(VinePair) - There is a distinct lack of nuance when it comes to conversations about politics, taxes and … organic agriculture. But even more distressingly, there is a distinct lack of basic consumer comprehension.

It seems like everyone has an opinion, and even on a recent weekend getaway, I couldn’t escape the increasingly incessant chatter about the relative merits of the organic movement.

“Which of these Napa Chards is organic?” a slim 40-ish woman asked our bartender. “I don’t like drinking pesticides,” she said solemnly.

Who does?

“I’m not sure, actually,” the bartender replied. “I don’t put much stock in the organic label myself.”

My jaw hung open at this display of carefully cultivated cluelessness, not to mention sassiness – at a farm-to-table in horsey, high-flying Saratoga, no less. I left the restaurant in a fog that night, and it had little to do with the bottle of Burgundy Pinot Noir my mother and I split. On the walk back to our hotel, we debated whether the deep analysis of even the smallest purchasing choice was a modern necessity in the age of globalization or just a major bummer.

The bartender’s refusal to engage threw me too – I couldn’t decide if it was deeply thought out and considered or just tossed off. I decided to investigate, ferreting out academic studies of synthetic and natural pesticides and then reaching out to farmers, academics and winemakers to learn more about why (and if) buying organic really matters.

What I found was hardly the Easy Road To Sustainable Juice I was hoping to discover – idyllic images of free-range farming this story is not.

A lot of the buzz and imagery about organics appears to be just that – empty sound bites and gimmicks created by folks eager to cash in on the increasingly lucrative organic market. Where does that leave us? Not in an easy place.

Falling for marketers’ ploys is practically a full-time occupation in America (I’m not the only one who’s bought multiple cartons of fat-free ice cream hoping, this time, to finally find “creamy fat-free vanilla bliss” right?) Consumers’ perception of what organic agriculture is vs. the reality, and the halo of virtue with which it is bequeathed (and conventional agriculture’s implicit pair of devil’s horns) is, arguably, one of the biggest boondoggles in our culture today. More than half of Americans (55%) go organic because they believe it’s healthier. Meanwhile, there is really no evidence to back that assumption up. And even organic farmers use pesticides (sorry random lady at the bar). They just happen to be “natural.”