By Wylie Harris
December 1, 2003
Aired on KEOS 89.1 FM, Community Radio for the Brazos Valley
Listen online at:
http://www.rtis.com/touchstone/tsradio/static/cd32-17.html
Lately I've been noticing a label on my groceries – a little circle with the words, "USDA Organic." The U.S. Department of Agriculture authorized the label a little over a year ago, after 12 years of regulatory wrangling and public comment to establish just what "organic" means. In the end, what it means - with a few notable exceptions – is that when you buy organic food, you can have a pretty clear and reliable notion of what went into growing and processing it. To meet the USDA standards, foods must have been produced without antibiotics, artificial hormones, synthetic fertilizers, irradiation, or genetic engineering. Most synthetic pesticides are also out-of-bounds, and animal products have to come from animals with access to the outdoors.
On the other hand, if you buy foods without the organic label, what you think you know about them may be pretty far from the truth. Take the case of genetically modified ingredients. Although an estimated 80 % of the foods on supermarket shelves contain them, only 26 % of shoppers think they've ever eaten them.
When it comes to conventional food, the consumer is woefully uninformed – and the corporate food industry is working hard to keep it that way. When Vermont passed a law requiring dairies to label their milk if the cattle it came from had been treated with hormones, a group of large dairies sued the state. The corporations claimed that forcing them to say that they'd used the hormones violated their right to "negative free speech" – that is, the right not to say something. They won, and Vermont's law was struck down. But when a small dairy in Maine started using a label saying, "Our Farmers' Pledge: No Artifical Growth Hormones," the dairy industry's concern about freedom of speech disappeared. Monsanto sued the dairy, saying the labels implied that hormones are somehow harmful, and thus constituted an unfair business practice. That case is still pending, and fortunately enough, seems likely to end in the small dairy's favor. But the two suits together show just how much the food industry cares about consumer safety – not to mention constitutional rights – when its profits are threatened.
Then there's irradiation. Rather than growing and processing food under stricter sanitation rules, the food industry would rather just irradiate it to neutralize any pathogens. Until last year, even non-organic food sterilized in this way was required to bear a label reading, "Treated with radiation." But the corporations had their way with the Food and Drug Administration, which now allows them to say the food has been "cold pasteurized" instead. Apparently this makes at least some of us feel safer, because this year, the USDA lifted a ban on irradiated meat in the national school lunch program.
The food industry is twisting free speech and free markets to hide what it's putting in our food. If you want to know, buy organic - or buy local, from a farmer you can trust.