I think the food movement began with excellent intentions—sustainable agriculture, reduced pesticide pollution, combatting obesity, more humane treatment of farm animals.
But it's become excessive. It's less about transforming the food supply than an inchoate bourgeois anxiety about what we're putting into our bodies.
We eat organic nowadays not because of its environmental benefits but because we have some vague sentiment that anything with chemicals must be bad for us. The more simulated, machine-ridden our lifestyle, the more we want to eat "natural." It's an understandable impulse but it has nothing to do with making good food policy.
Take this study in the scientific journal PlosOne. The researchers concluded natural pesticides of the kind used by organic farmers are more damaging to the environment than synthetic ones:
organic approved insecticides had a similar or even greater negative impact on several natural enemy species in lab studies, were more detrimental to biological control organisms in field experiments, and had higher Environmental Impact Quotients at field use rates.
I am sure there are plenty of flaws in the study and plenty of scientific studies showing the opposite, but the point is the food movement is really no longer interested in whether its assumptions are backed by science. "Natural good, artificial bad"—that's the credo and it's the reason so many have been duped by food companies that repackage junk food in boxes and containers depicting scenes from nature and make a killing.
Natural is an aesthetic we apply to cuisine. It's the latest trend. That's all.
The real problem here is that this focus on what we eat makes the food movement to all about what we buy as consumers. But the solution to obesity, pollution, animal cruelty, and all the other ills associated with food production lies on the macro-level--in public policy at both the national and international level. For Christ sake, we have a worldwide obesity epidemic on our hands. It won't be halted by growing more heirloom tomatoes.
We need to focus on issues like urbanization and poverty, replacing grain subsidies with subsidies for vegetable crops, increasing food stamp benefits, controlling the spread of global fast-food franchises, and passing international environmental regulations.
If GMOs or synthetic pesticides will aid in this endeavor, by all means let's use them. Otherwise we're doomed to a myopic focus on "eating natural" that will do nothing to help people or the planet.