But organic proponents question the findings and also note that the health benefits of organic agriculture can go beyond nutrition.
"If you take the soil out of the system, is it a legitimate organic system?" questioned Carolyn Dimitri, director of the food studies program at New York University.
During his years as an assistant professor of chemistry at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Dietze asked fundamental questions about mechanisms of basic organic chemical reactions, questions he recounted in a recent telephone interview: "How does A go to B? Are there intermediate states?
In the organic industry, the question is how shoppers will react to rising prices.
The organic molecules in question can be vaporised and condensed in a thin layer on to the appropriate surface.
Concentration through either evaporation or freezing of pools, adsorption on clay interfaces, or the generation of colloidal enclosures called coacervates may have served to bring the organic molecules in question in contact with each other.
Since the organic compound in question does not absorb sunlight and the ROS are produced in a separate reaction, this is an indirect photoreaction, facilitated by the clay minerals which presumably act as catalysts by generating ROS from O2 upon exposure to light (Fig. 3e).
Perry and Lu (1992) suggested that the organic matrix in question might be made from polymers of carbohydrates, for example, cellulose [ 14], and this suggestion was reinforced recently by Fry and colleagues who speculated that the hemicellulose, callose, in horsetail cell walls might be a potential site of silica deposition [ 15].
Representatives from large food corporations as well as organic farming cooperatives questioned how Congress had allowed Representative Nathan Deal, a Republican from Georgia, to undermine the organic standard put into effect last October after 12 years of debate, public comment, regulation and legislation.
Last week, the WaPo ran a story headlined "Purity of Organic Label is Questioned" -- a quasi-investigative story on how the organic "program's lax standards are undermining the federal program and the law itself".
