“Is that USDA organic or Oregon organic or
Portland organic?” asks a character played by singer Carrie
Brownstein, one of the stars of the great IFC network sketch comedy
Portlandia, in a widely loved restaurant skit from the
show’s first episode last year.

“It’s just all across the board organic,” the server responds
before excusing herself.

When she returns a moment later, the waitress shares with the
diners a pamphlet of information about the chicken before
presenting its “papers” for inspection. This helps her to fill in
the pretentious would-be diners on the life of “Colin,” who as its
name suggests actually was a rooster—which makes the joke
even funnier—before it came to star as an entrée.

Kendall J. Eskine, a psychology professor at Loyola University
New Orleans, calls the Portlandia skit “very funny, to say
the least.”

Eskine knows a thing or two about the links between thought,
self, other, and eating. His body of research
focuses on “how our everyday embodied experiences shape our
cognitive architecture.”

His latest paper, “Wholesome Foods and Wholesome Morals? Organic
Foods Reduce Prosocial Behavior and Harshen Moral
Judgments,” looks at whether people exposed to organic
food marketing are so self-satisfied that they are less likely to
express empathy toward others.

Extrapolating from existing research on “moral licensing” that
found a negative relationship between altruism and salient moral
identity, Eskine theorized his research would reveal “that those
exposed to organic foods would help less and make harsher moral
judgments compared to those exposed to non-organic foods.”

Indeed Eskine’s latest research,
published last week in the journal Social Psychological and
Personality Science, pegs organic consumers as anti-social

jerks. Or at least those are the sort of stark terms that the
press has used to
frame Eskine’s research.

And while at least some segment of organic consumers has been
painted as pretentious and elitist since even before Dave Barry was
cracking timely Windows 98
jokes, Eskine says that lumping his research in with such
anti-organic digs misses his point.

“I’m not arguing that organic food itself is making
people harsh judgers or non-altrustic,” he tells me by email. “What
the data suggest is that mere exposure to organic labeling
can be enough to lead people to affirm their moral identities,
which in much past research can lead people to act unethically
later.

“This research points to the idea that its marketing might
entice people to affirm their moral identities,” Eskine says. “I
think it’s important for eaters of all types to be mindful of their
decisions and try to extend their altruism beyond mere food
purchases.”

But if people have misunderstood his point at times, it may be
because Eskine’s paper appears to conflate “organic foods” with
“organic marketing,” and to focus more on the former than on the
latter. The word “label” also appears just once in the paper.

Not surprisingly, some critics have pounced on the study. Its
research “methodology was utterly ridiculous,”
writes Martin Cizmar, a Portland writer and author of the
so-ironic-it’s-not-ironic-it’s-ironic book
Chubster: A Hipster’s Guide to Losing Weight While Staying
Cool.

Another critic calls
Eskine’s methodology “demented” for—among other claimed faults—its
small sample size. But in the next sentence that same writer goes
on to belittle the integrity of the five-dozen or so anonymous
undergraduate students who Eskine (like many academic researchers)
used as research subjects—saying undergrads are “not exactly known
for the tensile strength of their moral fiber.”

Even though that critic’s argument was stillborn, the Eskine
study does appear to have limitations.