Organic School Lunches: A Load of Manure?

My Hoover colleague and former FDA senior official Henry I. Miller had a letter to the editor in the Feb. 27 New York Times responding to a Feb. 20 op-ed calling for expensive organically-grown school lunches.



Dr. Miller wrote (in part):

[F]ood safety, environmental preservation and energy conservation are not promoted by “foods that are produced without pesticides or chemical fertilizers.” Such foods are expensive and inefficient, because they use more land and water than if modern techniques were employed.


Moreover, [restaurateur Alice] Waters is a longtime opponent of the use of the most precise and predictable genetic techniques to improve crop varieties, a view that is diametrically at odds with the writers’ desire for the federal government “to back environmentally sound farming practices.”