The Organic Phenomenon

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a bad impact on the people who eat it. Two, if you have to keep fertilizing and making everything genetically and chemically enhanced then it will impact everything else badly. Lastly, just because the farmer is trying to make more money doesn’t give him the right to put synthetic fertilizers and hormones and genes etc. in the plants and soil, which will overall have a bad impact on the world. Shapin talks about how great Earthbound farms is and from all of the statistics it really is a great company, even though they’re almost as bad as the other companies. With the amount of things that they’re doing to try and help save the environment it is astonishing that more businesses don’t do what they’re doing. They have become “the nation’s largest grower of organic produce” (428) recieving almost 450 million a year in revenue. I’m glad to know that the food I can find at Whole Foods is actually organic and not jsut a label. Shapin also states that we should know where are food comes from and what has been done to the food. This is the one point of this article that I don’t think would be beneficial to the greater amount of people. I believe that if everyone knew where their food came from and what was done to their food they would spend too much time looking for the “perfect meal” that almost doesn’t exist. All in all though, I agree with Shapin’s article about organic food.

In conclusion, Steven Shapin’s “What are you Buying when you Buy Organic” article is a great read. It gives great insight into the organic world. He talks about Whole Foods, Earthbound Farms, along with Michael Pollan’s quest for the “perfect meal”. He showed us what is really going on with organic food and gave some statistics as well. From his article we recieved some very useful information about some not so organic things that are considered organic. In the end, however, he says that it all doesn’t matter to the majority of the population and that it’s “just lunch. We can call it sacred, we can talk about communion, but it’s just lunch.