
All About Organics
Organic Consumers Association Campaigns, Essays, Headlines, Action Alerts, Downloads and Videos on Organic Food.
Organic food is pure food. It's safer, more nutritious and free of chemical additives. Organic crops are grown without chemical pesticides or fertilizers and organic livestock are raised without antibiotics, growth hormones or other drugs. Organic food isn't genetically modified or irradiated.
Our food system has taken hits from COVID-19. You’ve read about it, maybe felt it firsthand. Endless food pantry lines, scrambles to feed kids out of school, and supply chain disruptions for farms and food retail alike. A shuttered restaurant industry. Supermarkets facing food shortages, suppliers figuring out their pivots, farms forced to discard food.
Read moreOne week of eating organic can dramatically reduce pesticide levels in the body, according to a recent study conducted by the Health Research Institute, Commonweal Institute, and Friends of the Earth.
Read moreEarlier this year, Americans learned what it looks like when a food system reliant on industrial agriculture, near monopolies and exploited laborers breaks down. Just two months into the pandemic, the meat industry in the most powerful nation in the world was buckling.
Read moreNearly all soya is used by the farming sector as a livestock feed for chickens, pigs and other animals. The biggest users are chicken producers; soya makes up around a quarter of the diet of birds. It has been the cheapest source of protein poultry available to farmers since the ban on meat and bonemeal after BSE. Soya remains key to producing fast-growing, low-priced chickens.
Read more"World Agriculture Towards 2030/2050" is a major report predicting global agricultural trends (Alexandratos & Bruinsma, 2012). It was produced by the economics division of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In its abstract the FAO authors make a prominent disclaimer. Its projections, they stress (both on p. i and p. 7), are not to be used for normative purposes; that is, their report is not a prescription of how the global food system should develop.
Read moreHistorians know that turkey and corn were part of the first Thanksgiving, when Wampanoag peoples shared a harvest meal with the pilgrims of Plymouth plantation in Massachusetts. And traditional Native American farming practices tell us that squash and beans likely were part of that 1621 dinner too.
Read moreI got an article this week. It appeared in Civil Eats, and it had quotations from Linley Dixon, Kathleen Merrigan, and others about COVID, farm scale, and feeding people. It raised very
Read moreThe palm civet is a small omnivorous mammal of Indonesia and other parts of tropical Asia. Emerging from its forest home onto coffee plantations, it’s able to sense the finest coffee fruits of perfect ripeness. Eating them, it digests the pulp and excretes the beans, adding a musky scent to them from its anal glands.
In the 1990s, Indonesian kopi luwak – civet coffee, made from coffee beans that had passed through a civet’s digestive tract – became a new luxury commodity among wealthy coffee-lovers. Market dynamics
Read moreWhen COVID-19 forced communications consultant Kyle Freund and his wife to work from home this spring, the Madison, Wisconsin couple and their 5-year-old daughter began seeking out organic produce from small local farms. They stopped patronizing large supermarkets, shopped only at the co-op, and subscribed to a community supported agriculture (CSA) program through a nearby farm.
Read moreWhile plant disease is difficult to control in organic fruits, researchers at the University of Hawaii are studying essential oils to see if they might provide a solution. Finding ways to improve feasibility and long-term profitability of organic fruit production is the basis of a nearly $2 million Initiative awarded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to a team of 15.
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