Random musing

Right from childhood, it is ingrained in our thoughts that failure is a terrible thing. Failing a year in school is thought as wasting a year of life. Students on the borderline of academic pass/fail line have to deal with the constant stress of staying on the right side of this line. 

Most of them do! They come out of the system without facing failure. But the race isn't quite complete yet. It keeps getting tougher and tougher. There comes college, now the odds of survival are slightly tougher. The ones who passed out of school with flying colors are suddenly scrambling to pull things together to avoid another failure. Some of them succeed here too. 

But then here's the problem for people who come through this system without failure. Life is much more than standardized tests where where you are judged on memory/knowledge/aptitude et al. It has much more to it! Guess what, having never faced failure before is going to make it ever more difficult to face it when the time comes. 

It can come through variety of forms. Rejection from the girl you adored so much, failing the job interview of the company of your dreams, not getting the promotion you really worked hard for. As a child we learn to deal with so many things, anger, jealousy, frustration, peer pressure and many more. But we never had to deal with failure. This makes us react in mysterious ways. 

We start looking for faults within ourselves, faults within the system, start looking at inspirational quotes, motivational you tube videos(bring on Rocky speech!) and so on. We start believing in luck(good/bad), in superstition, in other things that take our mind away from failure. Gulp down a drink or two. 

But, we seldom think, is failure really that bad? It's just a phase! It happens to most of us. It gives us good advise for our future endeavors. It makes us aware of our capabilities. It gives us a chance to try again. It makes us humble. 

Maybe it's not such a bad thing! Maybe somebody should have told me this earlier!

Organic - the new premium

Organic!! The word that has been buzzing around us for past few years. It's all around us, so much that a lot more people are talking about it. It is like a premium grocery product. It begs the question, is it really worth paying the price difference? Can the regular stuff(non-organic) be that bad that you feel like moving to the organic section.

And why is it that we are hearing about it now more than ever? I did not know of organic grocery while growing up. It was all just grocery. What changed?

I think until some point, we were doing the right thing, in terms of produce, poultry and other groceries, but slowly we moved away from the best practices. We modified our crops to survive harsher climates, low rainfall. We stopped grazing cows on pastures and started feeding them in factories producing milk. We genetically modified stuff. Chicken that lay eggs for us were no longer cage free, farm fed. Slaughter houses were not kept up to standards. We started fish farming rather than wild caught fish. We kept producing only those varieties which had a bigger shelf life and could stay longer in the supermarket without going bad.

We made so many changes that hardly anything is seasonal anymore. Everything is available all the time. A mango in November was unthinkable in my childhood for me, but I can easily buy mangoes throughout the year at roughly the same price. same goes out for watermelons, strawberries and apples.

We did so many things to keep the produce prices low, deviated from so many good practices and all those changes were so gradual that people accepted them. The world population just keeps growing, our consumption keeps growing and yet we roughly use the same amount of land that we had before for farming.

While these changes were taking place, two kinds of people really stood up for a food revolution. Firstly, the farmers who did not want to get away from doing the right things stood their ground and refused to make these adjustments to maintain their product quality. Secondly, some of the consumers who had this awareness of benefits of these practices kept buying these things at the now changed prices.

This is the beginning of the the new 'organic' I think. Those were the people who did not ask the question, why is this stuff so expensive. They asked the question, why is that other stuff priced low. Where could they have cut corners. It is a shift in thinking that makes a difference. What we buy really indirectly sends the message. with more people starting to buy the right stuff, the big supermarkets will have no choice but to stock the right stuff more and more.

Supermarkets are a reflection of society's buying habits. We see so much canned food and frozen foods around us occupying more than half the shelves and the produce reduced to a single aisle in the supermarket with a division between a small organic section and the other regular stuff. It is a crazy world where a can of apple juice costs less than if you were to buy apples and make juice out of them.

I am not suggesting we all buy apples instead of apple juice or buy the fresh stuff instead of canned or buy organic instead of regular. The pace of modern life has changed our lifestyle which we have to live with. I understand that for some of the lower and middle incomes, grocery costs can constitute for up to 10 percent of their after tax income and for them to move to a costlier product is not always feasible. And the world's resources would be put to a lot of strain if every animal or animal product that we consume were to come from pasture raised, non gmo, no growth hormones, no stress environment.

I think this debate is endless. We can never have a definitive agreement on either side, but we can make an informed choice rather than our grocery store influencing us by putting a fancy label. If we don't we might end up with a 3 tier structure. Regular, premium and extra-premium. I hope that never happens with food.