Organic Fooled

There is something bizarre going on with organic food. It's everywhere.

My wife came home from Lidl today with one of those weekly specials brochures. Inside there is a 2 page spread about all of the organic fruit and vegetables they sell.

Then this evening I was down in Blackrock and while strolling through Marks & Spencer's foodhall I noticed that everything in sight had that now familiar yellow organic label. It transpires however that there is a whole variety of labels that can be used. This is not clear for consumers in my view.

Call it coincidence but driving around in the car today the podcast that came on was from Business Week. The subject?

"The organic myth"

The gist of the article was that interest in and demand for organic foods has risen spectacularly and producers are struggling to keep up. So much so that it's now hard to tell if 'organic' really means what you think it means.

The folks talking on the podcast discuss how in some cases cattle that produce organic milk are not in fact roaming and eating in lush green fields. They are in muddy pens eating organic cattle feed.

And for this you have the privilege of paying extra for the 'organic' milk.

And in a final coincidence I recall an article earlier this week in the commenting on a scam in the UK concerning so-called organic eggs. The scam covers some 30 million supposedly-organic eggs which appear to have been so-labeled in order to jack up the price.

So, why is it all going wrong for the organic concept?

In my view two things have not helped.

If there was not such a price differential between "ordinary" food and "organic" food then there would not have been such a rush by big producers to get in on the act. They are changing the nature of what organic means, as they import 'organic' ingredients from China and Brazil where the organic concept is not quite the same.

Second consumers are too quick to embrace everything that is labeled as organic. They need to demand more information about why exactly the produce is organic and then decide if that's good enough. In addition there's plenty of stories about the dangers of this type of food such as this one or this one.

For goodness sake, according to the Business Week story you can now buy organic macaroni and cheese out of a box among other things.

Organic food is quickly losing its meaning and is in danger of becoming just another way of conning the paying customer who really does want to do the right thing when they go to the grocery store.