There are requirements to be able to call yourself organic, but there’s no actual reason to think that it’s better or more nutritious food.
Basically, people had a wide range of food concerns and they wanted to generally “eat better food”. USDA (US department of agriculture) rolled many of those concerns up into a bundle and made them compatible with how food can actually be produced.
Fulfilling their role of making sure that consumers aren’t mislead, and that there’s a consistent standard associated with a consistent label attached to foods.
USDA organic isn’t a “grade”, like “this is better than prime, this beef is organic”. It’s more “this beef met a minimum requirement for outdoor motion, and wasn’t given antibiotics as a preventative, only as treatment for a disease”. “This food was grown using only certain types of pesticide”.
The FDA (food and drug administration) doesn’t let anyone use anything that they don’t have good reason to believe is safe.
So as far as anyone can actually demonstrate, nothing prohibited by the organic rules is actually harmful.
So we have a label that says “this food was produced in a fashion that basically complies with a vague set of preferences that a bunch of people kinda had towards food, and uses a subset of the safe food manufacturing techniques available”.
Nothing about being healthier, because they don’t let you sell food they think is harmful (in the dangerous sense, no one thinks poptarts are good for you, but they aren’t poisonous).
It’s a marketing label in the sense that it keeps marketing terms uniform and honest, not that it’s meaningless.
There are requirements to be able to call yourself organic, but there’s no actual reason to think that it’s better or more nutritious food.
Basically, people had a wide range of food concerns and they wanted to generally “eat better food”. USDA (US department of agriculture) rolled many of those concerns up into a bundle and made them compatible with how food can actually be produced.
Fulfilling their role of making sure that consumers aren’t mislead, and that there’s a consistent standard associated with a consistent label attached to foods.
USDA organic isn’t a “grade”, like “this is better than prime, this beef is organic”. It’s more “this beef met a minimum requirement for outdoor motion, and wasn’t given antibiotics as a preventative, only as treatment for a disease”. “This food was grown using only certain types of pesticide”.
The FDA (food and drug administration) doesn’t let anyone use anything that they don’t have good reason to believe is safe.
So as far as anyone can actually demonstrate, nothing prohibited by the organic rules is actually harmful.
So we have a label that says “this food was produced in a fashion that basically complies with a vague set of preferences that a bunch of people kinda had towards food, and uses a subset of the safe food manufacturing techniques available”.
Nothing about being healthier, because they don’t let you sell food they think is harmful (in the dangerous sense, no one thinks poptarts are good for you, but they aren’t poisonous).
It’s a marketing label in the sense that it keeps marketing terms uniform and honest, not that it’s meaningless.