As the popularity of organic food grows, it is becoming more and more difficult for food companies to keep up with demand. Companies ranging from Wal-Mart to General Mills are now marketing organic food.
Click Here for Stonyfield’s Rebuttal.
While the involvement of large corporations has turned organic food into a $14-billion business, these organizations are frequently choosing to eliminate the ethos that many feel is essential to organic food as they struggle to find a consistent, large-scale supply of high-quality organic ingredients.
To be certified as organic by the U.S. Agriculture Department, food must be free of most pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, hormones, antibiotics, genetic modification, and irradiation. But many argue that true organic food also entails respect for locally produced food, respect for livestock and employees, and environmentally sustainable practices.
The Organic Integrity Project last spring released a high-profile report card calling 11 producers ethically challenged, including Horizon Organic Dairy and Aurora Organic Dairy, both of which operate giant corporate feedlots and feed their cattle grains, rather than letting them graze on grass at pasture for all of their food.
There is also now "organic" food that is imported from such countries as China, Sierra Leone, and Brazil, where standards, wages, and conditions are difficult to monitor and enforce.
This great review by Business Week documents the progressive decline in the quality and meaning of the organic label. One of their examples is Stonyfield Farm yogurt, which abandoned its organic farm in New Hampshire long ago and now gets its milk in powdered form. Yes, you read that correctly:
Powdered milk exported from 9,000 miles away in New Zealand.
You can bet your bottom dollar making powder out of milk is one of the worst things you can to do to it after pasteurization. Nearly all of the biologic value of the milk is removed.
Once that happens, "organic" Stonyfield Farm yogurt sitting on your grocery store shelf is not much more of a health food than a can of soda. It is so far removed from the real deal, it is a pathetic tragedy.
Consumers pay huge amounts for what should be a health food, but are getting ripped off in a major way. The best yogurt is obtained from grass-fed cows that are NOT fed any grains (unlike the feedlot cows used by Horizon and Aurora). This will optimize the fatty acid balance and improve its CLA content. Then, avoid adding sugar to flavor it like Stonyfield does.
You will want to consume the milk in its raw form and certainly not put in a powder. Raw grass-fed milk is the true health food that will move your body to vibrant health, not the factory-farmed "organic" crap that Stonyfield is selling.
Additionally, the major corporations like Wal-Mart, Dean Foods, General Mills, Unilever, Mars, Kraft and Kellogg have jumped in to reap some of the fat margins that are present in organic foods. You can bet they will keep the prices high and lower the quality and take the extra profit for their bottom line. In the meantime, you are getting ripped off again.
The organic label has become virtually meaningless as a sign of quality. Your only solution is to seek out LOCAL suppliers of healthy food where you can actually get to know the people who are growing your food. You can start to find some of these suppliers in an article I wrote earlier this year.