The Truth About Organic Food

There's an interesting article in the New York Times about the complex realities that lie behind the cuddly concept of "organic" food - and how it's not quite as easy as banging a certain kind of label on food. I particularly liked this formulation:

As the organic movement has long maintained, cheap industrial food is cheap only because the real costs of producing it are not reflected in the price at the checkout. Rather, those costs are charged to the environment, in the form of soil depletion and pollution (industrial agriculture is now our biggest polluter); to the public purse, in the form of subsidies to conventional commodity farmers; to the public health, in the form of an epidemic of diabetes and obesity that is expected to cost the economy more than $100 billion per year; and to the welfare of the farm- and food-factory workers, not to mention the well-being of the animals we eat. As Wendell Berry once wrote, the motto of our conventional food system — at the center of which stands Wal-Mart, the biggest purveyor of cheap food in America — should be: Cheap at any price!

This is a key point that most people do not get - one, indeed, that I had never thought about until recently. And until more of us do start thinking about it - and acting on it - I fear the world is in big, big trouble. (Via Against Monopoly.)