Mark Kastel and the Cornucopia Institute are at it again, standing up for the organic food label and going after corporations who play loose with it. The organization co-founded by Kastel, who was recently named one of Utne Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World,” just fired a volley at Target, accusing the megaretailer of deceiving customers about soymilk.

In a press release, Cornucopia says Target advertised Silk soymilk as organic in newspaper ads by showing the carton with “organic” on its label, even though the soymilk was not organic. Cornucopia has filed formal complaints with the U.S. Agriculture Department’s organic program and with Minnesota and Wisconsin officials.

Cornucopia has previously criticized Dean Foods, the maker of Silk, for quietly switching to conventional soybeans in the core products of its White Wave soy division.

Was the image of the organic carton an honest mistake by a graphic designer, or an attempt to capitalize on the cachet of the organic label by implying that Silk is organic? Target isn’t saying much at this point. Spokeswoman Jana O’Leary tells Utne Reader that Target is investigating the matter and that the retailer sells both organic and nonorganic Silk at its SuperTarget stores.

Cornucopia has called foul on Target before, most notably in 2007 when it accused Target’s private-label food line, Archer Farms, of using milk that was produced in violation of federal organic livestock standards by the Colorado-based Aurora Dairy. Despite that the USDA found Aurora had willfully violated 14 federal organic regulations, the dairy was allowed to stay in business and Target stuck with Aurora as its Archer Farms milk supplier.

Source: Cornucopia Institute, City Pages

Image by GenGlo, licensed under Creative Commons.

The U.S. dairy system has shifted westward, and often it doesn’t look pretty: Instead of bucolic heartland pastures dotted with grazing cows, picture huge pens or sprawling open-air sheds where the animals are fed a high-protein, shipped-in diet and milked through metal crossbars. Conditions for workers in these big dairies are often little better than they are for the cows, as Rebecca Clarren makes chillingly clear in “The Dark Side of Dairies” in the August 31, 2009, High Country News.

Eighteen Western dairy workers died from 2003 to 2009, Clarren writes, “killed in tractor accidents, suffocated by falling hay bales, crushed by charging cows and bulls and asphyxiated by gases from manure lagoons and corn silage. Others survived but lost limbs or received concussions and spent days in the hospital.”

The majority of the West’s 50,000 dairy workers are immigrants, many of them living illegally in the United States. Dairy labor laws are lax to start with, and the workers’ tenuous status makes them especially vulnerable to egregious labor abuses, which Clarren vividly documents.

The story is enough to make you want to go organic and local, buying dairy products that come from a family-scale farm instead of a distant megadairy. If you do, check out the Cornucopia Institute’s Organic Dairy Report and Scorecard to find one that treats its cows, its workers, and its land with respect.

Sources: High Country News, The Cornucopia Institute

Michael Pollan and the rest of the organic-food advocates should pipe down, according to farmer Blake Hurst in the American (the magazine of the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank). Hurst writes, “I’m so tired of people who wouldn’t visit a doctor who used a stethoscope instead of an MRI demanding that farmers like me use 1930s technology to raise food.”

In his screed against organics, Hurst scores a point or two for the industrial farming system. He writes, “the parts of farming that are the most ‘industrial’ are the most likely to be owned by the kind of family farmers that elicit such a positive response from the consumer.” He adds, “If we are about to require more expensive ways of producing food, the largest and most well-capitalized farms will have the least trouble adapting.”

Those large farms also would likely benefit from an economy based on genetically modified foods, which Hurst also advocates. He unfortunately neglects to mention that.

Source: The American

Image by  Vaarok , licensed under  Creative Commons .

For some clotheshorses, the ethical quandry of leather fashions is implicit: It’s a dead animal’s skin. But that’s only part of the story. While leather goods don’t carry quite the stigma that furs do, perhaps they should, especially when one learns the cost of leather production in terms of human health and environmental damage.

