As we now know, organic food isn’t a health issue for the consumer but for the producer, but back in the 1970s only a very few people were hip to that. Back then, “organic,” vegetables meant that they were:
- more expensive
- weird looking
- small
- only available at the hippie stores
Nowadays, you can find organic vegetables in Safeway. I’ve noticed that some stores (Nob Hill Foods, for one) only carry certain things in the organic section and don’t offer a pesticide and fertilizer version (which, by the way, is fine with me). Heck, even Costco has a huge organic section. It’s gone mainstream, and that’s probably good for the long term. The price markup is dropping a bit, too. So where are the retailers making their huge bucks off the hippies? “Gluten-free” and “artisanal”. I swear, I saw a package of meat that was labeled gluten-free. Whew! That’s a relief!
So yeah, my hypothesis is that today, things are labeled, “artisanal,” and what that really means is that the artisanal product is:
- more expensive (see packaging, below)
- lumpy in unexpected places
- small (but probably hand-wrapped in tissue and tied with raffia)
- only available at stores where rich people shop (if it’s at a little corner market, it’s not artisanal, it’s just fresh made by the owner, same as it has been for years; do you want that pupusa or are you just gonna take a picture of it?)