Is Everything Organic? Different Definitions of "Organic"

One definition of "organic" is "a carbon-containing molecule." But is that the only definition?

As I mentioned in my post “How Health Food Became a Bad Word,” I’ve identified over 150 articles and eleven books in what I like to call the genre of “anti-organic.” It’s not a very engaging genre, and they pretty much all say the same thing. If you’ve read one, you’ve read them all.. But there’s a positive side to that redundancy—it’s easy to summarize what they say.

Intriguingly—considering that they’re usually written by scientists—these articles almost always start out with a discussion of language. The first order of business is to define what words like “organic” and “natural” mean.

“In the terminology of science, organic chemistry is the branch of chemistry that deals with carbon compounds,” the 1980 CAST report “Organic and Conventional Farming Compared” explained. UC-Berkeley biochemist Thomas Jukes agreed. “Organic compounds are defined in chemistry as substances that contain carbon,” he wrote in a 1977 article for Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition.

By the chemistry definition, all carbon-containing molecules are organic. That includes synthetic organic compounds like DDT and dioxin. Conversely, naturally occurring minerals like rock phosphate are not organic. All food contains carbon, so all food is organic. Claiming that foods grown with chemical fertilizers are not organic is silly, according to this definition, since of course they’re still made out of carbon. And if they have a few synthetic pesticide residues, that just adds on more organic molecules!

If only these learned scientists would have consulted the dictionary, they would not have been so adamant that their definition of the word “organic” was the only right one. The 1969 American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, which was current when most of these articles were written, lists six different definitions for the word “organic.” The chemistry one, “Of or designating carbon compounds,” is the last one. Two of the others—“Of, pertaining to, or derived from living organisms” and “Likened to an organism in organization or development”—much more accurately describe what organic farmers meant by the word “organic.” And this dictionary even had a separate definition for “organic gardening”: “A system of gardening that uses fertilizers and mulches consisting only of animal or vegetable matter.” That’s not quite accurate, since organic farmers have always used rock powders, but the linguists still understood the various definitions of “organic” better than the scientists.

Most good writers, then and now, keep a dictionary handy to make sure they are using words properly—especially if they’re planning on spending several paragraphs defining them. So why didn’t these scientists take a couple minutes to grab a dictionary off the shelf, look up the word “organic,” and see that it had multiple definitions? Why didn’t the editors of the journals and magazines that published these articles look at their dictionaries and question this linguistic oversight? Why was the claim that the only definition of organic was “a carbon-containing molecule” repeated in article after article, until it became an axiom?

Perhaps part of the problem was that these scientists viewed the world in a very black-and-white way. Either something was true, or it wasn’t. The possibility that a word like “organic” might have multiple valid meanings just didn’t fit into the narrow way they thought the world worked.