In today’s Inquirer, food columnist Rick Nichols complains about the devaluation of the word “organic” in describing food. I think the piece rambles a little bit, but the heart of the complaint seems to be here:
Organics aren’t built for an SUV economy: They are, by their essence, small-scale, local, landscape-protecting, low-impact, natural.
The Earthbound Farm organic baby arugula salad at Whole Foods, as Steven Shapin wrote in this week’s New Yorker, is indeed grown without synthetic fertilizers, weird genes or toxic pesticides. But the compost is trucked in, the monocultural fields are laser-leveled for speedy mechanical harvesting, and the whole process (long-haul transport included) uses up nearly as much fossil fuel as a conventional head of iceberg lettuce.
Maybe I’m late on the organic bandwagon. Maybe I’m a reflexive Whole Foods defender. But I don’t automatically associate organic with local and low-impact. I associate it with the lack of “synthetic fertilizers, weird genes or toxic pesticides.” Local, low-impact, and landscape-protecting are all good, mind you, but I don’t find them essential to the concept. And if organic farming merely breaks even with conventional farming on the fossil-fuel issue, that still gives it advantages on the health-of-the-food issue. So if it takes some technological compromises to spread that health benefit to others, then I’m willing to file this under “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”