A recent article in the Ecologist (not available online) profiles the leather industry in Hazaribagh, a city in the Dhaka region of Bangladesh. Thanks to lax environmental regulations, the city is able to provide leather at lower costs than its Western counterparts, making its tanneries an economic boon to the city. But the cost of production is lower precisely because environmental regulations are lower.

Describing the leather manufacturing process at length, the Ecologist implicates the city’s tanneries with vivid descriptions of their environmental impact:

Electric-blue rivers of effluent gushing out of every tannery wall; a frothy, noxious cocktail of lead, chrome syntans, mercury, cadmium, and corrosive acids that creeps along the open drains under the stilted homes of neighbouring slums, and then straight into the Dhaka’s primary river, the Buriganga. 

Communities that once depended on the river for fishing have been decimated, while toxic tanning chemicals are slowly killing the city’s inhabitants:

Large numbers of the 8,000 to 12,000 workers at the tanneries suffer from gastrointestinal and dermatological diseases... SEDH (Bangladesh’s Society for Environment and Human Development) claims that 90 percent of tannery workers will be dead by the age of 50.

As with other consumer goods, there is an alternative for the conscientious: Organic Leather, in California, for example, promises leather derived from humanely slaughtered animals and tanned without toxic chemicals. Of course, these methods raise the product’s price significantly and cannot be conducted on Hazaribagh’s massive scale. It’s unlikely that real change can happen in Bangladesh’s tanneries until leather buyers worldwide, and especially in Europe, stop feeding the market for cheaper leather manufactured under such conditions.

(Thanks to Kari Volkmann-Carlsen for additional research.)

Image by Frances Voon, licensed by Creative Commons.

Medicinal herbs stave off a range of ills, including the common cold, joint stiffness, and herpes outbreaks. Soon, they might be able to stave off tiger poaching. The Wildlife Conservation Society Russia Program hopes to reduce Siberian tiger poaching by collecting and selling certified organic herbs, reports In Good Tilth (article not available online), the newspaper of the sustainable agriculture nonprofit Oregon Tilth. Russian villagers will collect Siberian ginseng root, wild rosehips, and Schisandra chinensis berries on organic certified land managed by local hunting clubs. The Wildlife Conservation Society hopes the income generated from selling organic medicinal herbs will reduce the temptation for locals to hunt or allow the hunting of the eight to 10 tigers who roam the area. Only 400 to 500 wild Siberian tigers remain worldwide.

Vegetarian converts can be won without employing the ubiquitous mantra of “meat is murder.” Functional and affordable products are key, argues Silicon Valley Metro Active food columnist Elisa Camahort, which is why she embraces big-box organics along with neighborhood co-ops.

“Like anybody else,” Camahort writes, “I want the fact that a product or service meets my personal ethical requirements to be the bonus, the cherry on the sundae. I don’t want it to be the reason I have to put up with below-par quality or service.”

Increasing the availability of veg products is the modus operandi of “vegan culinary activism,” which Post Punk Kitchen co-creator Isa Chandra Moskowitz outlines in the vegetarian magazine Satya. Attracting the omnivorous masses starts with convincing your mom to use a vegan cookbook or your neighborhood 7-Eleven to stock seitan sandwiches, which they do in Philadelphia. Moskowitz challenges animal libbers to tempt the taste buds of omnivores as a form of activism.

“Every time I hear animal rights activists engaging in heated debate,” Moskowitz writes, “I want to shout, ‘Shut the hell up and go invent a good-tasting soy cheese!’”

—Lisa Gulya

Eking out a living from meager government pensions, grandmothers in poor suburban South African townships have staged a revolution. But while their cities were once hotbeds of anti-apartheid sentiment, this uprising is gentler. It involves growing vegetables. Supported by the environmental group Abalimi Bezekhaya, grandmothers have set up organic community farms, helping to feed their neighbors and gain some self-sufficiency. AllAfrica.com has a series of articles, photo galleries, and videos about the farms.

—Brendan Mackie