There is a Chinese middle class for the first time ever and they have decided to avoid their numerous conventional food scares by opting for organic food scares.

To-date, it is has been entirely possible for Americans gullible enough to believe they are getting organic oranges in the winter to do so without a huge bump in cost.  Not in the future.  The Chinese have gotten positively Western in their willingness to buy ethical soap, bottled water and organic food.  Their motivations for organic food are a little different than ours.  They are not worried about the environment (for example, they don't think they should be told to not buy an air conditioner now that they can afford it, because of some concern about the environment, when all of the Western world has them), they only care about mitigating their safety issue.

Tony Zhang, founder and president of Pudong Da Tuan, one of the largest organic farms  in the Shanghai area, told Jing Daily's Nora Chen, “Demand for organic vegetables in China is primarily driven by the need for safe food. Only a small portion of people choose it as a low carbon, environmentally friendly option as it is in other countries.” 

If even the Chinese are in a panic about the safety of their food - and 25% of organic food imported from China is just regular food, including synthetic pesticides instead of toxic natural pesticides - why in the name of Gaia is anyone in America comfortable buying it? They are immune to Hepatitis A because everyone is exposed to poor sanitary and hygienic conditions from birth so if even they think their food is risky, so should you.

The fact remains, if you really care about how organic your food is, you are not buying oranges in the winter - it's not natural to ship things from other countries.  If you are buying imported organic food in the winter, you are coddling yourself intellectually with a feel-good fallacy. It is not healthier, it is not safer, it is certainly not nutritionally or structurally superior, and it is not better for Mother Earth.

Now, the giant market of China is certainly good for organic companies in the US.  While an 'organic' label in America is a subjective, moving target and their lobbyists are constantly pushing to add to the list of synthetic ingredients they can include, it is still a whole lot more rigorous than what they have in Asia.  You can quite literally bribe someone and get an organic certification in China that food importers in the US happily accept, and Chinese people know their own food system is suspect so they will import rather than take risks when all-natural feces is involved.

With bigger money comes bigger problems; multi-billion dollar organic companies are currently fighting in court over things like organic milk and the dirty tricks will get even more prevalent. It's almost like organic companies are corporations in the business of making money - because they are.

The sustainability of organic food was always a myth but we all have our irrational spots, those sweet little lies we tell ourselves, and the idea that organic can feed the world without creating a class war between the 1% who can afford it and the rest who cannot is obvious; organic wine requires 80X the fertilizer of conventional wine and that is not good for anyone who is on the receiving end of all those chemicals in the groundwater.

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Want more feel-good fallacies punctured?  Check out a copy of Science Left Behind, out September 12th, 2012.