The Pure, Local, Organic Thing Itself 4 comments

By Caroline Langston

In the leafy, old, inner-ring suburb where I live, my very diverse neighbors have lots of contrarian opinions on all kinds of things, but there’s one thing that everyone agrees on:

Buy Organic.

In theory, this sounds like a straightforward process. You go to the grocery store and buy the $3.99 half-gallon of milk that has the pictures of the cows on it. Or you get rid of the Soft Scrub and Windex in favor of the full suite of Seventh Generation cleaning supplies.

But before you know it—and I can say this, as someone who has drunk the Kool-Aid, ha-ha—it’s not enough to go to the normal grocery store anymore. First you go to Whole Foods or one of the other organic markets, until someone you’re standing next to at a party mutters something about Whole Foods’ labor practices and how the place is “just as bad as Safeway, really.”

So you move on to the farmer’s markets, which offer the virtuous satisfaction that not only are you buying organic, you’re buying local. You are circumventing the long-haul trucking companies and jet contrails of industrial agriculture, while indulging in a fantasy of Wendell Berry-esque community. Those pyramids of delicate white-pink apples, hovered over by flies, so different from the slick, blood-red, slightly pornographic Red Delicious specimens from StuffMart! Goodbye, raspberries from Chile! Goodbye, roses from Ecuador, in favor of bunches of hairy wildflowers that droop within the hour.

(And in case some folks out there are tempted to think that this trajectory is just some wild hair of the Left, may I point to Rod Dreher’s seminal 2002 National Review article “Confessions of a Granola Conservative”? Which spawned a whole bestselling book, you might remember.)

Where I live, we have now even moved to home delivery. As I sit writing at 6:28 in the morning before my son wakes up, I am an hour and 32 minutes away from the weekly deadline for placing my order—for creamy milk in glass bottles, grass-fed beef, delicious seeded bread and handmade goat cheese.

All of it is, indeed, delicious. But it also seems to me that the full-tilt pursuit of the organic is marked by, at bottom, a spirit of desperation. If we can just get it right, we imagine, we will not only “save the planet,” as the cliché goes, but we can be purified and become like angels.

In his wonderful book Brown: The Last Discovery of America, which is all about the multiple, “impure” influences of Mexican-American identity, essayist Richard Rodriguez describes taking his nephew out for a meal, only for the tetchy young man to balk at everything on the menu as potentially defiling. As though, Rodriguez remarks—and I’m paraphrasing from memory, since this books seems lost in my filthy basement—it were even possible, on this earth, to attain that kind of purity.

This earth, as we know it, is inevitably and ultimately defiling. I think it’s significant that after journeying through the rigorous Orthodox fasting seasons, what I want the most is not the artisanal goat cheese, but to go through the drive-thru at KFC. On one of the most memorable Christmas Eves I have ever experienced, my brother and I attended Liturgy at St. Basil’s Church in suburban New Orleans, then drove all the way to Baton Rouge on I-10 eating tiny, ghastly, but utterly tasty Krystal burgers. (Like White Castles, for those of you out there from the northeast.)

“Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man,” I’m reminded, “but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.” (Matthew 15:11) I, in my weakness, am just going to have to trust this.

Last week I came to just such a moment. For months I had failed to get the bathroom floor as clean as I had hoped. I had tried the lavender method cleaner, the expensive Swedish stuff from the vacuum cleaner store, assorted concoctions of water and vinegar and baking soda. But still the floor looked dirty. So finally I just said “screw it,” called my husband, and asked him to pick up a bottle of Mop’n’Glo at the store.

I sprayed it on the tile, took a swipe with the mop, watched the illusory flawless shine immediately appear. Then I sat back, and took a deep breath of those nostalgic chemical fumes that remind me of home.