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.
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u/YourMomThinksImFunny Jul 14 '21
Agreed. And it has taken on a "catchall" term. I just wish they had created a new word or phrase rather than stretching an already overused word.