"The Lies Spoiling Organic Food"
ìLeery of ingesting tasteless, rock-hard supermarket fruit and hormone-laden chickens raised in a space the size of a Palm Pilotî? as Thane Peterson writes in Business Week. Me, too. Thatís why, with very few exceptions, I only buy food labeled "organic" -- organic produce, poultry raised without hormones, and grass-fed, hormone-free beef from New Zealand.
I used to think paying more for food labeled organic meant buying into a scam -- until I spent a month in France, where the food is free of pesticides, giganticizing chemicals, and hormones. Beyond the fact that a strawberry that isn't injected with crap to make it the size of a grapefruit tastes amazing, I noticed a real difference in my health after a month eating food free of Frankensteinian meddling: a clearer head and great skin and improved overall health.
Too bad sleazebag legislators and food producers are trying to ìjigger the rules so that foods can carry this designation that otherwise wouldn't qualify.î For example,ìGeorgia chicken producers convinced Representative Nathan Deal (R-Ga.) to add a rider to the 2003 Omnibus Appropriations bill allowing chicken farmers to use regular feed if organic feed got too expensive. Never mind that the resulting chickens wouldn't be "organic" by any reasonable definition.î Representative Nathan Deal? Indeed. Who's his chief of staff, Sally Sell-Out?
Then thereís a ìnew federal law allowing wild fish to be labeled organic -- a measure that was quietly slipped into the bill passed to fund the Iraq war, at the behest of Alaska Senators Lisa Murkowsky and Ted Stevens.î Sweet. Sure all wild fish are, of course, organic -- if you consider mercury and carcinogenic PCBs organic fish feed. Murkowskyís aide, Bill Woolf, ìsays this could be easily dealt with by testing the fish before they're marketed, but the law doesn't contain any provision for testing.î