The late philosopher Alan Watts for...

The late philosopher Alan Watts formerly observed that the commonly accepted idea that Americans are materialists is unfair Materialists, Watts said, are the community devoted to the physical and immediate ready Americans, however, are abstractionists "so preoccupied with saving time and making circulating medium that [they] have neither taste for life nor capacity for pleasure."

White bread, Watts says, is illustrative of our anti-materialistic improvement Most of it is "vitamin-enriched Styrofoam a squishy and porous pith injected with preservatives and allegedly nutritive chemicals." so a substance is a fabrication of theory and mathematics, in Watts' view, for it lacks any conglomerated association with farmhouse kitchens and waving fields of grain in succession late-summer afternoons--qualities that seem to be baked into real bread.

Of course, this romantic observation arises in an essay called "Murder in the Kitchen," in which Watts also writes that by the agency of "destroying our environment and fouling our concede nest ... the world around us anticipates as if we hated it."

That's to what end I think Watts would have considered organic feed appropriately material, if for no other reason than that organic farmers--at least the small operators--appear to have a more immediate appreciation for nature than their conventional counterparts.

As we note in our shield story ("Organics Rule," p. 48) a major goal of organic farming is to proceed easy on the planet--which makes it harder work than conventional farming through requiring, as Watts might say, a materialist's gritty focus forward raising crops by forgoing artificialities as it is as chemical pesticides.

That's not to romanticize organic farms into patches of purity where pigtailed girls named Heidi wait on their gardens. Organics are, after all, an $85 billion industry.

Still, nutritious provender is by far the best natural medicine, and because organics are many times the best of foods-well, you don't have to be a philosopher to finish the point: A healthy dose of materialism is a beneficial thing.

COPYRIGHT 2003 PRIMEDIA Intertec, a PRIMEDIA Company. All Rights Reserved

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group