In the approach to next week’s USDA National Organic Standards Board meeting in Pittsburgh, October 23-25, an industry watchdog, OrganicEye, has formally asked the body to remove celery powder from the List of approved substances in organic food processing.
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When you buy certified organic processed meats (bacon, ham, salami, hot dogs, etc.) with the words “uncured” and “no nitrates” on the package, you assume you’re avoiding cancer-causing substances, right?
Not if the meat you buy also contains celery powder.
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Got organic milk?
There are plenty of reasons to drink it.
And there are lots of organic dairies producing—with real integrity—authentic nutrient-dense organic milk, including raw milk.
Unfortunately for those organic dairies and for consumers, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Organic Program (NOP) lets some very large dairies get—and keep—organic certification, even though they don’t play by the rules.
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From the “Department of Here We Go Again,” the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) needs our help—again—to remind the Trump administration that all forms of genetic engineering must be excluded from organic production.
We have only until midnight EST October 3 to flood the NOSB with comments.
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Miami Beach-based Truly Organic will pay $1.76 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission complaint that the company deceived shoppers by labeling its products as organic and vegan. An FTC investigation revealed that some Truly Organic products contained no organic ingredients at all, and others contained ingredients that were not vegan, including honey and lactose, according to the FTC complaint.
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With some sophisticated maneuvering of legal paperwork, cows that have been fed GMOs and injected with growth hormones can all of a sudden be classified as organic cows. And this can go on repeatedly, year after year. How does this happen?
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Beyond Pesticides, a public interest organization founded to advocate for healthy air, water, land, and food by eliminating the use of toxic pesticides, and advance healthy practices, has announced the formation of an investigative arm, OrganicEye. The new watchdog agency will focus on defending the “time-honored philosophy and legal definition of organic farming and food production” from USDA’s systemic failure to protect the interests of organic farmers, ethical businesses, and consumers.
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Is the National Organic Program (NOP) doing a good job of fulfilling its stated mission: developing and enforcing “uniform national standards for organically-produced agricultural products sold in the United States?”
That’s debatable. And so the question of organic standards enforcement was debated—last month, during the Northeast Organic Farmers Association (NOFA) conference in Amherst, Mass.
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The perpetrator of the largest case of organic fraud in U.S. history was sentenced to 10 plus years in prison last Friday. Between 2010 and 2017, court documents show that Randy Constant ran an Iowa grain brokerage, selling $142 million-plus in supposedly “organic” animal feed to livestock farmers throughout the Midwest.
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The organic industry just received another harsh reminder — unless we truly deal with our problems, the integrity of the organic seal will only suffer further damage. With The Washington Post’s investigation of Aurora Dairy in the rearview mirror — and largely ignored by the USDA— the dairy scandal that we are now facing is Natural Prairie Dairy, a 14,000-head organic dairy in Texas.
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