The earlier post No Data Please referenced yet another study showing that organic foods were no better nutritionally than other foods. Many earlier posts also have talked about how they are worse from an environmental perspective when all externalities are counted. That's not to say that there are not conventional growers who produce unsatisfying foods in destructive ways, it's just that they are bozos. Some folks can screw up a wet dream.

The study referenced in that post was one of many recent articles - research and opinion - expressing doubt about, or outright debunking, fashionable food fetishes. The market speaks.

Whole Foods Market Inc. -- or, as it's become better known recently, No. 48 in the bestselling book "Stuff White People Like" -- has problems. Chiefly, there are fewer people, white or otherwise, interested in paying a premium for its ethically-cultivated, fair-trade, organic gourmet fare. . .

Consumers didn't have to shell out a lot of dough for organic plum tomatoes lovingly cultivated in volcanic soils. They did so because they could. And because this choice, while economically perplexing, allowed them to bolster a view of themselves as opposing rapacious mega-corporations that peddled genetically modified products grown in vast fields rendered toxic by industrial fertilizers and pesticides. It was political action, practiced at the dinner table, energized by books like "Fast Food Nation" and "The Omnivore's Dilemma." . . .

Whole Foods boomed alongside this national trend and was handsomely rewarded. But sticker shock was always an issue; the grocer earned the derisive tag "Whole Paycheck" because even free-spending customers with a jones for wild-caught salmon were taken aback when the contents of a single reusable shopping bag ran them $100. . .

Any form of "virtuous inflation" quickly vanishes in the face of the real thing. I'll probably be just as healthy if I eat the plain old non-organic apple, even though it may have been sprayed with pesticides. I'll certainly be less stressed about my bottom line. Ultimately, this is a strength: Under duress, many Americans focus on the fundamentals and defer gratification on the indulgences. . .

A scientist would point out that the body doesn't care what you're feeding it, so long as it's nourishing. When times are tough, that means the value-pack bag of frozen chicken thighs wins and the vegetarian-fed, free-range whole fryer does not. Virtue is a funny thing: It has a hard time competing with an empty stomach. Or an empty wallet.

We need higher virtue, true virtue rather than merely fashion. There's nothing virtuous about buying and eating foods that are all symbolism. The food isn't better and it's not better for the environment. It's all packaging and hype, presentation and flattery, a way for money to be separated from the gullible.

Real virtue might be better understood as making informed judgements that could be emulated by those with less time, energy and other resources to investigate and make good decisions. Real analysis and prescription should be done rather than half-baked mumbo-jumbo like you get in Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma".

Journalists and academics could help with this instead of perpetrating hoaxes like Pollan, who is both an academic and a journalist. For example, he claims that the beef and chicken raised by Joel Salatin is done without fertilizer. In truth he imports fertility in the form of corn - non-organic corn - which he feeds to chickens for 90% of their diet. The residue of that corn, chicken manure, is deposited on pastures growing grasses for beef.

He also excitedly reports that the chickens eat bugs that breed in dung pats, and so pesticides are not needed. In real life wild birds do that anyway and the busted dung pats are scavenged by beetles and other soil macroorganisms. If you have no wild birds and no soil macroorganisms then that is the problem you should be worrying about. Ravens, wild turkeys and beetles do the job for me, and they are smart enough to know when the dung pats are "ripe", rather than me having to haul chicken tractors around on my pastures. It's rare that I find an unmolested dung pat.

Some organic practices, as noted in that recent post, are good agronomic practice that every grower can and usually should use. Some of the things that Salatin does and that Pollan reports are also good. The hoax comes from paying lip service to fashionable nonsense instead of doing incisive analysis to expose the empty gestures, outright lies and ineffective practices in service of various taboos and myths.

For example, the beef raised by Salatin on pasture with no grain fed to the cattle (just to chickens) is in fact more nutritious than grain fed cattle. This would also be true if fertilizers were used directly instead of the chicken ruse which runs fertilized corn through chickens, indirectly applying the fertilizer used to grow corn, to the pastures. From an environmental perspective fertilizing directly would be better since no corn would be needed at all. Pastures use less fertilizer than corn and are polycultures that support greater biodiversity, require no herbicides or pesticides, and sequester carbon rather than emitting carbon gases (CO2, methane etc.) as cultivated corn fields do.

Good science and agronomic practice is what should be celebrated and rewarded. If virtuous consumption is what people want, and think elevates their status, then they need the real thing. If this was the case then when the unwashed masses follow the lead of early adopters they would in fact be doing themselves and the planet good.