Organic foods, once confined to the cramped quarters of neighborhood health-food stores, have taken their place in the wide, bright aisles of supermarkets across America. Organic produce, eggs, milk, cheese, pasta sauces, cereals, breads, and even beef are now sold in 73 percent of conventional grocery stores. The organic market reached a staggering $13 billion in 2003, double what it was just five years ago.

Much of this trend has to do with rising anxiety over the antibiotics fed to farm animals and the 500 million pounds of pesticides that, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), are applied to American farmland each year. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the USDA are doing their best to ensure that agricultural chemicals do not make us sick. Still, the medical community, the USDA and the FDA, and many consumers continue to question what levels of pesticides, fertilizers, and antibiotics are safe.
Organic foods are free of antibiotics and synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. To what extent that makes them healthier, scientists do not know. Many of the most harmful pesticides, like DDT, have been banned in the United States, but scientists cannot tell us whether eating foods grown with the current generation of agricultural chemicals raises our risk of any particular cancer or other illness. The effect of consuming a number of different chemicals day after day is particularly unclear, says Jane Rissler, a senior scientist at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, which conducts and analyzes studies and advocates for a cleaner environment.

Zeroing in on the cumulative effects of eating minute, legally allowable doses of multiple pesticides and other synthetic farm chemicals is difficult, as so many other genetic and lifestyle factors affect vulnerability to disease, including family history, diet, exercise, and smoking. In the meantime, more and more Americans are choosing to limit their exposure by buying organic.

A Question of Taste — and Price
With more than 1,700 new organic foods introduced in the last two years alone, you’d think they’d be getting less expensive. But in many stores organic milk still costs 60 percent more than ordinary milk, organic broccoli sells at a 30 percent premium, and organic carrots are about 25 percent more than nonorganic. While small farmers often sell their organics at open-air markets for the same price as other produce, you’ll pay double at some supermarkets, because growing foods organically is more expensive. (The great benefit of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers is that they enable farmers to have higher yields at a lower cost.)
If better taste is what you’re after, the extra cost may be worth it. Working without chemicals forces farmers to create a nutrient-dense soil, according to the USDA. That results in plants with more intense flavors, says Peter Hoffman, the chef-owner of Savoy, in New York City. Organic wines can also have more intense flavors. “Healthier organic vines produce better wine,” says Hoffman.
Fresh breads, muffins, and cakes made from organic flour and other grains are often delicious, too. But many people find packaged organic crackers and cookies less tasty than conventional kinds. That’s largely because conventional baked goods contain highly refined sugars, unhealthy trans-fatty acids, and preservatives. (Organic breads, without preservatives, are often found in the freezer section.)

Fruits and Vegetables
Certain types of produce are more likely to contain residues from pesticides and fertilizers than others, depending on how much of the chemicals the farmer sprays on them and whether the plants are protected by skins or shells. If you choose only three foods to buy organic, they should be apples, pears, and grapes, because these are most likely to soak up pesticides, according to the EPA.
Grapes, especially imported ones, are cultivated with a particularly large dose of pesticides. That may explain the growing popularity of organic wines, such as those from Frey Vineyards and Organic Wine Works. (In the United States, unlike in Europe, certified-organic wines cannot contain added sulfite preservatives, so they often turn more quickly in the bottle.)
Thin-skinned fruits and vegetables, such as peaches, green beans, tomatoes, strawberries, and lettuce, contain more pesticide residues than do foods with thicker skins. Carrots, squashes, and leafy greens, such as spinach, tend to absorb chemicals in the soil. “If I eat vegetable soup, a whole lot of pesticides are in that bowl,” says Kathleen Merrigan, an assistant professor at the Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. The edible portion of thick-skinned produce, such as melons, pineapples, and oranges, is relatively pesticide-free.
Comparatively low levels of pesticides are absorbed by beets, mushrooms, radicchio, and potatoes. In a recent FDA study, 100 percent of samples of these foods contained no trace of pesticides. Pineapples, papayas, kiwis, avocados, onions, and turnips came out well for the same reason. Unless you’re an organic purist, you may do just as well buying the ordinary (cheaper) varieties of these foods.
Organic produce often appears beaten up or misshapen compared with conventional kinds. This is because it is not sprayed with the synthetic dyes, waxes, and fungicides that are applied to regular fruits and vegetables before shipping.

