New spin on the organic vs. conventional food debate. In today’s NYT, science writer Harold McGee quotes a study that shows rats prefer the taste of organic wheat to conventional wheat while humans can’t tell the difference!

Let me parse that carefully. I study the rat’s palate. The rat is an uberominivore, but it is also a neophobe. It is acutely aware of the dangers of unknown food. Instead it eats anything that smells of another rat, and it strongly prefers those foods that rats have previously eaten. Among other rats’ leftovers, the hungry rat likes to graze on such treats as grain, livestock feed, and meat, soap, leather, furs, candy, milk, meat, vegetables, poultry, eggs, grain, seeds, fruit, nuts, snails and other rodents and of course it yearns for a juicy human steak, if only humans stayed still long enough, even babies move too much.

A rat is also a coprophiliac. Nothing so delicious and nutritional as a dish of fresh or vintage feces, preferably their own. Rats eliminate an average of between 20-50 droppings per day, along with an ounce of urine, onto whatever’s available – usually the food er call it wheat they’re feeding on. One study claims that 70% of a tonne of wheat had been spoiled by 10-26 rats over the course of 28 weeks. Worldwide, half our food is ruined by rat contamination.

So before I buy into the rats’ preference for organic I need to know how the wheat samples were composed. Maybe the organic wheat sample had a whiff of rat in it…..