The Omnivore's Dilemma Part II response

What do words - sustainable, organic, and natural - stand for in the time of those words often misuse? That has been my question about organic food industry. Technically, the popularity of organic food has been rising because consumers have become more aware of healthy lifestyle and sustainable and moral way of processing foods. Waste is produced by the nitrogen and pesticide running off the industrial fields and harmful heat energy exerted from tractors and trucks for industrial farming. (Pollan 130). To prevent these problems and following more negative consequences, organic food industry emerged. However, Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma states that organic products even in the organic supermarket aren’t really organic. He says that “I would much rather use my money to keep my neighborhood productive and healthy than export my dollars five hundred miles away to get ‘pure product’ that’s really coated in diesel fuel” (132). This explains why organic foods can be as unsustainable as typical industrialized foods. It neglects saving energy waste, bioregionalism, and seasonality that are supposed to be an ideal standard of organic foods.

I think that saving energy waste, bioregionalism, and seasonality shouldn’t even be the ideal standard, but it should be required to be called “organic foods”. It actually makes me doubt when I see “certified organic” mark on the foods in grocery store because this word has been used so many times in food industry for marketing, fabricating an image of all “certified organic” marked foods are sustainable, green, and fresh which isn’t true in most of the case except in Farmer’s market or more local-concentrated markets. I realized at some point I lost the excitement to see “organic” marked foods which I supposed to think these would make me healthier. It is sad to see how our commercialized and industrialized society leads organic food to be just one of the popular trends that consumers can access without rethinking about foods themselves beyond what a label tells them.

Pollan states that “Our food system depends on consumers’ not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing” (245). It shows that ignorance of consumers let organic foods lose its essence. Industrialized world pushes organic foods to be cheaper and more convenient that distribution and production of organic foods make unsustainable. I believe that organic foods should be only from local farmers who would reduce use of fuel to move around their products. If consumers are more educated about the real concept of organic foods, then they will appreciate foods in a deeper level of understanding there do they come from and how they are processed.

Pollan talks also about slaughter and its cruelty. He argues that how scale makes all the difference in more sustainable and moral killing of animals for foods. Joel, a grass farmer, says that in The Omnivore’s Dilemma “That’s another reason we don’t raise a hundred thousand chickens. It’s not just the land that couldn’t take it, but the community too” (230). Basically, I think that people should stop expecting too much from the land and nature to produce what they want. This relates to booming of industrial organic foods because people have too much greed for faster, more convenient, and cheaper foods so that organic foods are forced to process and deliver in lower quality and in an unsustainable way.