Hardly Organic

Project Reflection

                The main focus of this project was to analyze the massive industry surrounding food, and how it affects our lives. The main piece of the project was reading The Omnivores Dilemma over the course of a few weeks, and looking closely at Michael Pollan’s rhetoric, but this was accompanied by a few tangents. We also watched Fresh, a movie that focuses on the food industry and all of the money to be made in it, read a couple papers that tried to give the industry’s perspective as an answer to documentaries like Fresh and Food Inc., and spent a day attempting to find out where the ingredients in food came from by calling the companies. After this, we began our project work time.

Our task was to create a piece of visual rhetoric that conveyed our perspective, or the perspective we chose to take. The perspective I acquired during this process is that industrial organic food is hardly organic compared to local, farm fresh food, so my project took a satirical prospective at industrial organic food. The end result was a cartoon of sorts that shows organic food being loaded onto the same dilapidated old cargo ship as non-organic food, so that it can be shipped a couple thousand miles in order to reach the market shelves. But, this project had altered my eating habits a little because I am starting to eat healthier, as well as my perspectives. For instance, my family has always hunted, grown vegetables, and eaten local meet not because we were trying to be organic, but more because the food just tastes better and my parents like to keep the “old way” of doing things instilled in us. Doing this has never really been a big deal to me, it was just part of life, but during this unit I realized that my family is doing pretty well in what I would say Pollan’s perspective would be, more so than I would have realized had we not done this study.

Hardly Organic

In America right now there is a big push to end the industrial farming system, and go back to the old way of producing food, organically. Consumers are starting to ask what actually goes into their food, and most are not okay with the amount of chemicals and genetic engineering in it, so they are turning to organic foods. Large food corporations have realized the money to be made in the organic market, and subsequently have started to farm organically on an industrial scale. These foods are technically organic, by the FDAs definition, but I don’t think they can hold water against local, farmer’s market organic products because of the carbon footprint they leave on the environment.

                 The industrial food system that our country operates on right now is far from the farm 60-70 years ago. Back then farms produced a wide range of food products, ranging from pigs to strawberries, but that has change dramatically. Now, there are massive, monoculture farms (farms that grow only one crop over and over again) where the small diverse farms used to be and this presents a problem. When you grow one crop over and over again, you end up stripping the ground of its nutrients and as a result end up having to use fertilizers to replenish the ground. The excess fertilizer usually turns into runoff that hurts the environment around the farms. Also, having only one crop puts the farmer in a risky spot because if the crop fails, then the farmer will go bankrupt. To combat this problem, we are taking our crops to the labs and turning them into “super crops”, otherwise known as genetically modified organisms (GMOs). GMOs are organisms that we have taken and crossed with another organism to produce a desired result.  For example, we have taken the gene that prevents fish from freezing in close to freezing water, and crossed it with a tomato gene to produce tomatoes that don’t die if they are hit by a frost. Eating foods that have been altered in such manner has proven to be undesirable to consumers, so they are going “back” to eating organic foods.

                When you think of organic food two things come into your head: that it’s better for you and that it’s better for the environment, but only one of these may prove true. In our supermarkets we have organic food, but if you look on the label it’s very possible you’ll find that it was grown outside of the U.S. It was most likely grown on a farm that also grew GMO crops as well, and was transported the same way, if not a more costly way, and this is what my poster focuses on.

                In the picture, pineapple from an island in the Caribbean is being loaded onto a cargo ship to be transported to the U.S Half of the cargo boxes are labeled organic, because they meet the criteria for it, and the other half don’t have this label because those pineapples weren’t grown organically. Now, these are transported on the same ship, the SS Organic, a ship that is less than environmentally friendly. An excessive amount of black smoke is pouring out of the smoke stack, oil is leaking out of the hull into the harbor, and there is rust on the ship, so it is really in need of repair. I exaggerated all of these aspects to show that while organic products eliminate the need of chemical fertilizers, when you transport them hundreds to thousands of miles before consuming them, the carbon footprint left behind covers up any eco-friendly process that occurred during the growing.     

                Not to say that organic food and regular (GMO) food are the same, because organic food is healthier for you and doesn’t require fertilizer. However, I am saying that organic food from the Dominican Republic leaves a much larger carbon footprint than local organic food like you would find at a farmers market. The FDA’s definition of organic is valid, but under some situations it would be more appropriate to call it hardly organic, especially when the food is from another continent. If you really want to eat organically, buy locally grown, farm fresh food that hasn’t used near as much nonrenewable fuel to reach you.