Economic Thinking and a Much Stupider Kind of Stephen Hawking

I liked Jen's closing line from her comment on organic foods - it illustrates an economic point:

"So I take the opposite stance and favor organic. I would love to see the prices come more in line, but since I do believe in the health impact (and also in whacky stuff like yoga and meditation), I consider the extra cost an investment in my body -- which is the most important thing I have."

Since Jen is a semi-professional dancer, it makes sense that she would place a premium on things, like organic foods, that either boost her physical performance or at least help prevent deterioration of it. (Or that provide peace of mind about something that she values highly.) Since my physical skills are so minimal (and any advantage being limited perhaps to projectile skills, which I rarely use), losing physical ability short of death, while certainly very undesirable, would have less impact on me. I could maintain my career as a knowledge worker from a wheelchair, for example.

Having a higher income also makes the decision to purchase organic, on speculation that it is beneficial, easier; many of us could buy only organic food and still not spend any great proportion of our income on food - especially if we stopped eating at restaurants. According to this National Restaurant Association data, Americans spend 47.9% of their food budget eating out. That suggests to me that people are throwing away plenty of money on food that is generally relatively unhealthy and fattening. Maybe people will start (continue?) going to all-organic restaurants and really start to eat into that food budget.

My beef (OK, that's a poor word choice) with vegetarianism and organic foods is not that I think people shouldn't eat that way if they want to do so and for whatever reasons they may have. My primary concerns regarding the organic movement are with activists who want to get rid of conventionally grown options and who like to portray conventionally grown food as functionally poisonous, even to lower income, less educated people who need to be eating and serving their children vegetables and cannot actually afford to eat 100% organic; and it is unclear that wide-scale organic farming would be productive enough to feed the growing population of the planet. (To those who propose that there are "too many people" in the world, I say it's time to "think globally and act locally" and "take one for the team.")

On a personal level, I also find the moral superiority and social posturing that sometimes, but certainly not always, accompanies the pro-organic lifestyle distasteful and annoying. And I'm easily frustrated by the many people who do not base their beliefs in the environmental arena in any kind of grounded, scientific truth but fall back on how something is "obviously" healthier or "clearly" dangerous or different. Although there are a lot of people who favor particular environmental activities or choices because in their estimation, the evidence backs them up, many others make unfounded assertions and take a basically faith-based approach to the whole thing. Many times, the argument appears to boil down to "natural is obviously better," which is less convincing than the "God is obviously the creator of the universe" argument, because we have abundant evidence that many natural foods will kill you if you eat them and that biologists can muck about with plants to a great extent with no harm done to the person eating them. (How many common modern agricultural products would Adam and Eve recognize? Do people believe that all the changes in food over time have been accidental?)

All this being said, remember to eat your veggies! Organic, conventionally grown, raw, cooked, from frozen, from a can, from a farmer's market, from your garden, whatever. Veggies are good. With Thanksgiving coming up in a couple of days, I wonder, is pumpkin pie a vegetable? I'm thinking it's vegetable enough.