The Organic Trend

[Calavera Diablos]

I'll tell you right off the bat, I want to take most of the foods from Whole Foods and Trader Joe's home with me, so I can worship it like a Greek deity before consuming it. Both places carry a large variety of high quality products that I don't mind shelling out extra money for. I love eating and WF and TJ's can provide me with some tasty vine ripened tomatoes, young basil (though finding ones that haven't been hydroponically grown is a task in itself... sorry, hydroponic basil has NO FLAVOR) and decent mozzarella for my summer Caprese binge. Thanks to those stores, extra-virgin olive oil is always in my family's home. It's become a staple along with rosemary garlic bread and balsamic vinegar. What DOES bother me is that so many of those herbal remedies really don't do anything. Honestly, most of the herbal pills that are sold are no better than taking a placebo and chewing on some grass.

As an example, I suffer from intermittent insomnia, so I naturally had a whole truckload of sleep aids thrown at me from friends who also liked Whole Foods. I checked out most of the different types of sleeping aids they reccomended and they all shared one major flaw. Most of them relied solely of the presence of St. John's Wort and little else. That particular herb is good for dealing with mild to moderate depression and anxiety problems, but not so much in the realm of sleep. I ended up grabbing some melatonin supplements, which actually is used medically to help people sleep naturally. Whole Foods and Trader Joe's aren't neccessarily to be burned down for hosting a bunch of a fake drugs since they also provide effective treatments on their shelves. These stores are places of business, so maybe a few products fly under the radar or maybe they just don't really care. I can't say. At the same time, they also tend to get damned preachy about their food.

What I do think is the problem is the fact that many places are tryng to cash in on being "earth sensitive" without providing any benefits at all. There are tons of so called healthy drinks out there that have more sugar and other crap in them than soda. I also despise the marketing ploys some products use. I don't like reading some large paragraph about impoverished sherpas hiking to some pure fountain of melted glacier water when your product is really manufactured in, say, Portland, Oregon. It's silly. Fabricated human suffering will not improve the taste of my Himalayan wonder tonic.

I can see both good and bad aspects of places like Whole Foods, but do they really need to abuse the trendiness of organic food to be successful as a business? I can see them being just as successful without catering to the gullible, New Ager, Neo-Pagan crowds.

[Fluffy]

VoldeMart has an organic foods section Once again, I have to emphasise that corporate America will ALWAYS try to pass stuff off as good for us, the economy, etc., but that it's all going to come down to local organisations keeping people genuinely informed about what's good for us and WHY.

The trouble here is that we have a natural foods co-op next door, but it's so expensive that the only thing we can afford to buy there is coffee (and that's just because I'm a snob about coffee). Loaves of bread are US$3.50. ! That's like three times what we normally pay out here - crazy! So of course VoldeMart can make a ton of money foisting "natural" foods on us (that are, as Cal says, crammed full of crap, genetically engineered, raised on massive doses of hormones, etc.) because the prices are so high at the co-op. We don't shop there for any reason, let alone cheap "organic" food - we go to another (locally owned) grocery who have started carrying (local) organic foods - and I do think that it's usually worth it to pay extra for healthy food, but $3.-freaking-50?!

[KoNeko]

I usually go to my local food co-op to buy things to make bread, and those ingredients are cheaper than buying bread from Voldemart (HAHAHAHA!) and it's still got all the good stuff in it. If you can get away with the time it takes to make bread, I would definitely recommend it. Same goes for making pasta. The expensiveness in natural foods from co-ops usually comes from their production process, so you can cut that out if you make the food yourself. Downside is the cost you pay in time consumption.

I don't usually go to grocery stores. Since the vast majority of my diet consists of vegetables and bread and rice and lentils, the only time I'd go to a store is to buy things like milk and juice and olive oil. My vegetables come from the local farmer's market (in the summer anyways, and in the winter most of the time things are frozen, thawed out and then sold in stores, and farmers markets can't do that) and my rice and lentils come from the co-op. I don't really see the point in buying things like vegetables from grocery stores when you can get them direct from the farmers, who can tell you what is in their stuff themselves.

[Fluffy]

We have some friends who are part of a cooperative organisation that distributes goods directly from the farms - our only qualm with that is that we don't have a kitchen and so can't prepare some of what would be our share of the goods if we joined If they set it up so we could be selective, that would be awesome, but for now we don't mind that the farmers' market is held in a lot about a block from our shop, twice a week (though it's now on hiatus until spring).

I still do eat cheap, processed food, but only because of the no-kitchen factor. As soon as we have a kitchen, I want to switch to something like what you're doing, Ko - because once I found out what all was in the crap I eat (Fast Food Nation - ickarrific), I realised that I'm pretty much killing myself.

It's good to see more and more people aware of this, but I worry that they seriously believe that Voldemart's "organic" products really are organic. They're as organic as their "made in America" stuff is really made in America, which is to say, no it isn't.

[hermoine]

So I must admit that the first thing I had to do upon reading the title of this thread was actually go check out what Organic food is. And no wonder I had no idea about it(apart from the minimal stuff I recall we did in environmental science a week or two ago); you barely find any organic food around here. Or rather, nobody ever mentions the distinction. You go to the grocer's or supermarket and there is no label saying "This is Organic Food" or anything of the sort. A lot of people are aware of the whole pesticide problem but mostly they just tell you to wash the product thoroughly and off you go.

When I come to think of it, I'm sure there are organic farmers around. I mean my grandfather who does it mainly out of not having much to do doesn't use pesticide, and when you go walk in the countryside pretty close to my house at certain times of the year, the odour makes you go "Oh la la!" But I digress.

Now you guys mentioned making your own pasta. My aunt does that at times, mainly with ravioli and my grandmother makes the pizza dough and all that herself. I do however admit that I've never heard of bread being so costly, and most definately not of organic bread(excuse my ignorance if I got the title wrong).

[KoNeko]

Well, it's not like, SUPER ridiculously and prohibitively costly for organic bread (it might be around $5 a loaf or something), but compare that to your cheapo supermarket white bread or something which is $1 or $2 for a giant loaf. The grain/wheat bread you get at the store is maybe $2 or something. Buying breadmaking ingredients (such as the grains and yeast and flour) isn't that much and yields a lot more bread, and since you made it yourself you know what's in it. Same with pasta, although I still need to fix my recipe for that because sometimes it comes out blobby.

[Calantha]

I would suggest seeing the film People Like Us. It might be difficult to find--it's a documentary that goes into detail about classism, but one of the main parts is the exploration of food co-ops...and even better, what type of bread you buy.

According to the film, people who are in the lower half of the economic scale (generally more common with people living below, at, or slightly above the poverty line) buy white bread. This makes sense because white bread is cheaper to make (also quite unhealthy) and is, of course, cheaper to buy. So for years poor people have basically been forced into buying unhealthy white bread.

However, when given the chance at local food pantries, the people refuse to take the free handout of wheat and multigrain bread because they prefer white bread and would rather buy the Wonderbread than the healthy wheat bread.

Why does this matter? Organic (or even healthier food) has become, I believe, a form of classism. We wonder why Americans aren't healthy? We wonder why it appears that "rich" people are sterotyped to be beautiful while poor people are sterotyped to be obese (with the exception of the starving)--because food prices dictate what things people eat. So some of us get the healthy wheat and some of us get the white that sticks to the top of our mouth like puddy. It ties back into organic food. If places like Wal*Mart are giving their food titles like "organic" it's only furthering classism in a sneaky and inevitably socially unhealthy way--probably moreso than the outright classism we see elsewhere.