By Peter Hoffman
After more than five years of deliberations, the Agriculture Department has released its proposal on how to regulate the labeling of organic foods.
Unfortunately, the plan will make it harder, not easier, for the consumer to distinguish between organic and conventionally produced food.
The producers of organic food have come a long way. Twenty years ago, organic foods and gnarly apples and wormy turnips attractive only to live-off-the-land hippies and urban extremists. As an aspiring chef, I had little use for these forlorn and wilted vegetables. I prided myself on searching for the finest looking produce.
How it was grown, what was sprayed on it and whether it was safe to eat were of little consequence. Without thinking much about it, I was of the "what you can't see won't hurt you" school of cooking.
Since then, my commitment to quality ingredients hasn't changed, but my definition of quality has. With the help of farmers' markets and local farms, consumers and chefs alike began over the years to discover food of a different order than what had been available through conventional markets. Here were vegetables with an unimagined flavor and freshness.
At the start, quantities were small, but in time they became plentiful enough to shift the taste and demands of consumers. There is no better example of this than the case of salad greens. New York has gone from a city of only iceberg and romaine to one where mesclun, a French mixture of varied baby lettuces, is available in virtually every corner grocery.
As the demand and volume for organic food increased, prices slowly came down and it began to compete with conventional foods. Large corporations like Dole saw that organics were more than just a niche market. In fact, the organic business has grown by 20 percent each year since 1990. Sales in 1996, the latest figures available, were $3.5 billion.
With expansion of the market came confusion about terms. What do "natural," "free-range," "low-spray" and "organic" really mean? Thirty-five different certifying private organizations currently offer definitions.
To clear up the confusion, Congress passed the Organic Foods Production Act in 1990 to standardize the terms and practices for organic farming. Acknowledging the Agriculture Department's lack of experience and historical hostility toward nonconventional farmers, Congress established the National Organic Standards Board to advise the department in developing national regulations.
The challenge and complexity of defining organic soon became apparent.
Organic food is not just about a product; it is a philosophy in which the
process of production is as important as the final result.
Organic growers rightly believe that a farm is a diverse ecosystem, that
soil is a living organism to be nurtured and that farming practices need
to be concerned about the long-term health of workers, consumers, the
surrounding water supply and the animals living within the habitat.
Transforming that philosophy into regulations took extensive research,
countless regional hearings and five years of draft plans. The national
standards board made specific recommendations, addressing production,
processing, labeling and certification.
So what happened? The Agriculture Department almost totally ignored the
board's advice. Instead it issued watered-down guidelines, including the
following:
In the most astonishing move, the proposed rules allow only the word "organic" to be used on labels and forbid any other detailed information about production. Farmers could not advertise that their animals are antibiotic-free or that their plants are not genetically engineered.
This is not good news for the small farmers who originally built the market for organic foods. In time, many could be forced out of the organic business by large companies that call food organic when it really isn't.
The Agriculture Department's new guidelines don't need minor tweaking or revision. They need to be scrapped and rewritten in accordance with the original recommendations by the national standards board — an approach that considers the health of all living things along the food chain" and tells consumers the truth about what they're buying.
— Peter Hoffman is the owner and chef of Savoy Restaurant" and serves as a board member of Chefs Collaborative 2000, which promotes sustainable agriculture. He wrote this article for the New York Times.
Nutrition
By Marian Burros
New York Times News Service
The organic food industry has organized an impressive grass-roots campaign — employing Web sites, public meetings, enclosures in telephone bills and even information printed on the backs of milk cartons — which already has convinced the Agriculture Department that major changes must be made in proposed federal rules for organically grown food.
Since December, when the proposed rules were announced, the department has received more than 15,000 comments, almost all of them negative. Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, aware that the proposals do not sit well with those who buy and sell organic food, said in an interview recently that the comment period was being extended to April 30 to give more people an opportunity to have a say.
There are a number of sticking points in the proposal, but what Glickman
calls "the big three" — irradiation, biotechnology and sludge —
have drawn the most critical comments.
Question and answer
In the proposal, the Agriculture Department asked whether foods that had been irradiated or created by bioengineering could be included in a definition of organic. It also asked whether sludge, which is reprocessed sewage, could be used as fertilizer on crops that would be sold as organic. I
There has been a resounding no to all three in questions from almost everyone who has taken the trouble to comment.
The flood of comments has been in response to a well-orchestrated effort that is the antithesis of the kind of lobbying done by wealthy industries.
When insurance companies want to influence a federal government decision, they send their lobbyists to talk directly to the people who are making the rules.
When a small industry like organic processors and farmers sends a message
to policy makers, it has to use less expensive strategies.
A cheap campaign
"If we put $100,000 into this campaign, it will be a lot," said Katherine DiMatteo, the executive director of the Organic Trade Association in Greenfield, Mass. "So, we sat down and mapped out a campaign on how to effect a change without a lot of money."
The trade association spent several days in January discussing the issues with members of what they call their consumer network list, which includes producers and consumer groups. It enlisted their support to get out the message that the proposed organic food regulations were unacceptable.
Such companies as Horizon Organic Dairy in Boulder, Col., and the natural food supermarket chain Whole Foods Market, which owns stores such as Bread and Circus in Massachusetts and Fresh Fields in Washington and New Jersey, and Whole Foods in St. Paul, are helping to spread the word. Whole Foods has posted information about the proposed rules in its stores and provided forms on which customers can submit their comments to the Agriculture Department.
The chain also has distributed fliers advising its customers to tell their senators that they're against sludge use, irradiation and biotech ingredients in their organic food.
By last week, the office of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., said that it had received 475 letters, plus a number of calls from constituents, all of them opposing the rule as it is now written.
The back panels of 2.5 million Horizon Organic milk cartons point out what the company considers to be the shortcomings of the proposed organic standards and advise consumers on how to register complaints.
Also fueling citizen participation was the publication of the rules by the Agriculture Department on the Internet (http://www.ams.usda.gov/nop).
DiMatteo said she hoped there would be 50,000 comments by the time the comment period expires, on April 30. And then the review process will begin again.
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