Intentional Eating

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.)

Starbucks experiments with ‘debranded’ stores in Seattle

The Starbucks Corporation, a brand that has become synonymous with gourmet coffee drinks, has become so large that the ubiquity of its shops is actually hurting its image. In cities where a Starbucks can be found on almost every corner (check your Starbucks density), the corporation hopes that removing the green logo from their shops will encourage consumers to drink more Starbucks coffee. The trouble is that those customers may not realize where their coffee is coming from.

The first stores to be ‘debranded’ are in Seattle, where their first shop opened in 1971. These stores will no longer bear the Starbucks name. From the Seattle Times:

The new names are meant to give the stores “a community personality,” said Tim Pfeiffer, senior vice president of global design. Starbucks’ logo will be absent, with bags of the company’s coffee and other products rebranded with the 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea name.

In the spirit of a traditional coffeehouse, it will serve wine and beer, host live music and poetry readings and sell espresso from a manual machine rather than the automated type found in most Starbucks stores.

I can see this campaign having both positive and negative effects. If the owner or manager of the store is given enough leeway to make purchasing and decorating decisions, the store might have a truly unique atmosphere. The furnishings might come from local shops and the decorations from local artists. Baristas who care more about their product might serve up a better cup than they would in an ordinary Starbucks. (However, unless those stores are given the opportunity to roast their own beans, each cup will have the nearly-trademarked burnt coffee taste that Starbucks is so well known for.) The life music and (terribly-clichéd) poetry readings might spice up otherwise spartan coffee houses.

Unfortunately, it seems as though this might be a marketing scheme designed to hide the product of a large corporation behind the façade of a small one. A cup of coffee that appears to be a local product but whose beans are actually bought, roasted, and shipped by an enormous corporation borders on false advertising.

One might argue that coffee can never be a local product of the U.S., as almost no coffee beans are grown here. My defense of local roasters and shops is that those local enterprises often put more value on personal relationships and transparency all the way through the supply chain, buying directly from farms in some cases. Profits go mainly back into the community or to the region where the beans are grown, whereas a healthy portion of a large chain’s profits are sent to the corporate behemoth. Finally, local roasters and shops can promote the genuine individuality of a neighborhood, rather than “community personality” as decided by a large corporation.

(via Treehugger)