journal Child Development, in which a Dallas team of scientists provided evidence that DHA and ARA in baby food improves brain development. Several members of the team have received Mead Johnson money in the form of research funding, as well as the coveted currency known as “consulting fees.”

The report claims that infants fed DHA/ARA baby formula (supplied for free by Mead Johnson) showed greater ability to solve certain problems, like pulling a blanket with a ball on it toward them. The researchers say this problem-solving ability correlates with enhanced IQ and vocabulary development.

“New evidence favors baby formula,” announced the Los Angeles Times, in an ambiguously worded headline that begs the question: Over what is baby formula favored?

Breastfeeding advocates went on the warpath over the suggestion that formula could be better for babies than breast milk.

“Parents will be encouraged to forgo breastfeeding in favor of a hyped-up infant formula,” complained Barbara Moore, president and CEO of Shape Up America. “Breast milk has other benefits not related to mental development. It confers protection against infection, including viral infections, and the CDC promotes breastfeeding to confer maximal protection against swine flu and other infections.”

Charlotte Vallaeys, a researcher for the Cornucopia Institute, wrote a substantial report on the risks and benefits of DHA/ARA in baby formula. She says the Mead Johnson-funded team behind the Child Development story is “the only group that has found real differences in cognitive development” resulting from the addition of DHA and ARA to formula.

Not that other research teams haven’t looked. To make sense of the growing body of research on the subject, a team of scientists led by Karen Simmer compiled a review, published in January 2008, of all available literature. The team found “feeding term infants with milk formula enriched with [DHA and ARA] had no proven benefit regarding vision, cognition or physical growth.”

A March 2009 review by the European Food Safety Authority also found the available data “insufficient to establish a cause-and-effect relationship” between DHA, ARA and brain development.

Nonetheless, the use of DHA and ARA has grown, and has even won approval for use in organic baby formula, as well as in organic milk.

In an article for the Washington Post on the eroding integrity of the “certified organic” label, Kimberly Kindy described how these laboratory produced oils received organic approval.

… in 2006, [USDA] staff members concluded that the fatty acids could not be added to organic baby formula because they are synthetics that are not on the standards board’s approved list. … Barbara Robinson, who administers the organics program and is a deputy USDA administrator, overruled the staff decision after a telephone call and an e-mail exchange with William J. Friedman, a lawyer who represents the formula makers.

While the FDA has raised serious questions regarding the safety of DHA/ARA, the issue remains in limbo, with concerned parents, medical professionals and advocacy groups pushing one way, and the deep-pocketed corporations pushing the other.

The FDA did instruct Martek and the formula companies to conduct post-market surveillance of its DHA and ARA products, but after seven years none has been submitted.

Until conclusive proof emerges on the safety and/or benefit of DHA and ARA in baby formula, it’s buyer beware for parents of newborns. And last I checked, breast milk — the product of millions of years of evolutionary shaping into the perfect food for babies — remains widely available and free of charge.

Ari LeVaux writes a syndicated weekly food column, Flash in the Pan.