Organic Foods - Research Paper Example

An entire industry dedicated to promoting organic food has established itself in recent years. So why the sudden attention towards organic food? What exactly is it about organic food that makes it popular? The answer is probably a simple one: organic food is very nutritious, chemical-free and provides a way of taking back your diet from the big agricultural companies that have come to dictate our diets to us and in some ways our whole lives. It is also a way of empowering people to make healthy choices about their bodies and the world around them.

These products are worth the extra cost and are healthier than the alternative. As the middle class expanded more and more throughout the 1980s, people got richer and more affluent. They became more educated and the had more money in their pockets to spend as they saw fit. The result was that they wanted more choice. In the past people used to simply buy what was available to them in the supermarket, now however with more time and more education they have asked for more choice and more control over the products that they want to buy—in particular when it comes to something as important as food, what everyone needs to live and what can affect our health so profoundly.

Instead of simply buying what the supermarket has on sale, consumers these days will read the labelling, look at nutritional information, and perhaps even perform research about food companies. There is a real impulse to buy ethical products, products that are environmentally friendly, and products that don’t harm the world around us. A newspaper reporter named Mark Bittman recently wrote in the New York Times: There’s plenty of evidence that both a person’s health — as well as the environment’s — will improve with a simple shift in eating habits away from animal products and highly processed foods to plant products and what might be called “real