2

I watched the movie Spencer last night and it is about Princess Diana of the UK. There is a chef listing off parts of a menu and he often refers to "organic" food such as organic carrots etc. This took me by surprise as I don't recall hearing much about "organic" food in the 90s. This seems like more of a recent trend.

Was "organic" food talked about often in the 90s? Was this representation in the film seemingly realistic?

Behacad
  • 1,840
  • 2
  • 18
  • 31
  • 4
    Based on my memory: yes. – Stephie Dec 04 '21 at 15:46
  • 3
    Mine too - yes, definitely. – bob1 Dec 05 '21 at 08:26
  • 2
    You may want to consider country and socio-political groups. The [demeter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demeter_International) standards have been around since the 1920s. And that was widely available first in the [Reformhaus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformhaus) (sort of the retail branch of the movement), then in the organic food stores starting out in the 1980s in Germany. The EU passed regulations in 1991, and frankly they wouldn’t have bothered if nobody sold and bought organic produce. – Stephie Dec 05 '21 at 17:15
  • I shopped at my first all-organic grocer in 1988, and that was in a small town. They'd existed in larger cities for a decade before that. – FuzzyChef Dec 06 '21 at 06:27
  • 3
    Waitrose 1983, Sainsbury's 1986. Can't find data for the other UK majors. Whole Foods didn't open in the UK until 2007. Diana was, of course, more likely to shop at Waitrose or even Fortnum & Mason than Asda ;)) – Tetsujin Dec 06 '21 at 07:52

1 Answers1

4

Yes, but you typically had to go to specialty stores to buy it. The US’s Organic Food Production Act was passed in 1990, and the topic was discussed well before that, as it was an attempt to standardize regulations that varied by state (although not all states had such regulations)

See https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/8889458

Before larger grocery chains carried organic food, you would have to go to a ‘health food store’, a co-op, or specialty grocery store such as Wild Oats (since bought out by While Foods after some possible stock manipulation)

You could also get organic food via mail-order. MOM’s Organic Market started out that way.

Joe
  • 78,818
  • 17
  • 154
  • 448
  • I guess the real qualifier in your question was ‘often’. organic certification really seemed to boom after concerned about GMOs, which weren’t certified for human consumption, but then GMOs were found in conventional products like corn tortillas (possibly via unscrupulous food traders, but the news reports at the time seemed to suggest it was inevitable via seed or pollen spread). Organic food certified to NOT be GMO, so I think some of it was GMO backlash. (Although, unscrupulous food traders are known to have sold non-organic food as organic) – Joe Dec 05 '21 at 16:03
  • Joe: er ... no? The organic boom happened well before "no GMO" was a slogan ... like 10 years before. Whole Foods had expanded to more than 20 states, for example, before 2000, whereas anti-GMO didn't become a popular cause until the late 2000s. – FuzzyChef Dec 06 '21 at 06:25
  • @FuzzyChef: there was more than one boom. I also wonder how the change in produce codes to 4 digits and you could prefix it with a 9 to make it organic, so shops could differentiate between organic produce or not easily affected things. – Joe Dec 06 '21 at 12:09
  • 1
    There's a lot of factors, but it's all been demand-based. The anti-GMO crew contributed to ongoing growth, but organic produce was already very well established -- available at Safeway, even -- by the time NoGMO made the mainstream news. – FuzzyChef Dec 06 '21 at 16:14
  • @FuzzyChef I guess I missed when Safeway made the shift. In the mid 90s, I was shopping at the tiny one in the Watergate Hotel, where there wasn’t much variety (except for butter & margarine) as they didn’t have the space. Then I was in a Kroger / Piggy Wiggly area through 1999. Kroger had a lot of local stuff (it was just as a lot of farms were changing after the tobacco buyout), but I don’t remember organics being a focus. I remember when Safeway and Giant would have a aisle dedicated to special deals that slowly became the health food aisle (then section), but I thought that was ~2000-2 – Joe Dec 06 '21 at 17:31
  • I was living in California by 2000, so organics probably showed up in Safeway there earlier than other states. – FuzzyChef Dec 06 '21 at 17:50
  • 2
    Everyone seems to have forgotten Diana was British. US trends & laws are not really relevant. – Tetsujin Dec 06 '21 at 18:16
  • 2
    @unlisted : I didn’t forget. And there’s also socio-economic considerations, as a high end chef that’s cooking for royalty or have multiple Michelin stars is going to be more likely to be getting heirloom tomatoes and organic produce than someone running a curry takeaway. – Joe Dec 06 '21 at 20:27
  • 1
    @Joe - indeed… and not only but also… Prince Charles, as the Duke of Cornwall & who owns half of that ilk, set up Duchy Organics in 1990 - so the pair of them [together or separately matrimonially] were very invested in the topic. – Tetsujin Dec 07 '21 at 07:59