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Without a doubt, I have become increasingly confused about the everyday food choices I make. I am a lover of Whole Foods, and the name conjures up a variety of delicious foods in my mind, from produce to desserts and everything in between. Simply by buying groceries at Whole Foods, I now realize that I was operating under a false sense of security. I thought, “food here must be healthier and of better quality than the food I buy at Stop and Shop.” To some extent that might be true, but I never knew how caught up I was in the “farmer pastoral” marketing technique that large organic companies want me to eat up. Sure, my food is grown without pesticides but “spraying approved organic agents” and detrimental heavy tilling still exist. What most disillusioned me was the true treatment of free range, organic chickens. I always pictured my chickens to be roaming a small field in the sun while periodically stopping to enjoy their chicken feed. Now I have a very different image of crowded chickens with hardly any outdoor space at all.

Not only was my idea of what “organic” means truly outdated, but also I was unaware of the big business side of the food industry. A part of me wants to cringe at my apparent naiveté, but I would guess that I’m not alone in this. The saying, “ignorance is bliss” truly applied to my previous thinking, yet despite the conflicting ideas and opinions racing around in my head, I feel happy for knowing. Just as a difficult math concept might hit me, I will be bogged down by confusion, but inevitably I trust that I’ll find some sense in all of this. The goal is that eventually I’ll make food decisions not on my incorrect assumptions but on actual fact. For the pleasure that hopefully waits, I’m willing to endure the confusion