Psychics, homeopaths, magic soap buyers, anti-vaccine and anti-energy people, they all share one thing in common - no, no, not the same political party (good guess, though!), they embrace organic food.

And if you don't also embrace their giant swath of superstitious crackpottery, they might depart in a huff.

Now that Big Organic is a $105 billion industry, I suspect they would like to quietly but assuredly start to distance themselves from the cranks who got them there. A key person at The Soil Association, which Andy Lewis at Quackometer notes was founded on the principles of Biodynamics and other Psychic principles (see"The Living Soil" by Eve Balfour, 1943) recently tested the waters of, you know, not saying magic water is science, and the reaction by other members of this organic food marketing group was overwhelmingly negative.


What do you mean homeopathy is not part of the organic movement? LA LA LA LA LA. Credit: Shutterstock

Dr. Gabriel Scally may not know much about agriculture - or he wouldn't be at The Soil Association - but he is a doctor in the UK NHS so he knows homeopathy is made up nonsense. He just did not know that you shouldn't tell organic farmers that.
Which led to anti-science cult figurehead Joanna Blythman writing that she, Lynda Brown, Pat Thomas and Andrew Whitley, resigned as trustees of the Soil Association because of 
the questionable presence on Management Committee (with an attendant reputational risk) of a non-organic farmer and a doctor who publicly attacks an important tool of organic animal husbandry (homoeopathy) seems not to concern a Council that purports to be committed to good governance.
"Important tool"? "Reputational" is a word now?? 

Never mind, back to the real world: Homeopathy is not only not a tool, it's actually animal cruelty to promote the bizarre notion any disease, in any animal, vegetable or mineral, can be cured with magic.

She then goes on to mumble something about there being a "demise of organic awareness" in the group and a "dull and uninspiring image". Her post on the subject reads like a bad, aging hipster cliché. I can almost see her writing that screed over a bowl of slow-dried whole-wheat dinosaur pasta in an industrial loft, wearing a vintage dress and telling her friends she has been over U2 since "Sunday Bloody Sunday".

What demise? It's now a $105 billion industry - that's 4X the size of the video game business - organic food and alternative medicine supplements and Federal employees are the only segments of the US economy growing, so they are not suffering a demise, it is actually evidence there is far too much awareness of organic food marketing 

It may instead be the case that organic food is now Big Ag and they would like to be taken seriously by the general public. The kind of public that does not believe in psychics or magic soap or that lower fuel prices mean we should raise taxes on gasoline.

On the "dull image" of their movement today, I agree having loons mumble something about Gaia is colorful, but that is not why people are buying $105 billion in organic placebos. They are buying them because The Soil Association convinced customers that their food manufacturing process is healthier than the same farmer using the same plants - yet that a synthetic toxic pesticide is somehow making the plant inferior to one grown with an organic toxic pesticide. It's bad logic and terrible science, but it is outstanding marketing.

Still, she really seems not to like their success. What is the #2 complaint she has under her ancillary list of beefs? 
Subordination and dilution of the organic message to a healthy eating message
There you go. The organic food message is not about healthy food or healthy people, it's about Shamanism and worshiping the movement.

H/T Ty Larson