The August 30th issue of TIME Magazine features a piece comparing the taste of organic and non-organic food to see what the fuss is all about. You can read the article here, and the taste test we all did is here. I was assigned to bring in some organic carrots and non-organic carrots and see what the differences were. (Here are my somewhat incoherent musings)

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I was told to show up for the taste test with an apron to have a quick picture taken and so of course, with perfect Dirt Candy timing, I had had a long, hot awful day. The night before my dishwasher had died during service (the machine, not the human being), and that morning when I came in to work Danielle informed me that my freezer upstairs had died in the night and that my downstairs freezer wasn’t sounding so good. So I spent all morning getting repair people in and bleeding money, then raced uptown to the TIME offices, stopping on the way to pick up two bags of carrots at D’Agostinos: one of organic carrots and one of non-organic carrots.

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If you get the magazine when it hits the stand and see the bigger photos, you can check out the crazy shoes I’m wearing  and the array of bizarre footwear on all the chefs testifies to the fact that none of us expected to have our feet photographed.

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As for the organic vs. non-organic debate, I want to say that I didn’t detect any difference in the taste. I believe in comparing things on a one-to-one basis and not stacking the deck. The organic carrots and non-organic carrots I bought were from the same produce section at D’Agostino, sitting right next to each other – they’d probably both been on the shelves for about a week. So of course they tasted the same. If I had bought one organic carrot from a farmer’s market and one non-organic carrot from the supermarket they would have tasted wildly different, but the taste has a lot more to do with where you’re getting your carrots rather than any essential magic in the souls of organic carrots. In fact, the non-organic carrots were slightly sweeter!

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A lot of the chefs brought in really particular products they wanted to compare, sourcing their eggs and meat from organic purveyors they knew and trusted, who turn out a superior product, and using those in this taste test. But I feel comfortable in saying that if you’re shopping for produce in the supermarket, there’s not going to be a huge amount of taste difference between organic and non-organic you take off the shelves. You might feel like one is healthier or safer than the other, but apart from the price-tag the difference, as far as I see it, is negligible.

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