An article in Slate comments on Whole Foods marketing and reality.

If you’ve ever wondered whether organic food is more than just marketing, read this:

Is Whole Foods Wholesome? by Field Maloney.

I do have a mildly amusing story about organic food, so I may as well tell it here.

Years ago, Mike and I went for a week-long vacation in Hawaii with Mike’s cousin Ricky. Ricky is heavily into health foods and the like — or at least he was back then — and insisted that we buy organic fruit for snacking while we traveled.

I had a terrible cold and we bought some oranges at a supermarket so I could suck down the vitamin C and soothe my sore throat with the juice. They were delicious oranges, sweet and juicy, and I really enjoyed them.

But because Ricky wanted organic fruit, we tracked down an organic food market and bought some extremely ugly — but organically grown — oranges. They were terrible. Tough skins and membranes, dry pulp, and not even sweet. Mike and I refused to eat them. Ricky finally threw them away.

He never bugged us about buying organic again.

Now I’m not trying to say that organic is bad. I’m just saying that it isn’t always good.