Mon 16 Oct 2006
Most people I meet don’t have to wait long to hear my vision of city rooftops covered in gardens providing food for the building’s residences, or even better, an ecovillage that grows it’s own organic food and is completely self-sustaining and self-reliant. It’s a little easier to grow gardens on rooftops and local gardens than to raise livestock, so the eco-village model is certainly superior in my view. The amount of fuel that is spent on transporting produce from farms to cities is obscene. At least here in Beijing you can see the famers bring in their delicious veggies on horse-drawn carts, so they are not burning fossil fuels in the process, though they likely would if they could. And there is certainly nothing organic about the way those vegetables are grown. There is a budding organic farming culture taking off here, but it has a long way to go.
In the US, I used to shop at chains like Whole Foods and Wild Oats and was thrilled that I had easy access to such a wide variety of organic products. Alas, it was the beginning of the end. In his article entitled The Sad Death Of ‘Organic’ How weird and depressing is it now that Kellogg’s and Wal-Mart are hawking ‘natural’ foods?, SFGate columnist Mark Morford elloquently desribes the death of organic farming for the masses and perhaps the death of any meaning to the very word organic.
[tags] organic, whole foods, wild oats, natural [/tags]
One Response to “When the word “Organic” becomes meaningless”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
January 1st, 2008 at 10:53 pm
[…] to pay a bit more for organic, although thanks to the lobbying efforts of the major food suppliers, even that label is now suspect. The fact that such products are now available in Beijing is wonderful, but the difference in price […]