Certified Organic: meaningless? (UPDATE)
UPDATE: The USDA has just announced an official audit of its National Organic Program (NOP). What an accomplishment for the great art of complaining! (via The Daily Green)
An article from last month in the Washington Post casts doubt on the integrity of federal organic certification. From that article:
Three years ago, U.S. Department of Agriculture employees determined that synthetic additives in organic baby formula violated federal standards and should be banned from a product carrying the federal organic label. Today the same additives, purported to boost brainpower and vision, can be found in 90 percent of organic baby formula.
The government’s turnaround, from prohibition to permission, came after a USDA program manager was lobbied by the formula makers and overruled her staff. That decision and others by a handful of USDA employees, along with an advisory board’s approval of a growing list of non-organic ingredients, have helped numerous companies win a coveted green-and-white “USDA Organic” seal on an array of products.
Grated organic cheese, for example, contains wood starch to prevent clumping. Organic beer can be made from non-organic hops. Organic mock duck contains a synthetic ingredient that gives it an authentic, stringy texture.
The dilution of the organic label did not begin recently. The organic movement was founded as a grass-roots community campaign that focused on small farms, local produce, and personal relationships between farmer and consumer. That movement helped to establish a federal organic certification. Unfortunately, capitalism demands growth. Small farms became enormous farms or were purchased by even larger food producers. The organic label now fuels a $23 billion industry where profiteering has all but washed away the ideals on which Organic was founded — one might call it erosion. What now?
Hailed as “America’s most influential farmer,” Joel Salatin is a Virginia farmer who describes his farm as “beyond organic. He recently gave an interview, where he gives his own impressions of the organic industry:
MG: Is your meat organic? What are your thoughts on certification?
JS: We don’t participate in any government program. We are beyond organic. Organic is a non-comprehensive term—it does not define many variables. Goodness, you can grow certified organic carrots using seed that you produced yourself, bought from a seed saver, or acquired from the other side of the planet. The soil can be fertilized with on-farm generated compost and manure or bags and jugs of concoctions created in industrial factories. You can prepare the soil by double digging, tractor tilling, or carpet mulching like permaculture. You can weed those carrots with plastic mulch, by hand, propane flamers. You can pick those tomatoes yourself, with family labor, or non-community labor. And this is nowhere near the variables just in raising carrots. And in livestock the allowable variables are even more than with plants. Most organic eggs in this country are raised in factory houses. Ditto meat birds. Cornucopia project and other watchdog groups have had to routinely sue the USDA to get enforcement of the National Organic Standards. I don’t trust the government as far as I can throw a bull by the tail—and that’s not very far. Why in the world would people who spent a lifetime castigating the USDA for its unabashed promotion of industrial food give it the authority to regulate honest food? This is called intellectual schizophrenia.
I first realized the fallacy of organic certification in around 1990 when I realized our pastured chickens could be certified organic if we purchased certified feed from 1,000 miles away but since we didn’t have any local organic grain growers, buying my grain locally eliminated the certification chances. In my opinion, patronizing my neighbor so he doesn’t get discouraged and sell to a strip mall is certainly as environmentally sensible as bathing my grains in transport diesel fuel and exporting my dollars outside the neighborhood just so I could claim organic purity.
The rest of the interview finds Salatin chastizing Whole Foods, describing how his farming differs from the norm, and even giving some predictions about the future of farming itself.
(You might recognize Salatin’s name from Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma or the recent documentary Food Inc. He has also written a slew of books on the methodology of his soil-centric farming.)
