Buy organic and make an Arab smile!

Boy, that sounds like something a Republican would say, and I'm as Left Coast Liberal as you can get. But I'm getting madder and madder at the retailers who are hopping on the organic bandwagon without a true social conscience. (Whole Foods, I'm talking to you.) Then there are the Food Nazis who are holier-than-thou about buying organic, but are missing the big picture. Both these groups, with their misguided smugness, are lulling us into a false sense of security about what it takes to affect our environment through the food chain.

What's made me acutely aware of the fallacy of "Organic Tunnel Vision" is "The Hundred Mile Diet" where you attempt to source as much of your food as possible from within a 100 mile radius of where you live. The premise is - and many environmentalists support this - that eating seasonally and locally is much better for the earth than just blindly buying organic. 1) You reduce oil use by not buying, say asparagus out of season and shipped up from Chile, 2) you keep your dollars in your community, and 3) if you are buying locally and in season, chances are, you are going to end up with mostly organic anyway.

But it's not as easy a message to get across as you would think. As I found out on a recent trip to Whole Foods. Granted I never should have gone to what we affectionately call "Whole Paycheck", but it's bigger than the small shops I usually go to, so I thought I'd have a better chance of finding all the stuff I needed for a large dinner party. Big mistake. Sure, there were miles of aisles, but as I pushed my cart past them, it seemed every other selection of produce was cutely labeled "Conventionally Grown". As in: "not organic, grown with pesticides, probably from the same source Safeway uses." But the prices still reflected the "three times normal price" Whole Paycheck mark up. Even when I found the organic versions, they were largely labeled "Product of South America". Brussels Sprouts from South America? When Watsonville, just 60 miles to the south of me, has miles and miles of brussels sprouts pumped out at the rate of three harvests a year? (And surely some of them are organic.) Definitely not fitting my 100 mile criteria.

How do they get away with this? Because even the hard core OrgaNazis are buying into the Whole Foods hype - "Damn the transportation costs and Organic Uber Alles."

I'm here to say, "Wipe that smug look off your face." Just using my experience at Whole

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