Think you buy organic? Think again

[renate]

Lobbying by large food companies to weaken organic rules started when the U.S. Department of Agriculture fully implemented organic labeling standards in October 2002. Food producers immediately fought the new rules. A Georgia chicken producer was ultimately able to persuade one of his state’s congressional representatives to slip through a federal legislative amendment in a 2003 appropriations bill to cut its costs. The amendment stated that if the price of organic feed was more than twice the cost of regular feed--which can contain heavy metals, pesticides, and animal byproducts--then livestock producers could feed their animals less costly, nonorganic feed but still label their products organic.

That bizarre change in standards was repealed in April 2003 after consumers and organic producers protested, but the fight to maintain the integrity of organic labeling continues. In October 2005, Congress weakened the organic-labeling law despite protests from more than 325,000 consumers and 250 organic-food companies. The law overturns a recent court ruling that barred the use of synthetic ingredients in “organic” foods. It mostly affects processed products such as canned soups and frozen pizza.

The Massachusetts-based Organic Trade Association (OTA), which represents large and small food producers including corporate giants such as Kraft Foods and Archer Daniels Midland Co., supported the amendment. “The issue is whether processed products could use a list of benign synthetic ingredients already approved by the National Organic Standards Board,” says Katherine DiMatteo, executive director of the OTA, “and we do not believe standards will be weakened at all.”

Not all organic producers agree, however. Executives at Earthbound Farm, which has been in the organic business for more than 20 years and is the nation’s leading supplier of specialty organic salad greens, were startled to find their company’s name on an OTA letter supporting the amendment. Earthbound objects to built-in “emergency exemptions” that would allow nonorganic ingredients in organically labeled food if the organic alternative is considered “commercially unavailable.” As with the Georgia chicken-feed case, if organic corn is expensive because it’s in short supply, a soup maker might argue that it is commercially unavailable and get an exemption to use nonorganic corn.

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/food/organic-products-206/overview.htm?resultPageIndex=1&resultIndex=1&searchTerm=organic
(bolding mine, of course)

The article doesn't say so, but I think this makes it crystal clear that big-corporation management and lobbyists are devil spawn. And Earthbound Farm rocks.

[Hissyspit]

1. I knew this already, but it still enrages me to see it. How about TRUTH

IN ADVERTISING?

If it is a company that will make use of emergency exemptions, than they should be required by law to put that on the label.

[upi402]

2. Earthbound Farm, is the Cali standard still trustworthy?

Do we go back to the indy inspections/certs?

[philarq]

3. delete

[philarq]

4. I am of the opinion that :

The entire "organic" thing is silly...period

If I buy a chicken --it is an organic item --If I buy a potato (non Quayle spelling), it is an organic item. --if I buy a can of soup, it may contain non-organic material, but wholey it is comprised of organic items. Even MSG (monosodium glutamate) is glutamine, an amino acid, and is manufactured from usually from seaweed, an organic material therefore it is "organic."

If you want to buy products lower in heavy metals and pesticides then do that, but don't think that labeling them "organic" doesn't make some of us snicker a bit.

[Idylle Moon Dancer]

6. yes, if you want to be all pedantic and technical.

what term would you suggest?

[philarq]

7. Call it what it is

If you want a chicken low in heavy metals, then call it a chicken low in heavy metals.

I am firmy convinced that if the actual difference between an "organic" chicken and an ordinary run of the mill chicken were shown then the "organic" happy farms would be out of business in a hearbeat.

I am also the person snickering at people who buy brown eggs instead of white ones for the same reason. None of these people has actally ever been on a farm and had to collect eggs and therefore has noticed that the exact same chicken can lay both brown and white eggs.

While I am not a consumer of foreign products where I can help it (other than the British empire in my case) I do feel that the food cost differences between "organic" products and the "non-organic" are fairly ludicrous. Please give me the cheaper potato and the everyday chicken rather than the chicken raised in a happy environment with low playing music piped in.

This is just another one of the arguments that Republicans often hype up to point out where they can never join the loony left. I for one don't feel that offering up a choice reason for them to take the Democrats to task is worth marrying the Democratic party to "organic" food products.

Rather than that, perhaps we should just agree that as a Democrat you and I can stand forestrong behind an independent FDA. Even the Right wing has no recourse but to accept that--true?

