….Organic Food is Over-Rated
1. Who really knows if organic is really organic. The standards to declare something organic are all over the place. In fact, you could probably make up your own rules, and no one could really call you on them. I’ve run across eggs described as organic but they’re really produced by free-run hens, who do, in fact, get to run free but are probably pumped with antibiotics and hormones.
2. Organic food is expensive. You want to be healthy and you want to support food production methods that are environmentally-friendly BUT you have to pay a premium to do it. Come on, $6 for a dozen eggs and $9 for three bags of milk; that’s a huge premium to be organic. All of which means being organic is something really available to the rich who can afford to do their grocery shopping at places such as Whole Foods (aka Whole Paycheck)
3. Just because something is organic doesn’t mean it’s environmentally friendly. How can you really justify eating an organic avocado flown in thousand of miles from South America? You’d have to do an awful lot of bicycling to offset the carbon load for the pleasure of off-season, imported organic vegetable or fruit. Maybe we should be buying local and organic, or just local.
4. Sure, there are credible people producing and selling organic food because it’s apparently the right thing to do, but there’s also a growing number of entrepreneurs and, increasingly, large corporations selling organic because the profit margins are extremely healthy. A lot of food producers and retailers are push green because of the green (money).
5. What’s pushed being as organic is a little crazy. Organic, mass-produced apple sauce? Organic potato chips? Right.
For more, check out this BusinessWeek story entitled “The Organic Myth”, and Robert Kozinet’s blog post on whether organic is just a branding scam. To be fair, The Great Beyond has a post on a European Union study that assets organic food is better for you.