Meat and Dairy
The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that large industrial feed lots supply their animals with about 25 million pounds of antibiotics and related drugs every year to encourage growth and discourage illness in the confined stalls. As a result, people who eat beef, chicken, and pork from these animals may be exposed to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, according to the World Health Organization. While those bacteria may not make you sick, future illnesses you get may not respond to antibiotics. But many consumers are beginning to demand that farmers cut back on antibiotics. McDonald’s now refuses to buy meat from producers that use antibiotic growth promoters. A bill before Congress, supported by the American Public Health Association and the American Medical Association, would mandate the reduction of antibiotics in farming.
Certified-organic animals graze only on organic grain or pastures and are raised without antibiotics. (An added benefit: organic animals are fed no animal by- products, the source of mad cow disease.)
If you can’t find the “certified organic” label, check for “no antibiotics added,” which is also verified by the USDA. The labels “free range,” “natural,” and “grass fed,” on the other hand, are not government regulated.
Websites like www.eatwellguide.com and www.eatwild.com offer listings of family-owned ranches that use organic farming methods. Some take mail orders.
Certified-organic milk, milk products (like yogurt and cheese), and eggs come from certified-organic animals. Organic milk is free of genetically engineered growth hormones. But all milk, even the organic kind, contains dioxin, a by-product of manufacturing and a known carcinogen. Thirty percent of our dioxin intake comes from milk, according to the EPA. The best way to avoid it is to drink nonfat or low-fat varieties, because the dioxin resides in milk fat.
The average nonorganic egg contains as many antibiotics as the equivalent amount of conventional beef, according to the USDA. Organic eggs are free of antibiotics and hormones.

Fish
There’s no such thing as a certified-organic fish. The USDA has no standards for fish in its organics program, mainly because there is no organic food to feed farmed fish in the United States. (There are no organic fish available with which to make organic fish meal, according to Rebecca Goldberg of Environmental Defense, a research and advocacy organization in New York City.) Various studies have shown that farmed salmon contain higher levels of PCBs, pollutants that have been linked to the risk of liver and other cancers, than are found in fish in the wild.
The contaminants in our lakes, rivers, and oceans include PCBs, mercury, dioxin, and DDT. Fish absorb these toxins as the water passes through their gills, and they ingest them by eating other contaminated fish. If you eat fish several times a week, these pollutants may accumulate in your body at levels high enough to disrupt the hormonal and nervous systems, according to the EPA and the FDA. Clearly it pays to consider carefully what fish we eat. But how?
The most important question to ask is, Where does the fish come from? The USDA now requires that seafood labels at large grocery stores describe where a fish comes from and whether it was wild or farm-raised. Environmental organizations, such as the Seafood Choices Alliance (www.thefishlist.org), and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch (www.seafoodwatch.org) offer wallet-size guides that describe which origins to look for. As for local freshwater fish, you can check the cleanliness of its water of origin by monitoring local EPA warnings (www.epa.gov/ost/fish/).
A few rules of thumb: Choose wild ocean or farmed varieties when you can (rivers and lakes are more polluted). Salmon and halibut from Alaska are healthier than their Atlantic counterparts. (Chilean farmed salmon are also less contaminated.) And canned light tuna, which comes from the northern Pacific, contains lower levels of contaminants than canned albacore.
Small fish, like rainbow trout and catfish, have fewer toxins than large, carnivorous fish. The big fish that you can slice into steak-size pieces are high on the food chain. They eat other fish that contain mercury, and they live longer, so the mercury accumulates, according to Jennifer Dianto, program manager of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch. If one whole fish is just enough to feed four, not 14, chances are it’s fairly contaminant-free.
Shark, swordfish, king mackerel, and tilefish contain the highest levels of mercury. Because this nerve-damaging substance is most dangerous to developing nervous systems, the EPA recommends that infants, young children, nursing mothers, and pregnant women (and those who may become pregnant within the year) not eat these varieties.