stlbites.com – st. louis food blog of bill burge

Organic vs. Conventional

Jul 29, 2008 farming, sustainable agriculture

As I catch back up on my life post Art of Food I’ve been sifting through RSS feeds and, in reading a post from the Supermarket News blog Refresh about two nutritional studies pitting Organic against Conventional produce, something occurred to me: Why is it that conventional produce is the pimped-out kind?

I’m fully aware that if I look up the word conventional it probably says something about conforming to standards, but still, I can’t help but feel the word also carries a traditional connotation with it as well. There’s nothing traditional about what companies like Dow or Monsanto do, so shouldn’t this new breed of farming be the one we consider non-conventional as organic farming was the only option until recently? For 10,000 years people have been farming without the need for synthetic pesticides and genetically modified crops and it’s only in the last century that these things have cropped up.

While most of you are hep to what’s going on in your produce sections, the general public is not. That means that when the average person goes into the supermarket it’s the organic stuff that sticks out with the weird label. If we stopped marking organic foods as organic and instead marked the supped-up versions with whatever modified seed produced it along with whatever was sprayed on it, I’m sure we’d see a startling change in consumer demand for what should have been considered conventional in the first place.

But then I’m also no fool and I’m fully aware that this will never happen because of all the lobbyists and big business interests.

Tags: pesticide, Refresh, Supermarket news