Well with my farming background I can be sort of be a cynic on the issue and annoy people.
Yeah, you wouldn't want to eat your food if you knew what was on it and the dirty lakes I've seen etc.
likewise,
organic means 'using agents that are naturally occurring' aka lots of mercury to kill stuff.
that's in terms of pesticides
farming:
When a lot of people say 'organic' they mean 'local' and 'non-mass produced farms'.
Well newsflash, I'm sorry to break to those people but those farms don't exist. The days of 100 acre farms died 30-40yrs ago. And, those 'family farms' are still 'family farms' but have become a corporation of a farm of 3,000+ acres in order to meet the needs of an ever growing consuming society and world. (I remember as a child back in '94, grandpa telling me the grains went to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union)
So to some 'organic' means to go back to a simpler time where there were small produced farms that looked a lot like gardens and sold locally. Overall, the rural farming communities sadly moved away from this trend in the 80s with the advent of Wal-Mart. Any rural resident below 40 doesn't know how to garden for example (obesity rates soared in this period). That trend is coming back so, inevitably the 'farmer's market' is slowly resurfacing.
but in terms of nutrients? Doesn't make sense to me. A potato is a potato. The organic movement rose out of a resistance to free-trade globalization, but morphed into genetic modification when Monsanto got ahead of themselves with modified corn/cows.
So now it means many things to many people and is rather confusing, especially now that its gone corporate. Kinda like fair trade.