Organ-O-Genesis

I found a delicious vegan restaurant near the Kyoto University campus. The food I ate had been fried, so in Japan ‘vegan’ and ‘organic’ don’t seem to automatically equate with ‘healthy.’ Still, I got to thinking about the label ‘organic,’ and it really bothers me. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with avoiding food that may contain dangerous chemicals, I just don’t like how the word has become associated with a certain production method: as if you would have a health-conscious friend over for dinner who tells you, quite pointedly, “Oh, I’m sorry. I can’t eat this salad. It’s inorganic.”

While the organic/inorganic duality may bring to mind a molecular distinction (”Oh-my, this free-range-organically-fed chicken is made out of chemicals!”), my first thought as a biologist is to the physiological meaning. We aren’t just mushy inside, but are composed out of discrete organs, each with its own ontogenetic life. These cells go this way, those cells go that way.

If you grab the genital plate of a fruit fly with a pair of tweezers and give it a good tug, the entire gut and reproductive tract comes spilling out, nice and neat; each structure a cozy compartment of function. And yet, this compartmentalization is not a property, per se, of living things; it is a process. Dissecting a pupa—the stage between the wormy larva and the fly-y adult—you might notice a perfectly formed head, the wings folded neatly, six (count ‘em) legs. But the abdomen, the gut, sloshes out: a brown mushy slurry.