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NancyLebovitz comments on Organic food, conventional food - Less Wrong Discussion
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The thing is, not eating organic food is also a way of showing affiliation.
I think many more people eat non-organic food because it's cheaper and/or more easily available.
Even “many more” is an understatement. I think the fraction of people who would prefer non-organic food over organic food if the prices and the convenience were the same would be tiny.
Yes, because most people agree organic food is higher status and signals caring about high-status causes, even if they choose not to spend extra money on it.
Seems like conservation of expected evidence should apply here. Not eating organic food does have signaling implications, but it's so much more common that the signal should be a lot weaker.
This might not be true if you live in an area where organic produce is more common than average, though -- like a lot of middle-to-upper-class urban areas.
I probably should have thought this through more carefully-- there are people who think making a point of eating organic food is ridiculous, and talk about that opinion. At this point, I think they're into signalling territory, but that's about what they say more than about what they eat, I think.
Um. I suppose that some other food-eating behavior is also signaling, but I don't think that the majority if non-organic food eaters are doing it because they conceive of themselves as people who don't eat organic food and want to show off that fact. And I'm rather suspicious of the idea that not eating a selection of foods is signaling as a general rule. Like, someone could eat Italian food as a form of signaling (especially if they themselves identify as Italian) but someone who doesn't eat Italian food is probably not doing it because they think of themselves as someone who "doesn't eat Italian" and wants to signal that fact.
I suppose there are probably people out there who don't eat organic as a way of showing affiliation, but I don't think that encompasses any significant portion of those people who do not eat organic food.