Waldo Jaquith, a Virginia Political blogger, wrote an extensive post about organic and some things he realized after reading a book entitled The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

The author, Pollan, discusses how much extra energy is used up in “organic” food production:

A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimental, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food. (These figures would be about 4 percent higher if the salad were grown conventionally.)

There is an excerpt from the book in Mother Jones and another article on The Washington Post about the issues with the term.

There’s also an inspiring article on the Post site about buying local and organic

nice, thank you for the great supplemental info!

I’d really like to read Pollan’s book. Looks fascinating.

It’s worth considering—is it better, environmentally speaking, to buy non-organic grapes grown in your province/state, or organic ones grown across the continent?

Mmmm Organic Food. How it used to taste before the World Wars, and mass production.

....but too bloody expensive

D

The whole foods where I live has a wide variety of locally grown produce and other foods/items in the store. Yesterday there was a guy demo-ing his chemical-free cleaning products that he makes at home and ships them to the store(just down the freeway a bit) in his car/truck/or whathaveyou that runs on vegetable oil. The points the article gives don’t really apply to all of their stores. It didn’t really do much to persuade me that the organic industry is twisted. I know how organic farming works. Most of the higher cost comes from the labor. Most organic farms utilize human labor rather than machines(which contribute to tons of emissions). The role of the organic farmer is to give back to the earth. Organic food is better for you(and the earth) and tastes better. When you use chemicals in the soil and in the air, it kills every that lives in it (like microorganisms and beneficial worms, insects, and other creatures), not to mention is harmful to humans as well.

Also, whole foods is certified organic by QAI. I’m not sure how many grocers are actually certified organic but they’re the only one around here. If you ever read their blog, you see all the ways that they are doing things for the local communities and for the planet.

Yes, read Pollan’s book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” If Whole Foods wanted to do something positive, they would rely less on industrial organic agriculture and more on farmers near their individual stores. It could be that lower transport costs would help make local food not too costly compared to mass produced industrial organic. Maybe not. But now, Whole Foods is only a little better than non-organic typical supermarket food.

Organic certification is a farce. Pollan has many examples in his book – like the door at the back of the chicken coup that few chicken use to free range, but gives the producer the certification. The requirements for something to be certified as organic are rediculously easy to meet, without forcing producers to abandon industrial organic production.

Maybe you cannot blame Whole Foods too much. This is a case that fits a growing concern abut this web site—it puts the focus on the companies and takes it off our government. Whole Foods is a profit-making enterprise. You cannot expect them to do things that hurt their bottom line. The real focus should be on our representatives, senators and president, who almost without exception on beholden to special interests in corporate America. Our elected officials are uniformly corrupt.

From: http://dotherightthing.com/entries/534 “Iraqi Order 81 is of special interest because it goes a long way in affecting every living being on the planet. This order prohibits Iraqi farmers from using the methods of agriculture that they have used for centuries”

Besweet:

If you buy locally, you benefit your local area. If there are ten people in a room and one gives $10 to another and this is repeated nine more times, you’ve just moved $100 in your local system. If this initial transaction goes outside your room, the room has gotten $0.

As far as buying local and—let’s call it sustainable food, look into a Community Supported Agriculture program (CSA)

Full Disclosure: I am an employee (at store level) of Whole Foods.

While the Slate article makes some good points about the energy costs of transporting organic goods, it makes an unfair evaluation of Whole Foods’ committment to local producers.

The article claims that ‘a multinational chain can’t promote a “buy local” philosophy without being self-defeating,’ but there’s no reasoning behind the statement. In fact, Whole Foods’ reputation is based in large part around our selection of high-quality specialty and hard-to-find products, many of which come from small local producers; you’ll find a number of unique products at Whole Foods in different areas of the country, and even in different areas of the same state or county. Each store is empowered to seek out local sources for as much product as they care to find. We also have a regional distribution system that gives us another opportunity to find sources in our area of the country whenever possible. Unfortunately, in many locations the local produce selection is limited by seasonal weather patterns and there is simply no option but imports if we want to provide our customers with a lot of the produce they want.

Whole Foods supports local farmers and food producers in many other ways as well. In my own store in Cambridge, MA, we have an ongoing demo program called Local Tuesdays that brings in local (Northern New England) producers to sample their products and give our customers a chance to get to know the faces behind their favorite foods. Whole Foods also recently announced a Local Producer Loan Program that will distribute $10 million annually in low-interest loans to help local farmers and food producers expand their operations (see http://dotherightthing.com/entries/83… for more info).

People often make the mistake of assuming that because Whole Foods is an international chain store, the success of our business comes at the expense of local businesses. What they misunderstand is that the success of our business actually depends on local businesses! If we didn’t support local producers, our shelves would soon be indistinguishable from Shaws or Stop-&-Shop, and that would definitely be self-defeating for Whole Foods.