‘Organic’ and ‘Authentic’ as Taglines

“Organic is a marketing label” (Galvez).

Today, we were joined by Alyshia Galvez, author of Eating NAFTA, and she discussed some of the components of the book. Anthony asked her the question regarding what it means for food to be considered organic and when that happens. She first responded with the above statement.

This got me thinking more about this idea. Organic is not necessarily meant to be merely a label for the ‘elite’ consumer, as Galvez called them. It’s designed to be a tag that demonstrates a lack of chemical inputs in the food, but society has construed this differently. In general, organic foods tend to be healthier for us, but I feel like a lot of the time people don’t even realize what exactly makes it better for us.

People will just see that ‘organic’ designation and they think it places them in the group of elitists that have such high esteem for their well-being. It’s become a social status more than anything else. It’s also used for the sake of profit and business. Anthony also brought up the tag of ‘authenticity’, which is thrown around blindly quite a bit for this same purpose as well.

‘Organic’ and ‘authentic’ have almost become downgraded to buzz words to attract the eyes of most consumers. People like to say they eat and drink organic stuff to show how much they care about their health. That’s a great sentiment to have (better than the other way around, of course), but they may do this without even grasping what separates it from inorganic products. Business, in kind, have taken advantage of that by billing more and more items as authentic and organic.