All About Organics

In November 2015, the veteran natural retailer—who founded Abby’s Health and Nutrition in Tampa in 1997—plunked down $300,000 to convert a rural property 20 miles from her store into the area's first nonprofit community farm. Today, apartment dwellers who couldn’t garden otherwise spend mornings harvesting watermelon, okra and peas with their children. School groups drop by to plant seeds in the moist black soil. Backyard gardeners come for workshops on composting and hydroponics. No produce is sold. Instead, the farm shares its harvest freely.

It’s tough to even know where to start with this one, but here goes.

A company called Impossible Foods, with $257 million in venture capital funding, recently launched its fake, genetically engineered Impossible Burger—even though, the FDA (supposedly in charge of food safety) can’t say if the burger’s “secret sauce”—soy leghemoglobin—is safe.

How can Impossible Foods put soy leghemoglobin in food if the FDA hasn’t deemed it safe? The New York Times explains:

The F.D.A.’s approval is not required for most new ingredients. Companies can hire consultants

It’s one of the most depressing aspects of environmentalism that pressing needs for change inevitably get turned into saleable products.

As the need to reduce our meat consumption rises so too do the number of so-called ‘meat substitutes’, products which aim to get us to eat less meat while still pretending that we are eating meat.

While organic farming groups are moving an arm's length from President Donald Trump's views, from immigration to an agriculture secretary nominee, Jim Riddle is leaning in to the new administration with a corn-huskers' handshake. 

Riddle, a 60-year-old who grew up on an Iowa farm and now raises berries in Minnesota, says there's an unclaimed common ground between organics and conservatives.