Nobody said they were, really, but wow! The NYTimes most emailed article is entitled Five Easy Ways to Go Organic, and it’s basically a blog post (no, it is a blog post) with an annotated list of five foods that are worth the trouble and money to buy organic. These are: milk, potatoes, peanut butter, ketchup and apples. Some of these things are unexpected, right? Like ketchup. It has to do with research that indicates “organic ketchup has about double the antioxidants of conventional ketchup.” Doubtless. And peanut butter has a lot of fungicide in it. Fine, we’re sure it does.
This list is obviously very family-oriented, and normal families at that. If everyone in America switched over to organic in those categories, it would force big farma to make serious reforms.
It’s also much more you-oriented than everyone-oriented. A big chunk of the organic movement is about sustainable agriculture, not just what’s healthier or better tasting for a given consumer; those are just side effects.
And also, these five things represent but the tiniest fraction of what’s superior in organic form. What’s not superior? We guess it’s hard to quantify that superiority in order to make a price judgment, especially given our completely whacked-out sensibilities of the marginal value of better food.
But basically, this list strikes us as Old News. We guess it’s still pretty relevant to a plurality of NYTimes readers, though.
Five Easy Ways to Go Organic [NYTimes]
