Organic Food Analysis

985 Words2 Pages

Organic has long since been a highly accredited term for food. To be organic is to be pure, natural, and above the dirty industrial system that food production has become. This definition however has become tainted. The truth is that organic foods are anything but healthier. In Michael Pollan’s research book The Omnivore’s Dilemma the validity of organic foods are discredited. Pollan argues about organic food, as it is misleading consumers. Similarly to a large majority of livestock, the life of an “organic” animal begins on a farm. For its first few years of life a cow will live on a farm grazing and enjoying life as nature intended. Sadly, they are then rounded up and shipped out to an industrial feedlot, aiming to fatten the animals …show more content…

Pictures of happy cows, chickens, and pigs grazing on luscious grasslands litter every grocery store and product in America. This illusion of natural food is the ingenious plan of large business’s advertising. With the loose description of organic available, companies throw it around as though it means nothing, but sadly when combined with the picture of a happy farmer, it is sold as the healthiest food on the market. “The organic label is a marketing tool…It is not a statement about food safety. Nor is ‘organic’ a value judgment about nutrition or quality” (Pollan 179). Pollan uses the example of Rosie the “free-range” chicken. Rosie is from a supposedly organic farm that raises thousands of chickens to be sold at Whole Foods Markets. Rosie’s life is spent in one small chicken house, where she is tightly packed in with several thousand other “Rosies”. Her “free-range” label is allowed because of one small trap door that allows chickens into a few square feet of grass – which is never utilized, by the time the door is opened the chickens are already several months old and do not know how to live outside the chicken coop. Yet the advertisement clearly reads that Rosie is a free range, completely natural chicken. When compared to a truly natural chicken, Rosie is just the same industrial product as any other feedlot …show more content…

Polyface Farm is the epitome of organic foods, and yet is not labeled as organic. “Polyface Farm is technically not an organic farm, though by any standard it is more “sustainable” than virtually any organic farm” (Pollan 131). Polyface uses no fertilizers, no chemicals, only the natural system that the earth has been running on for thousands of years. The animals provide nutrients for the soil, and the soil provides nutrients for the animals. This system is the most natural and organic food production system possible on this earth – and yet Polyface is not an “organic” farm. There is no accreditation to the word organic any longer. The epitome of organic food is not sanitary (although consists of only natural components) or regulated enough to be organic. This industry is completely flipped upside

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