Organics in the News

An alliance of consumer, farmer, environmental, ethical investor, and food safety groups today urged Ohio Governor Ted Strickland to repeal a February 2008 emergency rule he issued for labeling dairy products in his state. The rule stipulates that Ohio’s dairy producers cannot use the widely used and understood term “rbGH-free” on labels and must rather describe products as “from cows not treated with artificial growth hormones.” The rule also requires that a disclaimer must be included stating that there is “no significant difference between milk from rbGH-treated cows and milk from untreated cows.”

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“Governor Strickland has essentially made it illegal to tell the truth,” said Carol Goland, Executive Director of the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association. “Rather than continue to defend this rule in litigation, we urge the Governor to rethink the wisdom of spending State resources to support a rule that interferes with Ohioans’ ability to make an informed decision about the dairy products they buy, with farmers and dairies’ rights to free speech, and with consumer right-to-know. In this era of increased concern over how our food is produced, Ohio should be making more information available, not less.”

Many Americans have been going through some soul searching in the past few years about the current state of agriculture in this country. From decades of enjoying cheap food with little concern over its origins, we have now become transfixed by video of sick cows in feedlots, reports of poorly inspected imports and the ever increasing piles of evidence concerning agribusiness and the use of chemicals. Frontline personally scared the crap out of me with a special last month on the pollution flowing into the Chesapeake Bay from chicken farms in the area. Trust me, it wasn't pretty.

In Texas, Hamilton met Harry Lewis, an African American with dairy cows on land that has been in his family for generations. The story of Lewis and how African Americans came to farm such a large swath of land near Louisiana makes for fascinating social history. Combined with how some thrived there while others have left sets up for Lewis's many opinions on what makes a farm a success and what made him want to farm. "When I was young, I didn't want to farm because I didn't want to be confined. You know when the baseball game's goin', you in the milk barn. Of if you wanna do somethin' during the day then you have to do the milkin' earlier, and then you have to get up earlier. What I failed to realize at that age: anything you do is confining, but everything you do don't offer you a sense of freedom. And farming, as we were farming, allowed that."

Last week, the WaPo ran a story headlined "Purity of Organic Label is Questioned" -- a quasi-investigative story on how the organic "program's lax standards are undermining the federal program and the law itself."

I say quasi-investigative because it wasn't particularly news. The tension discussed in the article, between those who have always sought to expand the industry and those who seek a more purist vision, has been fodder for many articles and was the subject of my book Organic, Inc. -- published 3 years ago. Often those camps are presented as big corporations on the one hand (chipping away at regulations) and small farmers striving to keep things pure on the other, both at one another's throats.

Under the USDA rules, a product can carry the "organic" label if 95% of the ingredients are "organic." Processed organic foods, such as organic yogurt, crackers, cookies, cereal, etc., can carry the word "organic" if they meet this 95% threshold. But they can use approved non-organic ingredients in the remaining 5%. And these may be "synthetics" that must win a specific exception. Among them are baking powder, Vitamin E and C, xanthum gum (a thickening agent), pectin and lecithin. But as the article points out, the list has ballooned to 245.

Although "corporate firepower" has lobbied for these exceptions, nearly every company in the processed organic foods business uses them, from independents like Newman's Own Organics to farmer owned co-ops like Organic Valley and companies like Stonyfield Farm, which has a cameo in the film Food Inc. In short, though some are controversial, you would be hard pressed to find any processed organic food business arguing for a blanket dismissal of all synthetics.

As production of organic foods is rising about 20 percent a year, farmers markets are crowded, and even mainstream grocery stores carry organic produce.

Organics are moving beyond the fad stage, Jim Riddle says. They are here to stay because they are often better for growers, the land, the environment and consumers.

Riddle, of rural Winona, is a longtime advocate of organics who served a five-year term on the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Organic Standards Board and is now coordinator of Organic Agriculture Outreach for the University of Minnesota.

It's a dream life...with a few nightmares thrown in for fun," says Heidi Thompson of her involvement in organic farming.

Thompson's Painted Hill Farm is an organic farming operation situated on 47 acres south of Wells. It is the result of a vision and a lot of hard work by owners Chuck and Heidi Thompson.

The Thompson's journey began in the early 1990s, when, as a newly-married couple, they immersed themselves in the lifestyle that accompanies living in Minneapolis as students. At this time, Heidi was attending art school and Chuck was completing his apprenticeship to become an electrician.

After a few years of the hustle and bustle of city life, the country began calling louder and louder to the couple.

"Chuck had been raised on a small acreage in northern Minnesota where his parents raised a few chickens," says Heidi. "I always wanted to live on one, so we were getting the itch to get away from the city."

