It’s a simple matter to cruise the aisles of any grocery store and see the ever-growing shelf space devoted to organically grown foods. The increasing popularity of organically grown foods has something to do, one surmises, with the fear that we may be poisoning our environment and ourselves by using pesticides, fertilizers and herbicides. Why not? It seems rational on the surface. Look at what DDT does to bird eggs (ignore, for the moment, that DDT may have saved a billion lives). One could be forgiven for thinking that because X is bad for birds there is a pretty good chance that X is bad people. This, of course, is not completely specious reasoning, but it does ignore the larger picture. The larger picture involves taking the entire food supply into account, and when one does that one reaches one nearly inescapable conclusion: Organically grown food isn’t the answer, it’s part of the problem.

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