I can remember when I started scanning food labels for the word "organic." My daughter was about six months old and just beginning to try solid food. Like many moms, I wanted to be sure she was getting the safest, healthiest food possible, so I started buying organic yogurt and baby food. Looking for that organic label became a habit, and now that my kids are seven and ten years old, I still buy organic snacks and milk for them.

We have spoken at length in this column about the willful refusal of the human race to do something about problems that are either too big to grasp or too distant to worry about. They tend to become, in the words of Douglas Adams, SEPs: Somebody Else's Problems. In fact, in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, aliens use an SEP force field as a way to disguise the landing of a giant spaceship in the middle of a cricket match at Lord's (the world's most famous cricket stadium, for all non-Commonwealth readers - comparable to Fenway Park or Old …