Not All Organic Food Is Created Equal. Big Companies Are Co-opting A Good Thing.

When I became a beekeeper I took on the task of educating folks about raw, unfiltered, unheated, untreated honey and the high fructose corn syrup stuff masquerading as honey on the shelves of our markets.  Not all honey is created equal.

Nor, does it seem, is organic food.

Stephanie Strom reporting for the NYTimes in her detailed article "Organic Food Purists Worry About Big Companies' Influence" reveals that Big Food is exploiting what Americans are learning to choose: organic food over processed.  Excerpt.

Highlights:

1. "Organic food has become a wildly lucrative business for Big Food and a premium-price-means-premium-profit section of the grocery store
2. Bear Naked, Wholesome & Hearty, Kashi: all three and more actually belong to the cereals giant Kellogg. Naked Juice? That would be PepsiCo of Pepsi and Fritos fame. And behind the pastoral-sounding Walnut Acres, Health Valley and Spectrum Organics is none other than Hain Celestial, once affiliated with Heinz, the grand old name in ketchup.
3. Over the last decade, since federal organic standards have come to the fore, giant agri-food corporations like these and others — Coca-Cola, Cargill, ConAgra, General Mills, Kraft and M&M Mars among them — have gobbled up most of the nation’s organic food industry. Pure, locally produced ingredients from small family farms? Not so much anymore.
4. Many consumers may not realize the extent to which giant corporations have come to dominate organic food. Then again, giant corporations don’t exactly trumpet their role in the industry. Their financial motivation, however, is obvious. On Amazon.com, for instance, 12 six-ounce boxes of Kraft Organic Macaroni and Cheese sell for $25.32, while a dozen 7.25-ounce boxes of the company’s regular Macaroni and Cheese go for $19.64.
5. Between the time the Agriculture Department came up with its proposed regulations for the organic industry in 1997 and the time those rules became law in 2002, myriad small, independent organic companies — businesses like Cascadian Farm — were snapped up by corporate titans. Heinz and Hain together bought 19 organic brands.  Eden is one of the last remaining independent organic companies of any size, together with the Clif Bar & Company, Amy’s Kitchen, Lundberg Family Farms and a handful of others.
6. BIG FOOD has also assumed a powerful role in setting the standards for organic foods. Major corporations have come to dominate the board that sets these standards.As corporate membership on the board has increased, so, too, has the number of nonorganic materials approved for organic foods on what is called the National List. At first, the list was largely made up of things like baking soda, which is nonorganic but essential to making things like organic bread. Today, more than 250 nonorganic substances are on the list, up from 77 in 2002.
7. Cornucopia began taking a harder look at the history of the addition of carrageenan and other substances to the accepted organic list after a bruising battle last December over the addition of docosahexaenoic acid algae oil, or DHA, and arachidonic acid single cell oil, or ARA. Its research led to a paper titled “The Organic Watergate.” “After DHA got onto the list, we decided to go back and look at all of the ingredients on the list,” Mr. Kastel says. “The average consumer has no idea that all these additives are going into the organic products they’re buying.”
8. The Organic Foods Act calls for a board consisting of four farmers, three conservationists, three consumer representatives, a scientist, a retailer, a certification agent and two “handlers,” or representatives of companies that process organic food.  There are no farmers on the board.
9. Similarly, the three consumer seats have never been filled by anyone from a traditional consumer advocacy group like the Organic Consumers Association or the Consumers Union. Instead, those seats have largely gone to academics with agricultural expertise and to corporate executives. There are no independent consumers on the board.
10. Driscoll’s was the only company that allowed an employee serving on the board to talk to The New York Times. The rest — even Cropp, the 1,400-farmer cooperative that sells more than $700 million in products, many under the Organic Valley brand — had more senior executives do the talking. Organic Valley's board representative, Wendy Fulwider, has voted with the corporations,voted to keep carrageenan on the organic list, voted to let organic egg producers give their chickens just two square feet of living space, when Cropp requires its own farmers to provide five and, most controversially, she voted to add DHA and ARA (docosahexaenoic acid algae oil, or DHA, and arachidonic acid single cell oil, or ARA) to the list for use in baby formulas."

So, here's what you need to learn:

what are you eating,

what are you drinking,

where does it come from,

how do you know what's in it, and

for those folks living in food deserts who will educate and feed them?

I saw a bumper sticker on a semi: "Without trucks America stops."

What's worse: Without sustainable, organic, community-supported, local farms, America starves.