As you remember from last week, that word is Organic. As in organic produce and meats, organic farming and gardening, and organic, well, stuff. That word meanssomething, but it also implies something and confusion between the two can result in your getting something you didn’t expect and don’t really want. Particularly now.

Here’s the image.

Picture the verdant slope. An apple tree stands at the crest of a small hill, its boughs heavy with fruit. Next to the tree a small shack is surrounded by rough, wooden tables, groaning under the weight of gleaming colorful produce, jugs of fresh milk and cream, and wedges of farm cheese. The tables are tended by a farmer wearing dungaree overalls and a tattered straw hat. His wife, in her gingham dress, shoos flies away from fresh-baked pies with her apron. A woman walks down the hill, away from the stand, her wicker basket packed with the farm’s produce and dairy products. Her puppy and kitten play and tumble down the hill. From behind the farm stand a happy cow appears and blinks. Twice.

That’s the image of organic that they are selling. More importantly, that’s the image we are buying, every time we go through the checkout with something labeled “organic” or with fresh produce stuffed into one of those designed-to-be-very-noticeable, yellow-green plastic bags.

The reality is somewhat different than this image and it’s somewhat different than the definition of organic. And, as you might have guessed, “somewhat”, in this context, means “completely”.

I had no idea.

Up until the early 1800s, organic did not refer to something pertaining to a living thing. It described an instrument. Its meaning, by the late 19th Century, had morphed into something more along the lines of from living organisms. The current meaning, referring to farming and food production, came into being only in 1942. As defined in The business of food: encyclopedia of the food and drink industries, by Gary J. Allen and Ken Albala, organic refers to something produced “without using the conventional inputs of modern industrial agriculture: pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, sewage sludge. . .” I had to stop there. 

All of that sounds very good, especially the part about not feeding our future salads sewage, but nowhere, not in this book, not in the catalogs, and even not in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s definition for organic, does it say that organic means that something has been produced without chemicals or pesticides.

Just not “modern” ones.

At this point, in the interests of full disclosure, I need to let you know that I am almost fully committed to the organic concept. Agriculture developed as a system of recycling outputs back into the fields with the benefit of taking some food off the top. I am down with cross-cultivation, plant rotation, and encouraging predatory species. But I’m also not averse to splashing around a little Miracle-Gro or Copper Sulfate if the situation demands it.

What I am not fully committed to is the practice of taking something and labeling it as “organic” and then charging a premium price for what is put on the label, regardless of what’s inside the bottle. That sin is compounded by not letting you know what ingredients you’re paying for, up front, and by not letting you know that if you weren’t willing to pony-up eight, ten, or forty-five bucks for the stuff, they would have just thrown it out.

When you order something from Burpee Seeds they send you some freebies and special offers packed in the box with your seeds. I recently received such a package – hey, I had a coupon – and in it was a flyer for a company that makes these EarthBox things. They’re basically plastic trays you fill with dirt but they enhance their appeal by giving you a screen for the bottom, a plastic tube for watering, and a sheet of “mulch” all for only thirty-three bucks, plus shipping. But they’ll also sell you the whole kit – EarthBox, “growing media” AKA potting mix, fertilizer, and dolomite for fifty-five bucks plus overweight shipping. Then they have the final enticement.

For only five dollars more, they’ll make it organic.

Which entails putting the word “organic” on the labels of the potting mix, fertilizer, and dolomite.

Dolomite is a kind of rock. How can it be organic? Wait, I guess a better question would be how can it not be? Dolomite is formed when billions of tiny organic sea creatures die, sink to the bottom and turn into mud. Their tiny shells are made out of a tiny form of calcium carbonate called aragonite, which given time, reorganizes its tiny crystalline-self into calcite; a block of which is known as limestone. If this happens, as it sometimes does, in a magnesium-rich environment then some of the calcium gets replaced with magnesium and, instead of limestone, you end up with dolomite.

For five bucks, they take the same bag of powdered rock and change the label.

Then there’s organic fertilizer.

In olden times, like pre-1955, pretty much all farming and gardening was organic. Industrial agriculture was getting going but most farmers still ran an integrated, rather than a specialized, farm. On my uncle and aunt’s dairy/corn/hay/wheat operation I can still remember the device they used for distributing fertilizer across the fields. It was called a manure spreader.

In the summer the cows would graze in the meadow. Then in the fall, they would get moved onto the lush winter wheat, just as it sprouted. Over the winter they would eat the silage from the corn, and then, in the spring, it would be back into the meadow for the new grass. During all of this they would crap like a herd of cows. Most of the time they were out in the fields where the stuff was needed, but every once in a while my uncle would have to clean out the stalls and barnyard and spread it around. That was fertilizer. It was organic. It was good.

There are hosts of organic fertilizers available now. Manure is still foremost but now you can get it in bulk, bag, or as bottled tea. Yum! Fish emulsion, long an excellent fertilizer, is great if you can stand the smell. Take a fish, take a blender, and presto, you’ve got fertilizer. As I’ve mentioned, the micro-farm has a compost pile, which is where we turn all of the household vegetable wastes into fertilizer. All of these organic fertilizers, basically, are garbage that will be repurposed into tomatoes. Or whatever.

I can see the Eureka! moment when a couple of guys are standing out back of some factory, looking at a pile of something.

One guy says, “What’s that?”

Other guy says, “That’s just garbage.”

First guy says, “Oh, really. . .”

Which is how I come to be sitting at my desk with a bottle of MAXSEA, Seaweed Brand, plant food. I didn’t know that seaweed was a brand. Upon reading the label I discovered that the bottle contains, “seaweed powder” – no surprise there – accentuated by “blood meal”, which is exactly what you think, “urea”, yup, that too, followed by a list of nine chemicals. Those first three ingredients are at least natural. The last nine go by another name: Miracle-Gro.

But the prize in organic fertilizer deception goes to a product called Plant-tone made by the Espoma Company of Millville, New Jersey. I got this as a freebie in my Burpee box – hey, I had a coupon. What I found was that at Espoma, “organic” doesn’t mean organic the way we want or expect it to. They use the old definition: from living organisms. Think of that where the label says “an original all natural plant food made from the finest quality organicsobtainable”, “rich in natural organics”, and “for organic gardening”. (Emphasis is mine.)

They don’t tell you that they’re using the old definition to exploit the implications of the new. They don’t say “Oh, by the way. . .” Espoma says “organic”. And leaves you to figure out what’s really going on. They’re not lying; organic can mean both things, but in this case “from living organisms” is the truth.

And those living organisms are chickens.

The number one ingredient in Plant-tone is “hydrolyzed feather meal”, the second: “pasteurized chicken manure”, the fourth: “bone meal”. Espoma takes the trash and effluent from industrial chicken processing and turns it into fertilizer for your organic garden.

Those wastes – blood, bone, feathers, manure, and ground up fishy-bits – are the cleverly repackaged garbage from animal rearing, finishing, and processing operations. The wastes are organic in the old sense and – god, I hope none of you are vegetarians – are used to grow the things sold to you as organic in the current sense.

So, the next time you’re tossing up a salad of organic lettuce, tomatoes, and beets or whatever; you won’t have to wonder why it always turns out so tender and tasty.

They’ll tell you it’s because of the care the growers give to the soil. They’ll tell you it’s because the growers refuse to use synthetic pesticides or fertilizers. They’ll even tell you it’s because of the extra labor and love and commitment it takes to grow organically.

But it’s not.

It’s really because of the chicken. But they won’t tell you that.