To Be, or Not To Be ...

To Be, or Not To Be…
by Karen Beth Pike, Columnist

"Taking Care"

February 11, 2004

Certified organic. What a question and what a quandary! Many sheeple in the United States are so accustomed to having the government do their thinking for them, that they won't buy from local farmers that use sustainable practices because they prefer to get their groceries from the supermarkets, organic or otherwise. Convenience trumps healthy food for the most part. Organic certification is a costly and time consuming process that the big agribusiness outfits are learning to circumvent while still stamping their products certified organic… even though the product is anything but organic in reality. The following citations are part of the quandary that organic farmers are facing. Rather than quote them extensively, I'll give the links so that you'll have the whole article.

Alan Guebert is one of my favorite agriculture columnists, biting wit and brutally honest in his appraisals. This is his take on the way agribusiness is twisting organic certification to meet its own needs.

This letter is from a farm that does certify and their take on why it is important to do it.

The whole wild, wonderful world of organic farming has been a quiet revolution for the most part. The rest of the agribusiness world looks at us as a bit of a joke… at least until they did the math on profitability and decided that they wanted in on it too. The actual idea is as old as the agrarian mindset. If you take care of your land, and return the manures to the soils that produced the grain to feed the animals that produce the manure, the land will reward you abundantly. Somewhere along the way, agribusiness lured a lot of farmers down the same path that the media has led the city folks to their own version of Sodom and Gomorrah. Bigger, better, faster, more has become the mantra to a lot of the people in society. To our ultimate peril…

But there are pockets of people that still ask "why" when it is appropriate to do so. Slow food is one such organization. Founded in Europe, it has come to the States as well and is gathering quite a following. It celebrates the joy of fresh foods and cooking from scratch, reconnecting people and food. The Farmer's Markets have also become quite popular in a lot of communities as people become more familiar with their food supply. There is a glimmer of hope, and as I see these kinds of things returning to the mainstream of society I feel a certain gratitude that all is not lost in the rush to sameness that our society embraces.

There is still a very long path to travel, since most of the carts at the grocery are full of highly processed, heavily preserved stuff that ends up in most kitchens at mealtimes. The research is beginning to show that there are significant risks in consuming highly processed and chemically preserved foods. Again, convenience trumps healthy food. As our bodies become more obese, our children consume more antibiotics for every sniffle and the "bugs" they get becoming more resistant to stronger and stronger antibiotics perhaps we'll begin to notice the connection we have to our food supply and begin our return to sensibility. Gee, that might even strengthen the family if we started preparing meals together and becoming more involved with our food supply. If we begin to garden again, so much the better, since our children would be getting fresh air and an exposure to useful physical effort. Saving money is yet another reason to grow our own produce, but the connection to the process of nature is worth all that and more.

As for me, my place will be organic and sustainable, though I'll probably never certify. After careful consideration, I've decided that I'll never be big enough to make the money back it would take to recapture the costs without pricing myself out of the market entirely. The other reason is that I am vehemently opposed to some government agency telling me what I can and cannot do with my own land. Should the Organic Standards Board decide to privatize the inspection process rather than leaving it in the hands of a highly corrupt government agency, it might cause me to re-think the issue, although the outcome would likely remain the same. My goal is to educate and inspire people to take charge of the decisions they make about their food, from the ground up. ***

Photo of Karen Beth Pike courtesy of the author