I buy and eat organic almost exclusively, and have been for about 20 years now. I will do without, in other areas, in order to be able to afford it.

I considered getting into organic growing back in the 80s, when organic was just catching on.

My new novel’s protagonist has chucked everything to start over as an organic farmer.

So yeah, I support the organic food paradigm. But it doesn’t surprise me that as a social experiment, it’s gotten a little shady around the edges.

In Slate, the aptly named Field Maloney looks at how Whole Foods plays loose with its “why organic” in-store spin and writes

When the Department of Agriculture established the guidelines for organic food in 1990, it blew a huge opportunity. The USDA—under heavy agribusiness lobbying—adopted an abstract set of restrictions for organic agriculture and left “local” out of the formula. What passes for organic farming today has strayed far from what the shaggy utopians who got the movement going back in the ’60s and ’70s had in mind.

Well I was sitting in the living rooms of those shaggy utopians. Their biggest worry: if they didn’t bring in the feds, agribusiness would hijack the “organic” moniker and corrupt it.

They gambled that federal control would protect their business model, and ceded control.

C’est la vie.

It’s naive to think that attempts to script virtuous outcomes won’t, from time to time, lead to less-than-virtuous results. (For another example, look at the questions raised about Fair Trade coffee in this Reason article).

Yet Maloney’s observations are weak for being overly narrow. In Rochester, for instance, people are banding together in cooperatives for the sole reason of giving direct patronage to local organic growers (email me, btw, if you’re from around here and want to know more). Unless we’re an anomaly, which I doubt, that’s happening all over.

Furthermore, as much fun as it is to decry that “five or six big California farms dominate the whole industry,” that’s still a lot of acreage that isn’t getting pesticides dumped on it regularly.

Not to mention the fact that the organics mindset has dragged even conventional farming partway to the dance, ushering in more responsible use of pesticide (e.g. integrated pest management, where you spray only when you actually observe pest damage, instead of prophylacticly).

Bottom line: we’re still better off with organic growing that without it.