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My family tries to eat organic food. I would say that we are in the 75% range of organic foods vs. non-organic. We aren’t perfect, nor are we doing all that we can. But I wanted to talk about something that recently bothered me regarding an “organic” item that I rather enjoyed.
I used to get these Chewy Granola Bars that were USDA organic. One day, they were taken off the shelf of our local supermarket. They were removed because of the recent peanut salmonella scare. I walked around the store to get my other items and I noticed something that I felt was strange - that many different products were removed from the shelves because of the Salmonella scare. This was due to the supposed deplorable conditions at the Peanut Corporation of America plants. Many of the other items that were off the shelves were not organic.
How could it be that organic and non-organic products would be using the same peanuts? Organic peanuts could end up in non-organic products, of course. But, why would they not label their products as containing organic peanuts, when it is such a marketable item these days? It just did not make sense.
I wanted to inquire with the company that made these granola bars. I found that the website for this company touted “Organic since 1972″ and “…is also a real place — a working, active, productive farm dedicated to bringing wholesome organic food to your table.” Now this at first led me to believe that the farm pictured in their advertisement was the actual farm to produce their product.
When I decided to email this company, I was taken to a huge company’s website contact form. Huh…
A little further research led me to the information “…said it has no reason to believe there is a safety issue with these products, but that it is taking the action, as a precaution, because peanut pieces in the products may have been sourced from the Plainview, Texas, plant of Peanut Corporation of America.”
Is this company that owned the Peanut plant really an organic farm? At the very least, is it a clean organic farm? Who certified this farm as organic? It has been said that the farm did not properly supply documents regarding it’s organic farming. And as the bottom line, aren’t the products from the farm listed on their website?
The response to me was essentially that only these few products were at issue and everything else was OK. Now, I want to point out that the few products at issue, were products that I consumed almost daily. I wonder if that counted as a bad thing in their eyes?
My point with this is that the term “organic” seems to have been diminished and compromised, especially by large corporations that generally care about their bottom line. If “organic” is fashionable now, then these companies may want to grab onto the term without really doing the leg-work involved in truly being organic.
I believe this to be one more account of marketing replacing truth. In fact I think that our country is slowly and systematically being conditioned into believing that “something” is actually “something else”. This is done, often enough, by creating laws, often through lobbyists, that dictate “truth”. In the example above, does the term “organic” really get us just that? Does the USDA standard of organics actually measure up vs. true organic farming? I fear, in the account above, it does not.
We, as a people, might do better if we start to understand the difference between “moral” and “legal”. “Legal” does not necessarily mean “good” nor does “good” always become law.
