Kenneth Chang, guest-blogging at TeirneyLab, laments the use of the word “organic” in both the contexts of organic chemistry and as a term for natural foods:
Organic derives from Greek, organikos. The original meaning was, logically, something related to an organ of the body. The meaning later generalized to “characteristic of, pertaining to, or derived from living organisms.”
Nowadays, the most prevalent meaning of organic is in the supermarket — natural, without artificial ingredients, grown without chemical fertilizers — a fuzzy notion codified by 27,000 or so words of federal regulations…
Between the original definition and the new-age “natural” definition, chemists also adopted “organic,” originally to describe the chemistry of carbon-based molecules derived from living things, but they quickly took those starting pieces and synthesized many more molecules that look nothing like anything found in anything living.
But, to chemists, these chemical reactions are still organic chemistry and the products of these reactions are organic molecules.
That leads to the confounding situation that plastics, the epitome of artificial materials in the modern age, are organic molecules. (Even though plastics are usually made out of petroleum, which came from once-living organisms, I don’t think most people think of plastic as remotely organic.)
I couldn’t agree more.
With respect to organic chemistry, the use of the term to suggest compounds found only in living systems belies the fact that nearly all of these compounds can be synthesized in the lab through decidedly non-living means. Chang prompts readers to come up with an alternative term in this case. One option he discusses is “carbon-based” but this would include diamonds and carbon dioxide.
Maybe we should abandon “organic chemistry” in favor of “biochemistry.” Biochemistry makes clear that it means the chemistry of life. However, biochemistry courses often include stuff like metabolism and protein synthesis. As a science, I feel like biochemistry focuses mostly on the biological context in which these reactions take place, rather than the biological compounds themselves.
With respect to natural foods, the term “organic” poses even more problem. Whenever I see the term “organic” in the supermarket I think, “As opposed to what? Food made out of silicon and heavy metals?”
You could make an argument that “natural” would be better, but it is also a loaded term with a 500 year history. Anyone reading a history of ideas realizes pretty quickly that “natural” is whatever you think society should look like and “unnatural” is a rhetorical club for stuff you would like to get rid of. An example is Rousseau labeling the city as unnatural and the country as natural. Whether or not something is actually present in nature seems does not enter the discussion.
Our concept of natural vs. unnatural is partly a social construct. Having less pesticides in your food is probably better for your health (depending on the pesticide and the dose). Free range is indeed more humane. On the other hand, at least some of the fascination with natural food has nothing to do with the health benefits. It derives from a spirit of primitivism in our culture — a desire to get back to nature and away from a world that is too complicated. Because they are wrapped up in this social phenomena — primitivism — “organic” and “natural” are suspect and imprecise scientific terms.
A better set of terms — though much more lengthy — would be to describe the precise way that the foods differ their unnatural counterparts: “pesticide-free”, “free range”, “hormone-free”, etc. While it would take a lot more words, at least it wouldn’t package a lot of different things in a single ambiguous term.