Julie Powell has an op-ed today that I, as a Californian who frequents Whole Foods and buys organic, completely agree with:
What makes the snobbery of the organic movement more insidious is that it equates privilege not only with good taste, but also with good ethics. Eat wild Brazil nuts and save the rainforest. Buy more expensive organic fruit for your children and fight the national epidemic of childhood obesity. Support a local farmer and give economic power to responsible stewards of sustainable agriculture. There's nothing wrong with any of these choices, but they do require time and money.
When you wed money to decency, you come perilously close to equating penury with immorality. The milk at Whole Foods is hormone-free; the milk at Western Beef is presumably full of the stuff - and substantially less expensive. The chicken at Whole Foods is organic and cage-free; the chicken at Western Beef is not. Is the woman who buys her children's food at the place where they take her food stamps therefore a bad mother?
Organic food is fine, though the much-touted heightening of taste is generally bollocks, but it's too often used as a mark of personal virtue. It's food that you feel good about buying, that you feel socially-conscious for purchasing, that you think offers moral superiority against its fiddled-with brethren. Of course, it doesn't. At best, it shows you a bit more environmentally conscious than those of your socioeconomic group who shop at Safeway, but then, they're proving thriftier than you.
It's unfortunately true that a switch to organic would be many kinds of disastrous for the poor of this country and, moreover, the poor of other countries. The green revolution would have to be rolled back, self-sufficiency that's only newly enjoyed would be quickly denied, and the increase in misery would more than outweigh the theoretical security that an end to GM foods brought. I remember, in one of Tom Friedman's few good lines, that he got on the French for hysterically fighting against GM foods while smoking packs of cigarettes. The theoretical harm of the former was much easier to use in the morality play than the actual harm of the latter. But that's fine, to each their own: just don't forget that non-GM, non-organic is a choice that can only be made by those with the cash to make it.
