Organic food: Still More Than an Elitist Lifestyle Choice

from Civil Eats:


Organic food: Still More Than an Elitist Lifestyle Choice

September 12th, 2012
By Twilight Greenaway


It happens like clockwork; every few months, a rant against local and/or organic food appears in one of the papers of record. The author is nearly always an educated man who uses the words “elite” and “elitist” at least 175 times while defending today’s corporate food system and implying directly or indirectly that changes to the status quo—which often inherently begin with those who can afford to make them—should be seen as suspect at best, and downright damaging at worst.

There was James McWilliams’ 2009 book, Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, and the whole array of anti-locavore screeds that accompanied it in the Atlantic and The New York Times. And among the many others that have come since were James Budiansky’s 2010 claim that locavores needed math lessons and Canadian academic and author Pierre Desrochers’ recent book, which argues that “locavores do more harm than good.”Then last week, Roger Cohen, a British columnist for The New York Times and its European counterpart, the International Herald Tribune, joined the chorus by calling organic food a fable. In the op-ed, which was prompted by a Stanford University mega-study which questioned the nutritional value of organic foods and topped theTimes’ most-emailed list over the weekend, he took an all-too-familiar tone:



Ah, there they are again—those narcissistic, organic-eating straw men we all know and love. But Cohen doesn’t stop there. He dismisses organic as an “effective form of premium branding,” compares feeding your child organic baby food to sending them to private school, calls it an “elitist, pseudoscientific indulgence shot through with hype,” and returns to the oh-so-familiar assertion that organic can’t possibly feed our growing population in the years to come. It’s along these lines that he cries out: “I’d rather be against nature and have more people better fed.” ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://civileats.com/2012/09/12/organic-food-still-more-than-an-elitist-lifestyle-choice/