Forget About Labelling Nature. Just Label the Chemically Treated.
Imagine going to your favourite supermarket and seeing clearly stated on every package every chemical used to grow your vegetables.
Forget about labelling nature. Just label the chemically treated.
To make that work, we would need to understand what we're actually looking at. Neonicotinoids, the pesticides that affect the central nervous system of insects, especially bees. Calcium carbide, used for artificial ripening. Ethephon, another pesticide. Oxytocin, a hormone used to increase the size of fruits and vegetables. And of course, their carcinogenic levels.
A Personal Story
I recently worked on a Neroli Beauty Project. Our organically grown flowers, used to produce the essential oil for our cosmetic line, came from Minamata, a city on the west coast of southern Kyushu, in Kumamoto province.
Minamata was a fishing village in 1889, became a city in 1949, and became famous in the 1960s for severe mercury poisoning caused by wastewater discharged from the Chisso chemical plant. It caused irreversible neurological damage to the people who ate contaminated fish and shellfish. A city that had already learned, the hard way, what chemical contamination does to a place.
But my point is not about Minamata. My point is about ECOCERT, the French organisation that certifies the living.
The Dictator of the Absurd
This bureaucracy, which I'm sure started with good intentions, became the dictator of the absurd. Proving that our crops were naturally grown without chemicals became our cross to bear. Our Neroli farmers held a Japanese organic certification, but not the one ECOCERT recognised. There was no human-to-human understanding of what actually mattered. We could not speak directly to the local Japanese ECOCERT inspector, out of concern for potential corruption, only to a representative back in France who orchestrated the rules and the list of paid-for official proofs certifying our good intentions.
Never mind that our neighbouring farmer was happily spraying his crops with chemicals right next door. Because, as we all know from Chernobyl, clouds do not cross official borders.
