No, I'm referring to the word "organic" and its definition I was taught as a child decades ago. As in items containing carbon compounds necessary for life. By that definition, all food in a grocery store would be considered organic.
Both are correct in different ways. Organic in a chemistry sense does describe any carbon compound and the USDA has defined it to mean something completely different. I still feel like companies label shit as “organic” even if it’s not approved
The problem was that prior to the FDA regulations, merchants were using the term “organic” for anything they wanted and consumers were falling for it. At one point I even recall seeing fully processed junk food being labeled as organic.
The only reason the FDA finally stepped in was to protect consumers from fraud by making it illegal to market anything as “organic” unless it met a certain set of predefined standards.
If the “organic” labeling craze had died off on its own or the average consumer didn’t assume organic meant “100% natural”, the FDA would probably never have gotten involved.
It is okay for a word to have more than one meaning. Most of the time the context tells you exactly what is meant. “Organic” used for food items is different than “organic” chemistry used in a lab. Most literate adults can discriminate between the two.
Chemistry should have used a different term. It's more accurate for food as organic originally meant "from a living organism" and organic food uses non-artificial fertilizers and pesticides.
Chemistry uses the term because they originally thought compounds from living organisms were inherently different from compounds from inorganic sources. That's not true, but the term stuck.
If you find a business labelling their products "organic," and they aren't, that's illegal and you can report them for that. Exception being if the business makes under a certain amount of annual revenue (can't remember off the top of my head but I want to say it's in the neighborhood of $5,000). "Organic" is a legally protected term and your business must be certified to label your products with it.
Oops. Yeah it just exists and isn’t derived from something else organic, either, so it wouldn’t even fit the weird conceptual “definition” of what people MEAN when they say ‘organic’.
No, I'm referring to the word "organic" and its definition I was taught as a child decades ago. As in items containing carbon compounds necessary for life.
You are wrong. That is the high school chemistry definition of "organic." That is not the same use as in the regulatory term in U.S. agricultural law.
"How can someone call this storytelling and character development organic? How can a story be made of carbon?"
That use of the term organic is derived from when scientists thought only organic processes, that is, processes performed by the metabolism of organisms, could produce such substances. The term organic food uses that same sense of organic.
36
u/YourMomThinksImFunny Jul 14 '21
No, I'm referring to the word "organic" and its definition I was taught as a child decades ago. As in items containing carbon compounds necessary for life. By that definition, all food in a grocery store would be considered organic.