What’s going organic all about?
If you’re buying organic to reduce your exposure to toxic chemicals, you’re right, but you’re missing most of the point.
Pesticides are bad for your health. Though that could seem quite obvious considering these are chemicals that were designed to kill living things, scientific evidence keeps piling up to confirm that intuition. Limiting our exposure as consumers to these chemicals is undoubtedly the main reason explaining the sharp increase in the consumption of organic products in Western countries over the past few years, and that’s obviously a sensible thing to do, because who wants to eat poison, right? (I’m using the term “organic” very generally here, in the simple sense of “grown without chemicals”. Labels and certifications are useful, but the basic idea is universally understandable).
I’ve heard people in the past say stuff like “organic vegetables don’t have more vitamins” or “who said organic was better? I don’t see any difference in taste”, which just doesn’t make any sense when toxic chemicals are what’s in question, not taste or vitamin content (these remarks are sort of like complaining home made lasagna takes more time to make than mac & cheese from a box. A true but pointless remark.) You don’t hear that kind of comments much anymore, because the idea that “conventional” agriculture is full of poison has gained serious traction, and along with it the idea that organic food is healthier because it’s free of that poison. Good.
Look around you, there’s an entire planet
But now that this is just about clear in people’s heads, let’s push things further. Organic farming isn’t just about protecting your health as a consumer. It’s not even just about you as a human being. It goes much deeper than that: it’s about preserving life. Your life as the person eating the poison-free apple or lettuce of course, but also that of farmers and workers who produced them and, even more importantly, it’s about preserving the life of insects and microorganisms, as well as all the birds and other animals that live off them (who are rapidly disappearing due in large part to… pesticides), not to mention participating in preserving fresh water resources. Think of it this way: if agriculture was massively organic, would Europe’s waterways contain 100 different pesticides, including some that have been banned? Would 100,000 people get cancer from tap water every year in the US alone…?
We’re just humans, whether we live or die doesn’t matter much: what matters more is how much of the world around us we’re willing to let live.
Basically, we’re talking about entire ecosystems, and by extension, the life of our planet as a whole. And I think we can all agree that’s just more important than getting enough vitamins or even avoiding cancer. We’re just humans, whether we live or die doesn’t matter much: what matters more is how much of the world around us we’re willing to let live by avoiding to douse it in poison. Furthermore, if we’re to take a step back, going organic also means eating seasonally (at least it should), therefore reducing greenhouse gas emissions caused by transporting food across the globe and heating greenhouses to grow it in climates it shouldn’t be growing in. In other words, consuming organic products means radically changing the ways we produce and consume food by injecting some common sense back into them, and using our planet’s resources much more responsibly in the process.
Speaking of common sense: we should take a minute to realize that what we call “conventional agriculture” is actually the industrialized, chemically-enhanced version of agriculture Western civilization invented over the last 6 or 7 decades to replace a traditional model that had been in place for ten or twenty thousand years. (Yes, the number of mouths to feed on the planet grew tremendously during those decades, but we now know that the average yields of intensive agriculture are bound to continue to decrease whereas agroecological practices could very well feed the world in a sustainable way — agroecological farming is not a synonym for organic farming, but they share the same common principles of respect for biodiversity).
An organic state of mind
So going organic involves a tremendously bigger picture than taking care of our own selves. When you go for those organic produce at the store, your choice carries with it huge consequences. It involves an entire worldview, actually. In a way, consuming organic is a state of mind, and agriculture is just one aspect of it.
When you buy organic food, you decide to be part of a certain system, to give your money to people who are trying to do the right thing by doing away with deadly chemicals and promoting life instead, to put things simply. And that system goes way beyond the farmers who actually grew the food. The store you go to (or the absence of store if you’re purchasing directly from the producer, which is a political gesture in itself) and the entire supply chain that brought the food to you are all part of a system that represents as an alternative to the dominant industrialized one. And as we should all know, consumers have the power: what they demand is what will be offered, every time. Changing our buying habits could change the entire system (and make the price of organic food drop in the process).
The idea that going organic is all about avoiding the consumption of chemicals is like saying that skiing is all about wearing warm and puffy clothes.
Taking another step back, making this choice of what you consume and whom you buy it from is just the tip of the iceberg of a worldview where you consider respect for people and ecosystems as a priority. Take California almonds for example (represented by the Almond Board of California). When you buy them, you’re supporting a system where the norm is intensive monoculture, the exploitation of people (plantations and machinery designed so that the smallest possible number of minimum wage employees can harvest the largest possible number of trees) and the exploitation of nature (beehives transported over hundreds of miles across the US for high-efficiency pollination — killing thousands of bees in the process –, entire valleys turned all but sterile, where nothing grows but one single species of almond tree…). The reasons you might start refusing to buy such almonds and go for, say, an organic kind instead, can have to do with social justice, climate action, protecting biodiversity, water preservation, favoring responsible capitalism… all that in addition to not ingesting pesticides. Basically, you’d like the world to be a better place and that’s why you don’t want to eat those almonds. And that’s the true significance of buying organic.
At the end of the day, the idea that going organic is all about avoiding the consumption of chemicals is like saying that skiing is all about wearing warm and puffy clothes. Sure, one goes with the other, but there’s a hell of a lot more to it.