[podnoi]

8. What is wrong with having a standard?

It sounds like you aren't so concerned about the food supply as some are. Labeling "organic" is a way to recognize a certain kind of farming. Surely they could have called it something else but it is too late for that. This would be a democratic issue only in offerring the people what they want, a way to identify cleaner/purer foods. If you don't like it you can buy what you want.

[SpiralHawk]

10. You can drive a a Cadillac or you can drive a Pinto

You will pay more for the Caddy because it's a better car.

Same thing with food. You can buy the chemical-and-hormone saturated crap with special mystery genetically engineered components, which is offered up by Big Ag for the proles. Most of that food, in my view, is crap -- and leads to Big Problems down the road -- not just for the people who eat it, but for the land that was exploited and poisoned to "manufacture" it.

Or, you can buy clean food. Clean food comes from the "happy" farms you are so gleefully deriding. These farms are in fact oases of environmental and dietary sanity in an ocean of corrupted corporate crap.

[tkmorris]

11. True enough

The brown egg thing for example has always cracked up this ex-farmboy. They aren't worth more they're just..... brown.

However I would rather drink milk from a cow that wasn't fed Bovine Growth Hormones and fed on grass rather than chicken shit. I would rather eat a chicken that spent it's life pecking in the free area around it's coop than one that lived it's life in a 12 inch square. I would rather eat vegetables that weren't doused in some highly sketchy chemical pesticides thrice weekly.

True, calling anything from the produce section of your local supermarket, or the meat section for that matter, "organic" is just superfluous and a tad stupid, nonetheless I think we have to recognize that in this context the word has taken on a new meaning. Even if the USDA has undertaken to muddy that meaning. It is used to define foods that attempt to NOT be part of that mass production cycle gone mad. As such, I think we would all do well to support it.

[MadHound]

13. Fine, I'll give you that GM potato, since you scoff at organics

I'll give you that corn dowsed in anhydrous amonia. Want some of that tomota dosed in Roundup? All yours. As is the hormone pumped cow who was fed chicken brains. And when you start coming down with various cancers and lesions, when Mad Cow is eating away your brain, and your daughter hits puberty at six, remember, you said you wanted cheap, not healthy food.

You obviously have no clue as to what does and does not go into your food. Perhaps you should start looking. It's way beyond the happy hippy days friend, which you dismiss so easily. It has been shown time and again that organic foods are not only better for you, but taste better to boot. Modern agricbusiness has been injecting all sorts of hormones, carcinogens and chemicals into our diet for decades now, and we are paying the price. Higher rates of cancers, strange lesions, lowered age of puberty, previously unheard of diseases, and an agriculutural model that is unsustainable in the face of rising oil prices.

In many places where conventional farming has been practice for a long time, the land is untillable without fertilizers. The nutrients have been stripped away. What happens when fertilizers become grossly expensive(and prices are rising, as is anything petroleum related)? The land can't be worked and people starve.

Your casual dismissal of a subject that you obviously have no idea about is both laughable and insulting at the same time. Before you go talking out your ass any more on this subject, I suggest that you go do some research, like go visit an organic and petro farm both. Taste test the food, find out what is being added to it. Then get back to me about what you find. I think you will be greatly suprised. I would offer my farm for your use, but being as though it appears you're in Britain, it would be too long of a jaunt for you.

So please, please, no where of you speak before you open your mouth. Anything else just makes you look like a fool.

[NMMNG]

5. And yet again quality is sacrificed to expediency, volume and profit

Deplorable.

[awoke_in_2003]

12. Isn't that the american way

:sarcasm:

[SpiralHawk]

9. Want to be sure your food is clean? Join a CSA

Here are two links as resources on Community Supported Agriculture
(CSA), which was initiated 20 years ago in 1986 in the USA. In this short
span of time, farms on this general model have taken root in cities, suburbs, and rural areas
around our world.

CSA farms provide a proven way for people to be directly involved in the
healing of the environment, in the production of clean food for their
families and neighbors, and also in providing dignified work for men and
women. Here are the links:

The Story of the Farms of Tomorrow
http://www.chiron-communications.com/farms.html


Community Farms in the 21st Century: Poised for Another Wave of Growth? - A
two part article on the history and development of CSA in the USA.
http://www.thenewfarm.org/features/0104/csa-history/part1.shtml