Intern Journal: Organic data streams impact student as she navigates social media

By Megan Michler

I vaguely associated organic with healthy or eco-friendly. If you had asked me why I coupled those notions together, I couldn’t have told you. I suppose at one point some information about organic food had drifted into my ear, dropped some crumbs, and promptly left.

I am not—by any stretch of the imagination—an aficionado of organic agriculture or lifestyle.

In fact, up until a few months ago, I was a veritable clean—borderline painfully pristine— slate when it came to the subject. I almost never bought organic produce, save maybe once or twice on a trip to the Whole Foods store near my school in Long Island or at a Farmer’s Market back home in Pennsylvania. And even then, my decision to buy organic was uninformed, never motivated by any sort of morals I had regarding my eating habits.

My choice was based solely upon two plain facts: it was there, and I vaguely associated organic with healthy or eco-friendly. If you had asked me why I coupled those notions together, I couldn’t have told you. I suppose at one point some information about organic food had drifted into my ear, dropped some crumbs, and promptly left. But the phrase “organically grown” meant very little to me.

My ignorance had nothing to do with limited access to organic options or, for that matter, limited access to knowledge. Both were right at my fingertips. The problem was, as it is with many of us, I just wasn’t listening. Wasn’t asking questions. Simply wasn’t caring.

So when I applied for a volunteer social-media communications internship at Rodale Institute, I came as a newly declared print-journalism major needing experience in the field. Not, surely, as an advocate and staunch believer in organic agriculture, hoping to further the organic movement and change the face of food. I was a small town Pennsylvania girl turned urbanized city chick from Long Island, with the aspiration of magazine writing. I applied because I had toyed with the idea of focusing my writing on nutrition and healthy lifestyle, and, it seemed, this was a good place to test the waters.

When I returned home from my sophomore year at Hofstra University in May, I spent my first week at the Rodale Institute so I could orient myself with its message, experience research at its 333-acre farm and get a firsthand organic education. And what an education I received.

It’s difficult to condense organic agriculture into one palatable dish you can serve up and say, “Well, there ya go, take it or leave it.” There are so many complexities and politics involved. As I found out my first day, if you try to wrap your head around it all at once, you might be left spinning.

Many streams, one river

But it was something that Greg Bowman, communications manager at the Institute, said to me on that first day that gave me a place to start my organic edification. He explained that organic agriculture is like big river, flowing, hopefully, strong and deep. It has many small streams and creeks from many sources constantly feeding it, bringing their own unique makeup to the overall composition. So, I decided the river is where I would begin. It made no sense to try to comprehend the intricacies of the small streams before I really understood the broader picture of how the river flows.

The primary job of my summer internship was to develop and run the Institute Twitter account. This meant that every day I would canvas the internet for news stories, blogs or testimonies that would further the message of the Institute or shed new light on certain aspects of organic farming, and share them with the world in Rodale’s name. That, for an organic novice, is a pretty daunting task.

So, with my “big picture” theory in mind, I read. I read articles, I read tons of Rodale Institute pamphlets and research. Mind you, this was five days after I had finished my college finals, and my brain was on information overload to an unprecedented degree. However, one of the things I read that really stuck with me that week was a speech given by Warren Porter, Ph.D., at the National Pesticide Forum in 2007. In it, Porter focused on the pesticide chlorpyrfos—which is used as an insecticide on many foods we eat, like apples, almonds, corn, oranges—and its affect on humans.

According to studies, the chlorpyrfos has begun to affect the brains of thousands of children around the world, causing a sharp increase in mental disability. Most disturbing of all was the physical toll the use of chlorpyrfos has taken on the children of Sonora, Mexico: pubescent boys have begun to develop breasts with mammary tissue, and, conversely, girls have developed breasts made purely of fat. Sonora provides the United States with a lot of fruit, soy, and wheat—and if they’re being exposed, so are we.

If that’s not the big picture—or at least part of it—I don’t know what is.

My mother has always, always pleaded with me to wash my fruit and vegetables before I eat them, and every time she did I would look her straight in the eye and say, “We’re all going to die from something,” and bite into my unwashed, pesticide-riddled apple, (I was an awful child.) The moment I read that the Porter speech, I called her and said (as we children always end up saying), “You were right. If I ever buy a non-organic apple again, I’m scrubbing it like there’s no tomorrow.”

Not only do pesticide residues pollute our bodies as we consume them through food, but they also contaminate the air and water we share. Instead of using these harmful chemicals, organic farmers weed either manually, by cultivation or by growing weed-suppressive cover crops. They manage insect pests through the cultivation of other beneficial insects and steps toward biodiversity. Crop rotation helps with weeds and bugs.

Food: what we eat

Why should we care? These are our bodies, our children’s bodies, and our future. We should treat them well and with respect. My fellow intern, Betsy McCann, put it to me this way: “People complain about paying extra money for organic food. But…it’s food. It’s what we fuel our bodies with, it’s our gas, it’s what keeps us going, what we need to survive. Why would you not want to eat the best food you possibly can? Why should a few bucks matter to you if you live a better life because of it?” I, for one, couldn’t argue.

As I continued my work, I found more organic benefits: nutritional values, reduced carbon emissions, soil-sequestered carbon, improved treatment of animals—the list goes on. However, one particular kind of reoccurring organic story that I came across in my “tweet” searches fascinated me every time. They were stories—sometimes interviews, sometimes first-person testimonies—about people, all over the world, who had have their lives saved—think about it: saved—by organic agricultural. Some were farmers who had to rebuild their land after chemical methods stripped it of its fertility and found an escape from poverty and starvation in organic methods. Some were common people whose ailments were cured by the nutritional benefits of eating organic. These people’s lives were unequivocally changed by organics. What a huge, colossal impact.

And so, here I am, at the end of my summer plunge into organics and thus, the end of my internship. I can say, with confidence, that I know what organic means for my health, the health of the world and other beings around me.

Organic is the answer, plain and simple. Demand it.

Megan Michler was a communications intern at the Rodale Institute this summer, and is a journalism major at Hofstra University on Long Island, New York.