Here's an idea.
The organic movement has been successful
because of our aversion to dirt and growing
comfort with sterility.
In New York, we have these little groceries
on many street corners.
We call them bodegas, and they provide
a limited selection of staple food products, mostly
canned or boxed groceries, and usually a friendly cat
to hang out with.
When I moved to New York, they all kind of
looked like this, which is actually
around the corner from where I get my haircut.
But more and more over the last 10 or so years,
they've started looking like this,
which is in my neighborhood.
Please note the ODB mural next to the organic grocery.
If that is not a great metaphor for Brooklyn's identity crisis,
I don't know what is.
Of course, many bodegas' gradual transition
from neighborhood food shack to well-lit organic grocery
may be the result of gentrification,
the change in urban landscape which
results from an influx of middle and upper middle class
residents, and that will eventually get its own Idea
Channel episode.
Today, I want to talk about the more granular topic
of organic food, a huge movement happening
around the globe of which the transformation
of my local grocery is but one tiny symptom.
Now, it wasn't until the early 20th century
that farming became not organic, and it became so quickly.
Pesticides, man-made fertilizer, genetically engineered food,
irradiation-- a whole herd of generally sort of not awesome
seeming farming practices became normal,
at least as far as the food you get in the grocery store
is concerned.
It's probably worth mentioning the fact
that I see the local food movement
as being related but distinct from the organic food movement.
By the 1930s, some scientists started asking, hey, maybe
this stuff, not so good in the food?
But it wasn't until the 1970s with the recognition
of pollution as a serious global problem
that non-organic farming practices
started getting the side eye.
By the 1980s, the USDA had officially
recommended organic farming practices
for reasons of sustainability.
Further concern amongst the public
about the well-being of farm animals, fair trade practices,
biodiversity, and human health all
watered the soil, which led the organic movement to sprout.
Of course, there is a still lots of information out to pasture.
OK, I will stop.
It's still a bit unclear, at least as far
as human health is concerned, how good organic food really
is for you.
Or maybe the inverse, how bad non-organic food is.
The GMO debate, for instance, is huge,
and I'm not qualified to speak on it at all.
So here's a brief statement from PhD Biologist Mr.
tall, handsome Dr. Joe Hanson.
I'm Joe Hanson, and thousands of research studies to date
have demonstrated that genetically modified organisms
are safe for humans and animals to consume.
That hasn't stopped the EU from passing intense GMO
regulations-- from lots of people and certain food chains
swearing off GMO sources entirely.
Many people generally feel like it is better
to be eating organic, even if it costs
the average American household $4,000 extra per year to do so.
Source.
And that is the part of this that I find really interesting.
The feels.
The organic feels.
Organic amber feels of grain.
I'm so sorry.
Because really it's those feels which
are leading every bodega in Brooklyn
to trade their bright yellow and red tin
signs for green awnings and broccoli logos, even
and especially if it is exactly the same bodega on the inside.
They just started selling, like, Odwalla juices
and have an apple.
Whether people know if or how organic food is better--
and a bunch of research has shown that they don't-- tend
to think it is anyway.
Why might that be?
Easy, some people will say.
Chemicals are bad.
Do not put them down your gullet.
The problem with this attitude is, as Hank Green put it
succinctly--
Everything is chemicals.
Really, I think it has less to do with chemicals specifically
as it does with the feeling that a boundary has been crossed.
Let's talk about dirt for a second.
In her book "Purity and Danger," Mary Douglas
talks lots about dirt and the rituals
we have surrounding cleanliness.
She says that nothing is, in and of itself, dirty.
Things are always dirty in relation
to other things or their context.
Sneakers aren't dirty on our feet,
but they're dirty on the kitchen table.
Used dishes are more dirty in the bedroom
than they are in the sink.
Dirt, she says, is, quote, matter out of place.
Something put where it does not belong.
And while we tend to think of our revulsion to softened
fruit, feet on the table, or bodily detritus as being
grounded in scientific knowledge about the spread
of microscopic sickness causing wee beasties,
it turns out that these revulsions
are more often than not based in cultural ritual
than actual potential science-y harm.
I see this as being the case with organic food, too.
In the United States, as much of the world,
there is some romanticizing of good, old-fashioned farming.
