Food trends come and go, but one that has stuck around for well past its sell-by date has been the organic food fad. I buy my fair share of chemical- and hormone-free products, so none of this is shade to those choices, but sometimes I wonder why I fall for the hype.

For a while I worked in a job that was looped into the agriculture industry, so I got to peak behind the curtain of farm production and food processing and retail grocery. From my passing observations, organic is fairly legit—but only to a point. See, organic is almost certainly as much about marketing and hard selling a lifestyle vibe as it is about measurable quality, healthiness or adding anything besides political alignment to your shopping list. Organic food is a long-armed and mature industry in 2026 and sometimes I wonder if it really did do much to fight against what we thought it might achieve: standing up to the industrial farming complex, eschewing chemicals, and restoring the authenticity of food. Or if it just became yet another way to sell suckers on a gimmick.

Either way, the organic food movement does strike me as a bit of a spiritual elder step-sibling-meets-metaphor to the modern backlash against AI.

At its heart organic food was about a lot of things, but not the least of those seemed to be about having something more “real” in our lives.  The marketing behind the movement told us actually very little about what we were buying, but often implied a helluva lot against what the alternative choice was offering. The term organic did a lot of hand-waving around its own standards and measures, but one could presumably be damn certain that if something wore the organic badge it was not one of those nasty industrial, mass-produced, over-processed, chemically-stuffed, wasteful Earth-destroying options.

Right?

Probably. 

Maybe. 

And now we are here throwing around another term: human-made, all to denote a line in the sand between the processors and the poets. But “human” is carrying a lot of water that doesn’t always tell us what we’re getting when something wears that label. After all, humans are just as like to be messy, scheming, ego-stuffed, attention-seeking hacks as they are to be something pure and creative and wonderful.  The word “human” is merely telling us what we are not getting—we’re not getting algorithmic content—and that this thing called human authenticity has turned out to be increasingly valuable in an era of bots and language models and generative AI.

The problem lies in this: just as organic food has become just another big industry with fuzzy justifications for markups—a product that is arguably lacking in evidence-based value—it is a vibe stamp. A performative choice as much as purposeful one. So how long before the claim of human-made content goes that route too?