How Can You Talk About Eating Organic and Fair Trade Without Being a Holier-Than-Thou Yuppie?

I joke, but only a little. There's a book out there called, "Mom, Will This Chicken Give Me Man-Boobs?" It's by Robyn Harding, and it is a somewhat-tortured account of one mom's attempt to raise eco-conscious kids. It can be a rather tortured thing, this going organic and fair trade. It can result in discussing the benefits of organic produce with everyone you meet, talking about the importance of buying local and ethically-raised meat and raising winter vegetables, and being generally annoying at dinner parties, if you even get invited at all. After all, no one wants to feel like an environmentally and socially-inadequate person compared to you, the organic and fair trade zealot.

The choices and the discussions about food can be overwhelming, and no one wants to feel bad about their food choices. We environmental zealots would like to get invited to dinner parties too. How do you talk about eating local, organic, and fair trade food without making people run off into a corner, martini in hand?

My solution? I have a few. I love food, so I talk about it. I don't talk organic and local, for the most part. I talk about getting berries from local farms, and I talk about the fact that the berries are really, really tasty. I talk about gardening with my daughter and the fact that she'll enjoy vegetables like sorrel when they're in the garden, even though she wouldn't deign to look if they were on the dinner plate. I talk about the delicious fair-trade chocolate bar that I enjoy with my daughter once a week, because I'm addicted to chocolate. Guilt never comes to mind. For me, eating local and pesticide-free is all about enjoying good food.

I also assume good intent. I know that people have barriers to buying organic and fair trade food. I have them too. It can be more convenient to buy conventional produce, and people are busy, so they don't figure out easy ways to buy local and organic. It can be more expensive to buy organic and fair trade products, and so people try to pick wisely or just try not to think about the health, environmental and social implications of those products. A number of years ago, I did a lot of research on inexpensive and convenient options for local and organic produce in my area. I'm enthusiastic about these options, so when people ask, I try to point them to cheap and easy ways to eat organic.

I'm not a great believer in judgment. While I believe in weighing food options, I don't believe in judging other peoples' deepest ethical nature because of the food that they eat. That creates barriers. Eating organic and fair trade is often more of a matter of creating habits, sticking to a budget, and creating ways to make eating organic an easy part of life. Part of this is changing the behavior of individuals, and part of it is changing the behavior of institutions so that the market is full of eco-friendly, local and fair trade food.

If you love local, organic, and fair trade food, how do you talk about it?