I remember when and why I chose organic dairy products. One day in 1995, I was eating lunch with a coworker who had a carton of organic milk, and I asked him about it. He told me about rBST, antibiotic contamination, and thyroid hormones in conventional cows. I was dubious. After all, this was the same guy who told me about the secret government plot to engineer the cold winter climate in North Dakota. Apparently the U.S. government wanted (according to him) a sparse population so that its secret weapons and bio-engineering tests would go unnoticed.

I'm still skeptical about both the capability and desire to keep North Dakota cold. (After all, the United States seems to have mastered warming global climate, but not cooling it.) I did start looking into what's in my milk and cheese, and what I found eventually led to my choosing organic milk whenever possible. As a group, we cooperative grocery shoppers tend to research our food choices more than many conventional shoppers. But in an era dominated by information availability, how much do we really know? How do we sort through the overwhelming information that the Internet and e-mail have made available? How rational are we, anyway, at making decisions? In this issue and next, I'll try to give you some tools that will help you sort through information, evaluate it, and support your decisions about how you choose what you eat.

The Rational Consumer

Most of us think we're pretty rational. When faced with a choice - paper or plastic? mushrooms or olives? Bush or Kerry? this job offer, or that one? - we consider our options thoughtfully, call on our knowledge and experience, anticipate the possible outcomes of options, and make considered decisions. Right?

Well, no.

It turns out we're barely rational most of the time, even in the most serious circumstances. We're arbitrary, subjective, and biased. Psychologists and sociologists have made quite a living in the past 40 years, studying our irrational decision-making. It turns out that our irrationality is rather predictable.

First, we don't deal well with statistics. This is not a revelation to those of us who would rather have dental surgery than balance the checkbook. But we don't think well about what it means when we hear, for example, that oatmeal lowers cholesterol by 10%. Does that mean I'm guaranteed that my cholesterol will drop by 10% if I eat oatmeal? How long do I have to eat oatmeal before I see the results? How much oatmeal? If I eat twice as much oatmeal, will my cholesterol drop 20%? What if my cholesterol is really low - will it still drop by 10%? And can I assume that my risk for heart disease and stroke will decline by 10% as well? Ten percent less than what, exactly?

Next, we tend to overestimate our ability to predict the outcomes of our decisions. It turns out that many of our predictions are just hindsight. We fit events to match what we thought we were predicting in the first place.

Finally, we can be rigid. Even faced with evidence that might cause us to question our decisions, we stick with our original plan because we don't want to appear to waver. If you're unconvinced, remember how successful the "flip-flop" label was in the last Presidential election.

When it comes to making decisions about our food, we can be particularly impassioned and unaware of our own limitations. Consider this example. In the 1970's, saccharin was banned because the FDA determined it was a potential human carcinogen. The American people were indignant; they wanted their sugar-free sodas. In response, Congress passed legislation to make saccharin use legal again. Later, in the 1980's, the EPA considered the case of Alar, a pesticide then used on apples, and determined that normal exposure was too low to endanger apple consumers. Public interest groups, Congressmen, and celebrities cried foul, consumers boycotted apples, and Alar's manufacturer withdrew it from the market. Here's the rub: both these chemicals have nearly identical, very small potential to form cancers, and both these chemicals had nearly identical exposure to consumers. Why was one banned and the other deemed safe?

We are poor judges of risk and uncertainty. We don't know how to evaluate what might happen, and each of us has a different tolerance for risk. When it comes to our food production and consumption, we tend to be even more sensitive (what psychologists and economists call "risk-averse"). For example, the website www.snopes.com tracks Internet and e-mail hoaxes, and a quick check at the beginning of January showed over a third of the hoaxes and scams they tracked related to food and water supplies. Clearly, we're concerned.

Compounding the internal challenges we face are those outside of us. The Internet makes information available at the click of a mouse. Googling "Alar" or "saccharin" or "oatmeal and cholesterol" each return tens of thousands of hits. How do we know what's good information and what's bad information? We don't have time to read it all and compile an analysis of the evidence. And now that we know we're irrational decision-makers, what good would it do anyway?

Pointing out our irrationality at decision-making is not criticism; it's a part of our human nature. It's an acknowledgment that the internal field on which our choices play their game is not level. Now that we know, we need some strategies and tools that will allow us even chances of winning the game.

First, we need some tools to help us evaluate and filter the information that's out there. Next, we need some tools that help us make decisions that work for us.

I'm going to try and convince you that what you decide (about mushrooms vs. onions or paper vs. plastic) isn't always as important as how you decide. With all the information available out there about our food, no one among us can master it all. It's based purely on a numbers game: it's a lot easier to learn the rules for multiplication than memorize all the possible outcomes of all the numbers between (say) 1 and 100. Likewise, it'll be a lot easier to come up with a few simple tools - tools we can use over and over - that can help us distinguish between good information and bad information.

Next, I'm going to try and persuade you to become a skeptical consumer. Skeptical, to me, means that I suspend judgment, that I consciously "rein in" the part of my brain that, invariably, leaps to a conclusion. "Hold on," the skeptic says, "how exactly did you come up with that result?" This doesn't mean we have to set aside our opinions, oh no. My friends will tell you I'm not short on opinions. It means that, for the moment, we become more interested in sorting through information than we are interested in what we'll do with it.

If you're with me so far, then we're ready to choose a couple of information-sorting tools.

First, is the starting point sound? Do you buy the initial claim? Does oatmeal really reduce cholesterol by 10%, by absorbing "bad" cholesterol? Pretend like the claim isn't true and treat the investigation like a game. Think of all the other explanations for the claim. For instance, oatmeal might lower cholesterol because people are eating so much of it that they don't have room for as much meat. (By the way, this game is a lot of fun with kids!)

Next, look at the kind of information. Where is it coming from - has the information been collected and presented, or is the information from an "authority" on the subject? Authorities, whether individuals or groups, have been wrong before, and they'll be wrong again. There is no guarantee that a beautifully-designed web site's facts will be any more accurate than a plain web site's facts. Skeptics don't care about ribbons and bows. Useful, powerful information is numbers, pictures, and words that we have to interpret ourselves. It might mean a little more work, but cold hard facts are more persuasive to the skeptical consumer, than who's presenting them and how.

Here's an example. I heard a rumor about the dangers of freezing liquids in polycarbonate water bottles recently. Not too much later, an earnest friend of mine sent me a URL to a nicely-designed web site, complete with a letter from someone with the title "M.D." and links to verify the claims. Those brightly-colored water bottles, a steady fixture on my camping and fishing trips, leached dioxins when frozen (the web site proclaimed). I could also suffer a decline in intelligence, I could lose the ability to speak, and I might become antisocial and withdrawn.

The skeptic in my head spoke up. "Wait a minute," she said. "Does polycarbonate even have dioxins in it? (Questioning the claim.) And who is this guy, anyway, with the M.D. after his name?" (Questioning the authority.) I didn't know what I'd find out, I really didn't. I was just unwilling to accept what I read at face value. I was being asked to believe one person and a few links (selected by the same person). That's not an argument, that's baloney. I won't tell you - right now - what I found about plastic water bottles and dioxins. I will tell you that I never would have found out what I did, if I hadn't been willing to set aside what I thought I knew, and do just a little searching.

In the next issue I'll suggest some more tools for evaluating information and making decisions. Oh, and I'll wrap up the cliffhanger too.