it doesn't seem to have been a very comprehensive study, critics accuse the government of ignoring things like animal welfare and water use. but that's one of the problems with assessing these massive experiments we run called farms. we're not defining our terms very well, and it's tough in the beginning to figure out which gauges are the meaningful ones. it's helpful though, when you read it through to the end and you realize, that these rules are part of the problem. here's one way that organic tomatoes failed:

Organic tomatoes grown in heated greenhouses in Britain generate one hundred times the amount of CO2 per kilogram produced by tomatoes in unheated greenhouses in southern Spain.

it doesn't actually state that the spanish tomatoes are grown conventionally, just that they're not in heated greenhouses. this path we're on is riddled with weeds and troublesome forks. should we buy organic tomatoes no matter where they're from? local tomatoes regardless of season?

i'm really doing nothing more than paraphrasing a great article by michael pollan. other bloggers have done the same. but i notice a lot of the incarnations i'm seeing do not quote much beyond his initial exhortation that we "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

part of the problem the british study (and pollan) identifies is that, when you go to the grocery store, you have to think about what plants you're choosing. considering things like where they were grown, if they're being grown in season without lots of assistance, beyond simply being marked organic or being recognizably a plant. that's where we have the most work to do. this information doesn't just leap off the tomatoes at safeway. what pollan calls nutritionism is something we stagger toward gladly... certainty. this is why you tend to see discussions about how best to live in order to make the least impact on the world devolve into brawls. there is no real certainty that one rule is the best to live by or supercedes the others. the systems that convey food to market are sprawling and confusing. so it isn't surprising that people latch onto a single rule or maybe two and use that to guide their philosophy rather than reading the 12 page articles and buying a locally oriented food wheel and adopting all the other new rituals that used to be old... but what's strange is the religious zeal that sneaks into the conversation.

A proper vegetarian is a veggie for life and I would question you ever having any ethics in the first place and jumping ship when your meat-free fad was no longer en vogue.

this written in response to an article written by a woman who added meat back into her diet because she was more comfortable with ethically raised meat. she was also a new mother and apparently had an iron deficiency which some other vegetarian commenter noted was "part of being a vegetarian".

vegetarians usually like to point out how much more land is needed to raise meat animals over vegetables. and that's a good point, and truly, two of the problematic organic products were animal derived. but let's check some of those other memes that we see floating around... how about, buying organic and buying local. how will great britain produce enough food to feed everyone in london organically or locally? organic farms can be competitive with conventional farms, but britain is very densely populated, an island and the growing season is relatively short. what will they eat in the winter? will they have to use greenhouses to be ethically consistent with vegetarianism without eating just potatoes? and what about the poor?

which explains why people buy tomatoes grown in greenhouses or in spain. and once you start thinking a little about it, it can be very daunting to realize just how little you know about your food most of the time. it takes a lot of skill for a company to represent their systems in a way that is both marketable and honest on their packaging. 

and it's hard not to let your philosophy steer your ethics... like this vegan gardener who is so desperate not to have animal products in her garden, that she will send to the coast for kelp and to florida for raw rock phosphate (which may or may not have all sorts of crazy chemicals in it!) to amend her soil in her vegan garden. in the middle of beautiful ranchland full of manure. and i've done equally zealous things. i crowed about being able to buy local rice in california to my dad, and he reminded me that most of california is naturally a desert. it also is being kept air conditioned for storage. is that worse that fumigating it every now and then? i literally have no idea. but i know i don't just want to be guided by philosophy on this. the story of richville is the story of man wrestling a living from the ground, and it's completely incompatible with the narrative of the ecology movement. or is it?

and this is where i'm at. i've never been a vegetarian. or, i should say, i was a vegetarian for a few hours, and then my family decided that would be a good day to go to one of my favorite restaurants. yes, i was a weak teen! but enough about me, i wanted to make the point that none of us knows how to tread a clearly virtuous path anymore. there seems to be a unique set of requirements for every locale, and there's no way to no what another person is dealing with. i'm sure it was ever this way, else why would we have that old phrase about paving roads with good intentions... but it seems to me that it was in a much more primitive and morally clear way. our forebears asked themselves if it was ok to steal a loaf of bread to feed your sister's starving son... we wax philosophical about where you buy your bread, how many miles it flew to you ... is it vegan? kosher? do you bake your own in a sun oven? all without a clue as to the superior moral position. there must be a least impactful way to live, right? let's not muddle reality with our morals before we've even seen it ~ b