Do people value organic food over non-organic food? Does organic food taste better than non-organic food? In our photo narrative, we investigate peopleâs opinions and responses to organic cookies. While gauging their responses, we were also investigating how they responded to us, a random stranger, asking them to try our food. Organic food is often proclaimed to be healthier, tastier food than conventional processed food. However, both taste and health have fallen under critical eye. We chose cookies as our test food because, well, everyone loves cookies.
  If somebody asked you to try cookies, in front of a dining center, at ten o'clock in the morning, would you take them? Surprisingly, a lot of people did. We presented them with two options, organic cookies and the regular processed Chips Ahoy. 18 out of the 25 people we asked actually volunteered to try the cookies. Most of them even liked the organic cookies, saying things like âthey taste betterâ or âit tastes sweet and lightâ. Of course there were others who were not so apt on eating our organic product and made comments saying it was âchalkyâ and âdoughyâ. The Fillion study showed that the difference between organic foods and conventional food vary from product to product and these cookies support the argument for âorganic not being a better substitute for conventional.â The interesting thing was that opinions on organic foods were mixed. Even people who did not like the organic cookies still stood for buying and using organic foods. Others, however, admitted they did not use organic foods due to economic factors which is totally understandable, as we are just broke college kids.The most interesting reaction was a newly hired Spanish professor who picked up the organic cookie and ate it, while say âHmmmm this is organicâ and ate the Chips Ahoy while saying âHmmmm this is processedâ. He was actually in my opinion, our best âtest subjectâ.
  7 out of 25 people chose to walk away from the wonderful creation called cookies and 2 out of 25 people chose the organic over the non-organic cookie. Many of the people that chose to take the cookies favored the Chips Ahoy because of its taste and texture. People described the Chips Ahoy cookie as sweet, chocolatey, and ânormalâ (whatever that means). Others described the organic cookie as grainier, chalky, and chewy. The majority of people that took our cookie were young adults that probably attend VCU and professors that probably have enough money to buy whichever cookie their hearts desire. This information relates back to an article called, Consumer behavior and purchase intention for organic food. I found it shows that people that tend to buy organics are tend to be young adults or people that have stable jobs with an above average amount of income. My research also stated that organic foods do not always taste better and our reviews prove this.
   While reading an article entitled, âAttitudes towards organic foods and risk/benefit perception associated with pesticidesâ, I learned that organic foods are trusted more in mostly European countries. Their organic farms are more open to the public, so the people at least know and understand what theyâre eating. But, in America, trying to find where your produce is from is like going on a needle in a haystack hunt. Thereâs so many twists and turns, the distributors and producers take you in so many different directions that itâs hard to tell where anything is coming from. This I feel correlates with the distrust of the foods we were giving out. Americans already donât trust where their food is coming from, so why would they trust somebody randomly handing out food?
   One thing we discovered was that the labels on food are not always 100% accurate. The mislabeling of Pamelaâs Products Organic Cookies lead us to give a vegan eggs, even though the box was labeled dairy free. This is because there is debate in the food industry today as to whether or not eggs are dairy. This caused us to take a closer look at a comparison of the ingredients in the two cookies. The organic cookie had 40 more calories, 2 more grams of fat though the Chips Ahoy had more saturated fat, and 25 more grams of sodium than the Chips Ahoy. Further inspection of the ingredients led us to discover that the organic cookies contained, again, marked âdairy freeâ were made with chocolate chips that may contain milk protein. The organic cookies also contained Xanthan Gum which is used as a stabilizer and thickener in food made from fermenting sucrose, glucose, or lactose which has received some skepticism from the health community.
  After asking random strangers to try our cookies, we realized that most of them stuck with what they knew. The Chips Ahoy tasted better to them than the organic cookies due to the fact that their taste buds were already used to it. Organic foods may have made headway in other products, but cookies are still lagging. Many people have become more accepting to organic products, making them popular items very fast. But, due to the fact that they are only accessible to certain social classes organic products are not available to everyone. This study also revealed that people are not as wary of strangers as initially thought, in fact people are pretty nice, at least on this campus. Maybe organic products and the kindness of strangers will bring this country together.
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