What’s in a label? A lot, if the label is “organic” and you’re selling farm-raised fish. The New York Times has an extremely provocative story in the business section today titled “Free or Farmed, When Is a Fish Really Organic?” The article has garnered 70 comments and counting so far, a remarkable number of them by people who can spell and only a few from those oh-so-original wits who say that “organic” should refer to carbon-based life forms.

The gist of the article is this: The USDA is considering whether it’s possible to come up with a definition of “organic” that can apply to farm-raised fish, and those who catch wild fish — whose living conditions are uncontrolled and thus uncertifiable — are kvetching that their wares will be at a disadvantage in the hot-as-an-organic-jalapeno market.

Almost no one except them, however, thinks that wild fish could be labeled organic in any meaningful way. The real battle is over labeling farmed vegetarian fish like catfish and tilapia versus carnivorous fish like salmon, and environmentalists who oppose both. At stake is whether the label refers to inputs and outputs, or to a holistic philosophy of agriculture that can be extended to aquaculture.

Most everyone agrees that the organic label can easily be applied to farmed fish like catfish and tilapia that are primarily vegetarians because producers can buy organically certified feed pellets for them. However, in order to certify carnivores like salmon, the farmed fish would have to eat other fish labeled organic, or more likely, pellets made from such fish, which is of course a Catch-22 at the moment.

Environmentalists and other health-conscious groups are pissed that fish farms could even be considered for the label, as “organic” is also supposed to — in theory anyway — stand in some way for sustainability. And while some argue that fish farms are sustainable by virtue of preventing wild stocks from being over-fished, the truth is that most are heavy polluters, and in the case of carnivorous fish like salmon, their very food also comes from overfishing the small creatures that are the “building blocks” of a healthy ecosystem.

It all reminds me of the debate over the USDA’s proposed “grassfed” label. As Mack Graves, CEO of Panorama Grassfed Meats (formerly Western Grasslands), said to me, “It’s a diet, not a lifestyle.” What he meant was, if cows eat grass instead of grain, they should be able to be labeled “grass-fed” whether they forage for it in pasture or whether they eat antibiotic-laced hay standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a 10,000-cow feedlot.

Similarly, “organic” beef and milk can come from cows that have never seen a blade of actual grass: as long as their feed is pesticide-free, organic corn and hay, there’s no problem. Organic chickens can be raised indoors in 30,000-bird sheds ventilated by giant fans. No matter that those organic factory farms cause almost as many environmental problems as they nominally alleviate.

So I predict we will see an organic label for farm-raised fish. Consumer demand has made the financial opportunity it represents simply too lucrative for any silly ethical considerations to stand in the way.

But here’s what I wish: I wish the labels stood for both diet AND lifestyle. That in order to earn the “organic” label, you would have to raise chickens, pigs, and cows and yes, even, fish, according to their natural diets and behaviors. That would mean no grain — or animal byproducts — for cows and no fish “pellets” for fish; mud and straw bedding for pigs, pasture for cows, and things for chickens to peck at and scratch. I can hear the knee-jerk rebuttal now: “You’ll never feed the world that way.” There’s simply not enough land to spread out our 60 million hogs, 9 billion chickens, and however many million cows on, and I suspect there’s not enough wild fish for us to catch and eat without destroying the various aquatic ecosystems.

Fine. We should eat less animal protein, and we would if the market was actually a free one, and not built on passing the buck to someone else.

Wild fish is a lot more expensive, as it should be. Farmed fish, like factory-farm meat, is artificially cheap. As commenter John Foss points out on the NY Times site, salmon net-cage farms discharge masses of fecal waste into surrounding waters that sound like literal versions of the euphemistic “manure lagoons” that land-based factory farms rely on for waste “disposal.” They are plagued by parasites and require antibiotics. And as I have read elsewhere, many fish farmers were busy figuring out how to raise carnivorous salmon on (probably genetically engineered) corn pellets — but then, that was before corn prices made that impractical.

The lesson is obvious: Labels are fast becoming useless. If you consider food an extension of your values — and heaven knows very few Americans do —then you have to figure out which part of the SOLE food equation is most important to you, do the legwork, and make your own compromises on a case-by-case basis. No one, not the USDA, Whole Foods, or even the Monterey Aquarium, can tell you what’s “good” according to your particular value system.