A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday left in place an injunction barring Monsanto Co from selling its Roundup Ready alfalfa seed until the government completes an environmental impact study on how the genetically modified product could affect neighboring crops.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the company's request for a rehearing of its appeal and said it would accept no more petitions for rehearing in the three-year-old case.

Monsanto's only remaining avenue appears to be U.S. Supreme Court review. A Monsanto spokesman could not be reached for comment.

"This is a major victory for consumers, for farmers and for the public as far as protecting their rights and the rights of farmers to sow the crop of their choice and consumers to eat the food of their choice," said George Kimbrell, staff attorney for the Center for Food Safety.

Kimbrell, whose group is a plaintiff in the case, predicted that Monsanto's chances of getting Supreme Court review of the case were "slim to none and slim just left town."

Forget buckets of blood. Nothing says horror like one of those tubs of artificially buttered, nonorganic popcorn at the concession stand. That, at least, is one of the unappetizing lessons to draw from one of the scariest movies of the year, “Food, Inc.,” an informative, often infuriating activist documentary about the big business of feeding or, more to the political point, force-feeding, Americans all the junk that multinational corporate money can buy. You’ll shudder, shake and just possibly lose your genetically modified lunch.

Divided into chapters dedicated to points along the commercial food chain — from farm to fork, to borrow a loaded agribusiness phrase — the movie is nothing if not ambitious. “There are no seasons in the American supermarket,” the unidentified voice intones in the opening scene, as the camera sweeps the aisles of one such brightly lighted, heavily stocked if nutritionally impoverished emporium. From there the director Robert Kenner jumps all over the food map, from industrial feedlots where millions of cruelly crammed cattle mill about in their own waste until slaughter, to the chains where millions of consumers gobble down industrially produced meat and an occasional serving of E. coli bacteria.

The voice in the opening belongs to the ethical epicurean and locavore champion Michael Pollan, author of “In Defense of Food” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” as well as a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. (Somewhat confusingly, the movie uses voice-overs without clearly identifying who’s issuing forth on the soundtrack.) Mr. Pollan, who periodically appears on screen seated at a homey-looking table, is a great strength of “Food, Inc.,” as is one of its co-producers, Eric Schlosser, the author of “Fast Food Nation.” These two embodiments of conscience, together with Mr. Kenner, chart how and why the villains not only outnumber the heroes in contemporary food production, but also how and why they outbluff, outmuscle and outspend their opponents by billions of often government-subsidized dollars.

Kellogg Schwab, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Water and Health, refers to a typical pig farm manure lagoon that he sampled. "There were 10 million E. coli per liter [of sampled waste]. Ten million. And you have a hundred million liters in some of those pits. So you can have trillions of bacteria present, of which 89 percent are resistant to drugs. That's a massive amount that in a rain event can contaminate the environment."...

Schwab says that if he tried, he could not build a better incubator of resistant pathogens than a factory farm. He, Silbergeld, and others assert that the level of danger has yet to be widely acknowledged. Says Schwab, "It's not appreciated until it's your mother, or your son, or you trying to fight off an infection that will not go away because the last mechanism to fight it has been usurped by someone putting it into a pig or a chicken."

The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) today released its position paper on Genetically Modified foods stating that "GM foods pose a serious health risk" and calling for a moratorium on GM foods. Citing several animal studies, the AAEM concludes "there is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects" and that "GM foods pose a serious health risk in the areas of toxicology, allergy and immune function, reproductive health, and metabolic, physiologic and genetic health."

I recently organized an event at a small Methodist church in Cedar Grove, North Carolina: the newly-minted Bishop’s Task Force on Food. The meeting was comprised of fourteen farmers, theologians, pastors, community gardeners, and one ex-Special Forces soldier-turned-food activist named Stan. Stan’s newest tactical mission: getting churches involved in the sustainable food fight, which is why I invited him along to join us.

This food task force is but one example of a groundswell of interest among churches. For a faith whose central sacrament is the Eucharistic meal, a number of Christians are seeing the far-reaching implications of that meal for how they eat. And they are beginning to ask some hard questions. Why, for example, must that old warhorse known as The Church Potluck still feature tables brimming with Jell-O, high fructose corn syrup, and other “food products” we know to be bad for us? And why should our food supply be so dependent on fossil fuels which are quickly disappearing? Why has the number of malnourished people in the world (one billion) been surpassed by the number of obese? Clearly our eating habits are destructive. How, then, do we rethink the way we eat and what resources for that re-imagining do we already have within our faith tradition?