I sort of try to think of it as one of those words that means multiple things in different contexts, like the way I call a tomato a vegetable when I am in my kitchen but a fruit when I am discussing plant biology, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the grocery store meaning of "organic" is not just non-scientific; I suspect it means "holy and something that has no tradeoffs and proves you are a good person." Considering that I care about sustainability and the Green Revolution (the first one, in India), I have to come out in support of plenty of GM crops that have less environmental impact because they require less fertilization, fewer pesticides, and more nutrients. I mean, I love eating hand-raised regional vegetables fresh from the field. They taste killer. But I can do that because I'm wealthy, and I don't pretend it saves the planet.

In the most recent issue of National Geographic, there's a picture of dozens of plastic water bottles on a tin sheet, and the story is about how by doing this they use the radiation from the sun to sterilize the water in I forget which third world country, and that since they started doing it cases of diptheria have dropped; the mortality rate is way down, and kids aren't out from school so often with diherrea, so that now 95% of them can graduate instead of 2%. Even apart from acces, cheap plastic bottles apparently work much better for this than glass bottles; I guess they get a lot hotter. And I was looking at this picture and thinking how many people I know would freak out because reusing a soft plastic bottle like that exposes you to pthalates. I'm not saying there's no point worrying abut pthalates, but it's a luxury you can only get to once you've solved all these other issues which we haven't really solved.