I've never been in a debate, at least not a formal one, but in a couple of weeks I'll be in the middle of one in New York City. I'll have two others on my side, and three folks on the other side. The motion to be debated is, "Organic Food is Marketing Hype."
I'll be arguing in favor of the motion.
The website promoting the debate, intelligencesquaredus.org, is running an online poll. So far, my side is losing by more than 2 to 1, and I haven't even left home, let alone had a chance to change the minds of Manhattanites.
I could be in deep, deep, trouble.
I'm always up for a free trip, and when they interviewed me about being on the panel, I did my best to present myself as unobjectionable. I know I've got a bit of a farmer chip on my shoulder, but it was clear that they would have liked to give me an I.Q. test before extending the invitation.
Clearly my phone interview was to make sure that my grammar was passable, my voice not too country, my ability to string words together in something resembling complete sentences fairly evident.
I was in a good friends' wedding many years ago. He'd gone to law school at an Ivy league college, and most of the wedding party were graduates of one east coast institution or another. One of his friends told me I didn't sound like a farmer. What the hell does that mean?
Passing the smell test Anyway, I passed the smell test, got the invite, and now I'm going to be an Oxford debater.As the date approaches, it occurs to me that arguing against wholesomeness, naturalness, and all things green in Greenwich Village may not be such a good idea.
I hope the auditorium has a way out the back, and one of those chicken wire fences that separated the band from the crowd in the bars I used to frequent in my younger days.
How do I communicate what I really think about the idea of organic food? How do I tell folks that I really don't know why some things qualify as organic, and some do not? How the whole idea of organic strikes me as, well, sort of arbitrary?
Why do we assume natural is better than man made? Cancer is natural, baseball is not.Arsenic is natural, as is nicotine, and strychnine, but nothing like chocolate cake has ever occurred in nature.
Plants, animals and bugs all produce defenses against enemies foreign and domestic.Why do we assume that those defenses are less harmful to us than the weapons against pests developed in laboratories?
Organic food production demands its own set of environmental trade offs. Organic food takes more land than conventional farming to produce the same amount of food.Organic production takes more farmers to control pests by means mechanical and physical.
So what, you say.But what if one of those extra farmers swinging a hoe would have been better employed in a laboratory discovering the next generation of cancer drugs, or finally cracking the mystery of economically making ethanol from switch grass?
All resources have value.Believers in organic farming think the only resources that matter are the petroleum and chemicals used in conventional farming, and the only worries we have are caused by our farming methods.
Strangely enough, some problems, like bugs, weeds, floods, droughts, and disease, happen without man's intervention.Hunger is the darkest specter of all, and always closer than we expect, particularly in the parts of the world that are most likely to farm organically, although they don't call it that.
None of this strikes me as enough to win the debate. I hope my partners are better prepared.
If you have any ideas about how to convince a hostile New York audience of the rightness of your farming methods, I clearly need your help.Comment below or contact me at bhurst@iamotelephone.com before April 13th with your ideas.
And if organic farming is the marketing plan for your farm, tell me why I'm wrong. That will help me prepare, and make the debate a better illumination of both sides of the issue.However, I'm not the least bit interested in reading any more letters telling me I'm a tool of Big Ag, or a greedy subsidy sucking self interested environmental felon.
I've read hundreds of comments like that, and they've lost their charm.