Chemical food is not cheap

I found this article on Alternet today that echoes something I've been thinking about lately: how to describe non-organic food in a way that more accurately captures what it is.  The word "conventional" as Will Allen states, brings to mind "safety" and "normalcy" --two things that couldn't be further from the reality of the agribusiness method of producing food.  So I've started calling non-organic foods, chemical foods.  Why?  Allen explains:

Is food called "conventional" grown and processed with chemical fertilizers, antibiotics, hormones, toxic pesticides, sewage sludge, irradiation and genetic manipulation? Yes it is...

Clearly, something in our food system has gone terribly amiss since a majority of the food is loaded with poisonous pesticides, laced with antibiotics and hormones and infused with genetically modified growth hormones or genes from rats, bacteria, viruses and antibiotics and then -- through some bizarre logic -- labeled "conventional...

Corporations call chemical food "conventional" to conceal the fact that the food they produce is grown with the most toxic chemicals on the planet.

The rest of his article explains the various subsidies that US agribusiness has won in order to make chemical food "cheap".  At least in the checkout line.

Comments

[Brandon]

Oh please may I post this? Thanks!! I so want/need to find a list of foods that are available in grocery stores that dont have HFCS --if there are any!

[Katie]

Fair enough when talking to people who have MORE power than the speaker (or not-downtrodden people representing companies that do).

But please be careful about adopting this and encouraging others to adopt this as a default way of speaking.

I have been THANKFUL for remembering that there's a positive-sounding way to describe "chemical" food at the farmer's market, where many of the famers are too poor (we've got lots of refugee immigrants whom our state found land and set up as farmers, since that's all they did back in their home countries) to do anything pure enough to call "organic."

Yet...they're traditional farmers from places where they didn't dump chemicals all over stuff, and I see them eating their own food w/ their kids...

...and when it's seemed polite enough to ask, I've inquired once or twice about methods, and I've decided that I'm confident 99% of them are using "sort of chemical, but not ridiculous" methods.

And I've also decided that their farm labor practices--working their asses off but doing it as a family, not hiring a bunch of unethical assholes to rape--oops, I mean deny water to--oops, I mean "manage" migrant workers, MORE than makes up for the one or two rounds of "some fertilizer here, a little spray on that plant" that keep them from ever getting call their food not "chemical."

See what I mean?

I value what they're doing so much (the fair labor, the moderation w/ chemicals) that I couldn't POSSIBLY bring myself to put pressure on them to reform their chemical things faster than they feel they comfortably can.

They've been through too much already.

And it's not like they don't KNOW. Of course they know that no chemicals at all are best.

Just like poor women aren't ignorant of nutrition even though they're taking home Coca Cola & cereal every week at the store. (Did you hear about the study where when people got extra food welfare good for produce & farmer's markets (which a lot of food welfare isn't--just cereal, juice, & canned tuna), they used them up completely without even being TOLD of the nutritional benefits upon being given the extra food welfare?)

So...I trust that they know, and that when they've gotten enough money and security, they'll switch over...and I'm not gonna hurt them with my language.

:-\