I can answer why organic isn’t as hot selling as stores hope it will be. I can even answer it in one word: Confusion.
To expand on that – the definition of organic isn’t clear. Consumers mean one thing, producers mean another, and the two don’t agree. The definition of natural is the same way. Producers latch on to a label they think will be a hot seller and slap it on their product, often without any real effort to make the product as advertised. There’s no visible benefit to buying organic; it’s all ideology. There’s really not a lot of flavor or environmental or nutritional difference between an organic tomato shipped a thousand miles from its home soil and a locally grown hothouse tomato. There is a difference in price. Some people are willing to pay that difference for an ideology – a lot of people can’t afford to do that.
And besides, they’re talking Wal-Mart here. A lot of the people who shop at Wal-Mart aren’t as interested in saving the environment as they are in getting through the next day. And they have to watch every single penny. The price differnce between organic and not organic can mean the difference betwen having enough food for everyone and gasoline to get to and from work and not having that.
Organic is not hot, but buying local is getting there. There is a significant and noticeable difference between an organic tomato shipped in from a thousand miles away and a tomato grown locally and picked fresh that morning to sell at the farmer’s market – in taste, in nutritional value, and in environmental impact. It’s not a “magic” tomato, it didn’t just appear in the produce department of the grocery store. When you buy a tomato at the farmer’s market, you’re buying freshness, taste, and history directly from the person who helped grow that tomato. It might not be an organic tomato, but it’s a tomato with a face. It’s worth a little bit more. Most of the time, it’s the same price as the non-organic food, making it affordable even for the people living on a narrow margin.
Me, I like faces with my food. I like knowing the history of my food. I like slicing a tomato and thinking about the nice lady in braids from whom I bought it and her story of teaching her daughter how to tell a ripe tomato and watching her pick the harvest from which I was buying a small part, or chopping that onion and seeing again the smile on the young man’s face as I bought it from him and hear him tell me how he and his dad pulled it from the ground that morning. I like buying my buffalo from the rancher who tells me what the buffaloes ate and what he did when the ice storm hit and how he and his neighbors got together to pay for a load of hay to be airlifted in and dropped in the pasture for them.
Organic is nice, but it’s not enough. Personally, I think the hot trend is being able to put a face to the food you eat; it makes you friends, a part of the community, and you get some really delicious real food out of it.
Food with a face to it – that’s the hottest trend.
