a. What does “organic” mean? And how is it rhetorical?
As I just disappointingly found out in The Omnivore's Dilemma, the word organic has a different meaning for the believers of the organic farming movement and for today's food industry regulated by USDA.
Like Pollan, I imagined a lot of things under the word "organic". The food that is labeled organic is grown without the use of pesticides, the soil is treated with humus instead of chemical fertilizers, the animals grace on the green pasture, and the farm stands next to a cute red and white barn somewhere in the Catskills. I guess I am thirty years behind the times. The farms were always organic,in the sense of being one big living organism, till the discovery of fertilizers and pesticides that "set agriculture on its industrial path"(Pollan,146).The word organic started to appear again back in 1970's to describe the alternative farming mostly practiced by hippies. Their organic farming movement evolved around three ideas. 1) new way to grow food, 2) grow what people want to eat and 3) independent distribution of the food. (Pollan,153). The"ideal held that you could not divorce these three elements.."(Pollan,153). This all changed in 1990's when USDA stepped in to regulate the word, so "mainstream food companies" could start profiting from this fast growing organic industry.(Pollan,154)
This works well in the rhetorical sense: The industry is selling a wide range of products using "a word that had always meant different things to different people."(Pollan,154).
