This is an organic pepper that I grew; it's organic because I didn't care enough to do anything to it.As a chemist (sort of), the word organic has a very specific meaning: relating or belonging to the class of chemical compounds having a carbon basis. So, I'm organic. You're organic. Your dog is organic. And pretty much all foodstuffs are organic.
To the USDA, organic has a different meaning: foods that are grown without antibiotics, hormones, pesticides, irradiation or bioengineering. That's it. It does not mean that the food is healthier than foods that do not bear the apparent gleaming gilded halo of a sticker that says "Organic." It has no relationship to processing. You can process the bejeezus out of ingredients that were grown without pesticides.
If you had a batch of organic corn, you could make organic high fructose corn syrup, and I think we can all agree that's just as bad as regular high fructose corn syrup. There are organic toaster pastries, but I can assure you that regular old oatmeal would be a better choice.
Organic can mean a lot of things, but it is not a synonym for healthy.
Maybe it is because people are lazy and we feel that by purchasing the "organic" option we are actually doing something healthy?
ReplyDeleteWould it bother you less if a different word had been used? I agree that that is a maddening misuse of that term. But does that make the neurotoxins in the banana any less of a concern?
ReplyDeleteThere are really two things at play here:
ReplyDelete1) The word itself. I find that I'm significantly less annoyed by the word "natural" except when people try to apply it to chlorinated sugar (and they do! The next person who says "Splenda is natural because it comes from sugar" gets punched in the face and told that plastic is natural because it comes from dinosaurs).
2) The idea that everything that has been made with some set of organic ingredients is automagically healthy.