They're Mindless, They Will Stop at Nothing, They Have Insatiable Appetites, and They're Coming Your Way

If you live in a rural area, you'd better be braced for the invasion of the “authentic“ food freaks. The rules for authentic food are described in a recent Salon article (seen via Katherine Mangu-Ward, guestblogging for Megan McArdle):

To promote better food, in an article that appeared some years ago in Mother Earth News, Coleman proposed an attractive, romantic new post-"organic" term based on the Greek word authentes -- "one who does things for him or herself." To have an "authentic" label, food would have to be sold directly by the person or family who grew it -- no middleman. (Of course, many farmers don't have the time or desire to do their own retail selling. But if they did, customers could give useful feedback on varieties, ripeness, and taste.) "Fresh fruits and vegetables, milk, eggs, and meat [would be] produced within a 50-mile radius of their place of final sale," Coleman wrote, suggesting possible standards. "The seed and storage crops (grains, beans, nuts, potatoes, etc.) [would be] produced within a 300-mile radius."

This is, when combined with an insistence on “organic” food, a recipe for starving New York. You can expect a mass exodus of left-wing idiots from major cities if this catches on. If you live in a rural area, you will soon have unwanted neighbors.

There is a bright side. Some of the comments are hilarious. From neumann103:

What is needed is a term that:

• denotes attributes that resist easy re-definition in counterfactual ways.
• corporations cannot or will not want to co-opt
• is memorable, obvious and will not be confused with other descriptors
• and it would be good if it spoke to the values or perspective of the target consumers.

I humbly suggest "Full of Shit (TM)" as it:

• identifies the fertilizer used
• is less likely to be appropriated by greedy corporations
• will not be confused with product marketing
• clearly aligned itself with the consumer demographic obsessed with the label.