Organic. Organic? Organic!

After watching the film, The Smartest Guys In The Room, about Enron's fake and reading the chapter "Big Organic" from the book, written by Michael Pollan, called "The Omnivore's Dilemma" I start to find it difficult to believe in everything I from from advertisement and labels.

The name "organic" is a like a diamond ring word; it pretty much adds on a lot more value to a product when it's on its package. I am not the type of person that cares too much about eating "healthy food". I eat McDonald's even when I have already learned that it is "unhealthy" to human bodies. However, the name "organic" still stands out to me. As long as a product bares that name, it means that it got the reason to be more expensive than its competitors.

What does it mean when something is organic? There are many ways to address this term. I would put it as "when something is fresh, clean, and without any other chemicals." Now, the chapter of the book pointed out that when something says it is "organic" it probably doesn't really mean "it is organic" What it's saying is that the companies didn't "lie" to us. Instead, they hide the details from the consumers. I remember when Tina and I were working on the "green business presentation" Ms. Gruber once came and warned us that even when a company says it is a green business and it produces organic products doesn't necessary mean it is the type of "green" we are looking for. Come and think about it, if everything on the selves came from local farm without any pesticides, how would they menage to get that many farm? The process of making organic products is definitely industrialized. At least most of them.

This is pretty similar to Enron's case in some ways. Most of the "green business" out there would tell the consumer how green they are, but most of them wouldn't show the in depth details of how they do things. What's similar is that both Enron and the companies that have the title "organic" hide behind a name or numbers to attract more buyers. The difference would be that Enron just made up everything there. they even made up the numbers that they hid behind. As for most of the green business, they just only gave the broad idea of "organic" but specific details of how they menage to do it and get there.

image source: http://www.nextnature.net/?p=2012