You want to buy organic food to give your money to organic producers, who are more likely to care about causes you also care about, and invest some of that money in those causes.
But it might be more efficient to buy the cheapest food of a given quality, which is not organic, and donate the remaining money yourself to those causes. Have you done an optimal philanthropy calculation?
Unless, of course, your goal really is to support people who support those causes, not the causes themselves. Which is also a reasonable and laudable goal.
If the opening paragraph (“You want”) is intended to be descriptive of my goals, rather than merely addressing some hypothetical person, I’m afraid it doesn’t describe them at all accurately.
I want to buy organically produced food (in so far as I do) not in order to get certain causes invested in, but in order to get better food. I don’t think it’s obvious that “the cheapest food of a given quality [] is not organic” (though I’m sure it’s sometimes true) and in any case I don’t have ready access to an accurate food-quality-ometer and have to rely on heuristics to some extent; preferring organically produced food is one such heuristic.
(Of course it might turn out to be a rotten heuristic. That’s a separate issue.)
As far as optimal philanthropy goes, I’d be shocked if marginal improvements in the gastronomic life of middle-class Westerners came within three orders of magnitude of optimality for any reasonable person, no matter how efficiently pursued. Improving the welfare of the animals eaten by middle-class Westerners might do (it depends on the priority one gives to the welfare of non-human animals, and of course “philanthropy” would no longer be quite the right word) but indeed buying organically produced food seems like an inefficient way of pursuing that goal. Anyway, philanthropy has very little to do with my organic purchasing habits.
You want to buy organic food to give your money to organic producers, who are more likely to care about causes you also care about, and invest some of that money in those causes.
But it might be more efficient to buy the cheapest food of a given quality, which is not organic, and donate the remaining money yourself to those causes. Have you done an optimal philanthropy calculation?
Unless, of course, your goal really is to support people who support those causes, not the causes themselves. Which is also a reasonable and laudable goal.
If the opening paragraph (“You want”) is intended to be descriptive of my goals, rather than merely addressing some hypothetical person, I’m afraid it doesn’t describe them at all accurately.
I want to buy organically produced food (in so far as I do) not in order to get certain causes invested in, but in order to get better food. I don’t think it’s obvious that “the cheapest food of a given quality [] is not organic” (though I’m sure it’s sometimes true) and in any case I don’t have ready access to an accurate food-quality-ometer and have to rely on heuristics to some extent; preferring organically produced food is one such heuristic.
(Of course it might turn out to be a rotten heuristic. That’s a separate issue.)
As far as optimal philanthropy goes, I’d be shocked if marginal improvements in the gastronomic life of middle-class Westerners came within three orders of magnitude of optimality for any reasonable person, no matter how efficiently pursued. Improving the welfare of the animals eaten by middle-class Westerners might do (it depends on the priority one gives to the welfare of non-human animals, and of course “philanthropy” would no longer be quite the right word) but indeed buying organically produced food seems like an inefficient way of pursuing that goal. Anyway, philanthropy has very little to do with my organic purchasing habits.