Not that factory farming stuff.
I mean salt of the earth, working
with your hands, farm-to-table honest labor, et
cetera, et cetera.
The farmer is, to many, a kind of mythic hero providing
for his peers and the actions which
comprise farming, like the actions which
comprise much of our daily hygiene regimen,
are not unlike ritual.
To interfere with that ritual, to introduce chemicals
into this beautiful, natural, productive process,
is then taboo, to use Douglas' term.
Specifically, the attitude that any foreign chemicals
which find their way into that process are pollutants.
They are matter out of place.
And the food is, therefore, dirty.
And as we all know, what is not pure is dangerous,
and what is a pure is virtuous.
We see this all throughout our culture.
Myths of purity related to virginity.
Calling anything of a sexual nature dirty.
Saying people have filthy mouths.
Assumed relationships between a disorder and a lack
of hygiene or worse, mental stability.
Saying people clean up nice, and describing
that which is thoughtfully constructed
as polished or tidy.
Modern practices and concepts of design,
especially digital or technological and industrial,
have constant aims to minimize, if not simplify.
To clean things up a little bit.
It's not that thoughtfulness and minimalism are bad,
only that their association with cleanliness
has always struck me as strange and as reinforcing what
has always seemed a growing desire for-- or maybe
preoccupation with-- sterility.
Which, I mean, let's talk about hand sanitizer.
Hand sanitizer is everywhere.
That's no joke.
It is Dial's actual marketing campaign,
and an actual problem.
The FDA is asking for new research
on the long-term effects of exposure
to antibacterial products, due in part
to the apparentness of its constant use.
Triclosan and triclocarban, for instance,
found in some antibacterial products,
may contribute to the increase in antibacterial resistant
microbes.
The World Health Organization is concerned
about the overuse of broad spectrum antibiotics
on both humans and livestock for similar reasons.
In our discomfort with pollutants in all their forms,
we do not hesitate to clean.
But what if, because of the cleaning,
the beasties become less wee and turn into just beasts?
I'm not saying that medicine is bad.
Rather, as Paracelsus said on a recent episode of
"It's OK to be Smart," the dose makes the poison.
Writing for Time, Bill Saporito sees
the obsession with cleanliness as being particularly American.
America has long been a sanitation nation, he writes.
Over the past couple of decades, consumer products companies
have found a target-rich market in exploiting
this history of germ aversion.
They have launched wave after wave of microbe-seeking toilet
bowl cleaners, dish detergents, mouth washes, and no doubt
floor polishes.
He sees the desire to clean as a result of our ancestors' desire
to escape squalor for a better life.
To be clean is the American dream.
I don't know if I buy it.
I don't even think it's particularly Western.
The world over, for all of time, people
have had rituals to maintain cleanliness, to ward off taboo.
We are no different.
It's just that now, there are more of us.
And some of our rituals have a foot in science.
Also, we have things like global markets, manufacturing
and shipping capability, genetic engineering, economic pressure.
Anything that we want bad enough, we get it.
So whether or not it means anything health wise,
organic food feels right because we believe it to be unpolluted.
It's the closest we can come to clean, maybe even sterile
food, a quality we've come to value in so many other facets
of our lives.
Why not what we eat?
But even that is a whole thing that we
could call into question-- the actuality of organic foods'
organicness.
But we're already at 1,500 words,
and I have to get home for my dinner of chemicals.
What do you guys think?
What accounts for all of these good feelings
around the organic food movement?
Let us know in the comments, and I will respond to some of them
in next week's comment response video.
In this week's comment response video,
we talk about your thoughts related to-- I'm
very sorry-- minions.
If you want to watch that, and why wouldn't you,
you can click right here.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of this 100% organic production crew.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit, links
into the doobly doo.
And the tweet of the week comes from GrashUriza
who points us towards a story about trees
with email addresses that filled me with joy.
It's-- yeah.
It's great.
Oh, and one more thing.
This week, Vidcon, I'm there.
My schedule.
Doobly doo.
Come hang out in Anaheim with me.
I'm in Anaheim.
I mean, not right now.
I'm not in Anaheim.
But when you see this, I will be in-- you get it.
You understand completely what I'm saying.