I DON’T EAT ORGANIC FOOD
About five years ago, my mother, then in her late 80s, tasted a cheese she really liked at a party. It was made in a remote downland village just ten miles from where she lived. She really wanted that cheese. I was dispatched to seek it out in the market and all the local gourmet stores, none of which she had the strength to walk to. Total failure.
Then someone told her it was for sale in the giant British supermarket chain Tesco as part of their “local” campaign. Now this she could manage–nearby parking, a cart to hang on to or even sit in.
We approached the cheese counter. I was terrified that someone would knock her over, so frail she had become. But we made it. And sure enough the cheese was there. The girl started cutting it and helpfully said, “And it’s organic.”
Now you have to understand that my mother never ate an egg whose parentage was not known to her, never ate chicken because they were dirty birds, never ate bread that did not come from a baker she trusted . . . well you get the picture.
So my mother drew herself up to her full but much shrunken height, and in her still vibrant voice let fly.
I DON’T EAT ORGANIC FOOD.
We left without the cheese, but with lots of puzzled onlookers. Not a whim, not incipient dementia. The well-considered opinion of someone who had been a farmer’s wife for 65 years. She really felt, and I agree with her, that far from being the right and moral thing to do, it was a blind alley for food lovers and hungry people alike. It was her last outing.
Today Russ Parsons of the LA Times published a piece beginning “I don’t believe in organic,” that just flew around the social networks. Good for you Russ. And I think you are finding that there are lots of people who agree with you.
I’d like you to go yet further, though I think we may disagree here.
1) It’s really important to realize that that the current laws about organic in the United States are, from the point of view of those who set the politics in motion, are a pathetic compromise. They wanted large agriculture dismantled in favor of small, labor intensive, chemical averse farms. Good discussions can be found in Warren Belasco’s classic Appetite for Change (1989), ch. 4 and more recently in Julie Guthman’s Agrarian Dreams (2004), ch. 6. It was an honest and heartfelt movement even though I think in the end not the way to go.
They could not get this to fly politically. Instead they had to settle for the relatively narrow legal definition now in force in many countries. This usually seems to boil down to some version of “no synthetic chemicals,” though how this is refined varies from nation to nation. That means no chemical fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, or antibiotics.
2) Because the “no synthetics” compromise was not a bit to the liking of the anti-modern agricultural movement, they were horrified, not happy, when big chains (Wal-Mart) and big agriculture began going organic in the narrow sense.
Here’s a great chart showing how these companies leapt on the organic bandwagon (thanks to Richard Wilk on the ASFS website). A must see.
Because I think the organic policy was based on an ill-founded analysis to begin with, I would like to see both small and big organic set aside. Both a no-chemical policy and an anti-modern agriculture policy seem to me to be misguided ways to go about getting all the things we want–good tasting food, morally acceptable food, food adequate to feed the growing global population.
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Tomorrow back to all your wonderful comments on regional foods.
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