Material witness - notes - organic food and the definition of materialism - Brief Article - Editorial

The late philosopher Alan Watts once observed that the commonly accepted idea that Americans are materialists is wrong. Materialists, Watts said, are people devoted to the physical and immediate present. Americans, however, are abstractionists "so preoccupied with saving time and making money that [they] have neither taste for life nor capacity for pleasure."

White bread, Watts says, is illustrative of our anti-materialistic culture. Most of it is "vitamin-enriched Styrofoam ... a squishy and porous pith injected with preservatives and allegedly nutritive chemicals." Such a substance is a fabrication of theory and mathematics, in Watts' view, for it lacks any concrete association with farmhouse kitchens and waving fields of grain on late-summer afternoons--qualities that seem to be baked into real bread.

Of course, this romantic observation occurs in an essay called "Murder in the Kitchen," in which Watts also writes that by "destroying our environment and fouling our own nest ... the world around us looks as if we hated it."

That's why I think Watts would have considered organic food appropriately material, if for no other reason than that organic farmers--at least the small operators--appear to have a more immediate appreciation for nature than their conventional counterparts.

As we note in our cover story ("Organics Rule," p. 48), a major goal of organic farming is to go easy on the planet--which makes it harder work than conventional farming by requiring, as Watts might say, a materialist's gritty focus on raising crops by forgoing artificialities such as chemical pesticides.

That's not to romanticize organic farms into patches of purity where pigtailed girls named Heidi tend their gardens. Organics are, after all, an $8.5 billion industry.

Still, nutritious food is by far the best natural medicine, and because organics are often the best of foods-well, you don't have to be a philosopher to finish the point: A healthy dose of materialism is a good thing.

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