When food is marked organic, do you believe it?

We have a lot of organic food at work where I do demos.  We’re receiving more all the time, which I’m happy to see.  I do a lot of organic, gluten free, etc demos.  Most people are happy to have those foods to choose from, but sometimes I get people who want to argue with me over what’s written on the label.

Last week, I had a demo for organic salsa and two different customers asked me if I really believed it was organic.  Then they scoffed when I told them of course I did.  We get a few things on a list we can say about our products, but we refer the customers to the labels because everyone who comes in is looking for different information about what they want to consume.  Usually this has to do with food allergies, or sometimes different diets or health needs.

 Some people don’t believe it, even if they read the information on the label.  Case in point is these two different guys.  The last one proceeded to tell me that we would have nothing in this country to eat if the fields weren’t sprayed with pesticides.  He said he was a farmer and he knew about this first hand.  Well, I was raised on a farm and while it’s true the cotton crops were spayed every year, as far as I know we had an organic garden full of vegetables to eat.  Our grandmother would use all sorts of old fashioned remedies to keep pests at bay, such as placing old shoes in the cucumbers and sprinkling coffee grounds around the base of plants.  She always had tons of unconventional ideas.

My neighbor also has an organic garden and hasn’t and never will spray anything on the food she grows in there.  She’d rather take care of the pests in a more natural way.  It seems to work because she has enough veggies in there to feed all the neighbors and her friends and they haven’t been sprayed with pesticides.  I know food can be grown without using chemicals.

Of course, I don’t argue with people about this.  You could never change the mind of someone that is bent on believing whatever it is they believe.  I would never argue with a customer anyway because that’s not my job.  My job is to keep the customer happy so they shop in our store.  I won’t agree with them though when I know they’re wrong.

So how many of you believe the labels you read on the food you buy?  Do you think we have organic, gluten-free, dairy-free and soy-free food available to us today?

All photos are from my neighbor's garden.