no more organic lipstick for me
I have the should-I-buy-organic debate with myself all the time. For what it’s worth, Consumer Reports has a little page explaining which organic products are worth the cost.
(via MeFi)
2 Responses to “no more organic lipstick for me”
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January 10th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
I happened to read that same article the other day. Have you, by chance, read Jane Goodall’s book, Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating? What does this have to do with lipstick, you ask? More like, what does it have to do with being organic? I was once wishy-washy about the whole organic craze, but not anymore. It’s a great book!
January 11th, 2006 at 10:05 am
I haven’t read that book, no. It looks interesting. I’ve been thinking about downloading an audiobook for my iPod. =)
Anyway, I’d buy organic without too much internal strife if I weren’t currently in school, without reliable income.
A friend of mine is an evolutionary biologist who argues that organic farming is not sustainable due to the amount of land required to produce sufficient food to feed everyone. If everyone ate organic, he says, we wouldn’t have any land left. Which makes me think (a) about how the government subsidizes farmers to grow more food than necessary, so what’s that all about then? and (b) that this is annother indication that there are too many people on the planet to begin with, and that’s what’s not sustainable. But it was a novel argument, to me, and coming from someone with some authority.
Anyway, while there is undoubtedly a certain amount of exploitation of folks’ conscience going on, the price of organic food is clearly closer to the food’s true cost. Common wisdom is that conventional methods of farming cost us all a lot more in the end. We just don’t pay for it up front. It’s also clear to me on an intuitive level, regardless of technical arguments for or against organic, that big agribusiness as currently practiced is deranged, ill, unhealthy. It’s oriented towatds making money, not nourishing people (much less respecting life in general). Sort of how the medical business is oriented towards making money and not healing people. That’s not right, but I don’t know that there’s anything to do to fix it, right now. (That judgement has nothing to do with the ethics and philosophies of individual doctors or farmers. I’m talking about non-human corporations, where responsibility (and hence, ethics) is dilute.)
I’d love to buy organic, locally-produced foods all the time. I’d also love to be able to kill my own meat. But I think you have to strike a balance between action on an individual level, action within the system (ie, voting), action in protest of the system, and also … just not stressing about it. Nothing like this will change overnight, and you’ll make yourself ill by being obsessively at odds with something you can’t budge on your own. That’s kind of where I’m at, anyway.
rant rant rant rant rant. I guess that’s what I have a blog for.
Thanks for stopping by! =)