New Organic Vegetable Testing

Spanish scientists have found a way to determine if veggies are truely organic (i.e. not a GMO or grown with synthetic fertilizer or pesticides).  The short of it is that they can test the vegetable with nitrogen isotopic discrimination - or rather they examine the nitrogen in the produce.  They performed the test on sweet peppers and were able to identify which peppers were grown with and without synthetic processes.  Organic fertilizers are generally derived from maneur which is a different type of nitrogen than a synthetic.  You can read the entire article from the Journal of Environmental Quality to see if you can fully understand what the heck they are saying.  From what I gather, the process is expensive and wouldn’t be used for large-scale.  It would be used for suspected fraud.  It also doesn’t take into account any of the farm processes that USDA Organic checks on. 

 The Daily Green also has a nice blurb about it.  I think that it sounds very interesting, but I can’t seem to articulate very well this morning.

Source: Journal of Environmental Quality