Organic Guilt

If anyone is still reading this blog (HI!!!!!), I'm curious, what's your take on organic products? Do you eat organic, clean with "green" products, buy organic cotton sheets?

I haven't previously felt compelled to make the great switch from conventional to organic products, but I have been rethinking it lately. I'm pretty set with cleaning products. I think Catherine summed it up pretty well on here blog, a while back I recall her saying she couldn't get behind green cleaning products because her nursing self just needs the clean, astringent smell of bleach and Lysol. I'm not a nurse, but this describes exactly how I feel. I love 409 and I won't apologize for it.

As far as organic products like clothing and sheets, I don't really pay much attention to that. I admittedly have not read too much on the topic (Honestly, most of what I know about it is from reading Young House Love!), and I'm not sure why I should buy organic products of that kind.  The world is much more chemical conscious that it was even just 5 or 10 years ago, so many safer, greener products, like BPA free plastics, etc. are so readily available anyway with very little price difference it's easy enough to purchase without thinking to hard about it. Readily available and generally as cost efficient, fine, but I haven't gone out of my way before to find specific green products. 

I have occasionally dabbled in organic produce. When my sister-in-law and brother-and-law had their first baby, they completely switched to organic food, products and green cleaners.  They've been a great source of information on the topic for us and we've also had a lot of interesting conversations with them about the environmental, financial and health impacts of consuming organic products.  I've also read Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. 

Pollan's book I enjoyed immensely and I thought he made some excellent arguments. Even if you don't "convert" as it were, there is a great deal of food for thought (HA) contained in the pages about making more healthful choices in general. The book is organized around the consumption of three meals originating from the three food chains available to the average American omnivore: industrial, organic, and personal or foraged foods.  The big take away for me from the organic food chain section is the organic food isn't always what it appears, you need to look beyond the organic label to see what you're really getting. Organic strawberries are great, but if they came from California and you're buying them in Virginia, what is the environmental impact?  Cage-free, organic eggs can be purchased in many grocery stores, but Pollan argues that unless you can look the farmer in the eye that raised those chickens, you might as well not spend the extra money for the cage-free designation. 

Conventional wisdom (this topic is just full of great puns...) is that purchasing organic groceries is more expensive. Without considering anything beyond my own anecdotal evidence, I agree.  However, Pollan makes the excellent point that many people spend only a small portion of their income on groceries. To quote a recent article in the Times, consumers spend "about 7 percent of our disposable personal income on food. Fifty years ago, it was nearly 16 percent."  I was just looking at our budget this morning and I know we don't have much room to trim and reallocate to groceries. Generally speaking though, I know when we spend less money on convenience foods -- whether prepared items or fast food/dining out -- we have more to spend on whole foods (AGAIN). 

I think this is the best economic argument there is to make about organic food though and the cost is definitely my top hang-up about making the switch.  When non-organic chicken is $6 for four chicken breasts and the organic equivalent is $14, I have a hard time not buying conventional.

I'm not even going to go into what I thought about Animal, Vegetable, Miracle because I didn't care for it. Essentially, Kingsolver makes many of the same arguments Pollan makes, but using a different (and admittedly very interesting!) premise, but in a much smarmier and self-righteous manner.

After reading both books, and many conversations with our SIL and BIL, we try shopping the "dirty dozen" organic, but even limiting our organic consumption to that short list comes back to an economic issue: it's more expensive (we knew that would probably be the case), plus I often times can't get everything at our regular grocery store, which necessitates an additional trip to another store.  Considering the time and money costs, is it worth it to me at that point?  Most of the time, no.

One organic switch we have made, and very easily too, is organic milk. I've read a lot of articles citing studies about the hormones in conventional milk and their harmful effects,  especially on kids.  More importantly (ok, not really I guess), do you know how much longer organic milk lasts??? We don't drink a lot of milk, so we used to throw out a good bit because we didn't drink it before it soured! Not now though! I can't remember when I last had to dump out sour milk since switching to organic.

And that is a very long way of saying, given the different considerations that are important to me (us really), we just haven't been compelled to make the switch on groceries. So why the title, Organic Guilt?  Being pregnant has made me want to reexamine these considerations, and two things have been really bothering me. Chicken and apples. I heard something recently about all the junk that's in conventional chicken, dyes that are used and all the crap they feed the chickens and how if there is one meat you are going to purchase organic chicken ought to be it.  Apples as it turns out are among the worst offenders among the dirty dozen and if you're going to buy just one vegetable or fruit organic, apples should be the one.  We eat a lot of apples and chicken. I'm a grown person and I'm fine choosing conventional most of the time, but is that the choice I should be making for someone who is totally reliant on me to make all their choices for them?

So what do you do? Do you shop organic exclusively? Just a few things? Eat vegetarian to keep costs down? Try not to think about it?  I would love to know!