The first carton, from Naturally Nested, says “laid by uncaged hens” and claims that the “hens are fed an all vegetarian diet.” Both good things, because industrial chickens end up stuffed into cages and fed parts of other animals left over after slaughter. Naturally Nested also labels their cartons with “No animal fat. No animal by-products. No steroids, No hormones. No stimulants. No cages.” Seems like everything I want in an egg-laying hen.

Except that there’s also Sunrise Fresh eggs, which claim to be “cage free” and are also fed a vegetarian diet with no hormones or antibiotics. They’re “local northwest fresh, nest laid, certified humane raised & handled.” So they’re more local (but how local is defined is left up to your imagination) and they’re “certified humane raised & handled,” which the Naturally Nested eggs are not. Neither of these are organic, but they seem to cover everything a certified organic label would cover…although, maybe something’s left out, and how would you, the poor consumer, know?

There are so many adjectives, so many ways of saying whether your company is certified this or that and the whole thing becomes incredibly diluted and absurd.

Even buying something as simple as a tomato at a farmer’s market involves wading through a complex set of descriptors: heirloom, no spray, certified organic, organically grown, locally grown, pesticide free, and more.

Grocery shopping as a whole becomes more difficult as I become more socially and environmentally aware. It’s overwhelming to consider my impact as I’m shopping. Everything from the way the food is grown or raised, to its transportation, to the packaging and processing (if any) to the way I transport myself to the grocery and how I carry my food home nags me as I make my way down the aisles. There are even whole books to help you wade through this stuff!

The reason why—as far as I can see—we have all these labels and descriptors is that certifying something organic, for example, by the USDA, has become almost completely meaningless. There are no so many ways to skirt the USDA’s ever-loosening standards that it’s a farce. Luna Bars, tasty as they may be, are 70 percent organic. This is actually not true to the organic movement at all, because organic means…well, what does it mean? Who even knows anymore? And the labels by these organizations are so expensive for small farmers to subscribe to that they often avoid them and just call their food “organically-grown” and the like. But what does that mean?

It would appear we need an organization to oversee all of this, to sort through this for us and help with these labels. …..but this is precisely the problem we had to begin with. So now we have a multiplicity of organizations offering certifications and a multitude of ways to describe food that the whole thing is utterly absurd and thoroughly maddening for someone who really is trying quite hard to make sense of it.

Maybe I’ll give up on the eggs altogether. I prefer mine to come from hand-petted chickens, anyway.