When is “USDA Organic” not organic? More often than you probably realize. The USDA keeps a “National List” of inorganic products that can legally go into foods labeled as organic. The casings for those tasty USDA Organic sausages can come from conventionally raised animals that have been fed antibiotics. The hops in your favorite organic beer can be sprayed with all manner of chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Strawberries can be labeled as organic even if they had their start in a conventional nursery.
According to USDA rules, if 95 percent of a product is made up of organic ingredients, it can be called organic. If it’s 70 percent organic, the label can read “made with organic ingredients.”
A good friend of mine (and his wife) have been in the sustainable ag movement for 20 years. One is his most common gripes is the fact that even with organic forms of pesticide and herbicide, if you use an awful lot of it, it creates dangerous levels of toxicity both in the environment and on the product being sold. The larger the organic farm (and now well over 90% of certified organic food products are comingout of big ag corporate farms), the more there is a need for high levels of organic toxins to be used to maintain those large outputs in an efficient manner. The only way to get rid of the correlation between agriculture and horrible levels of pollution and toxicity is to transition to a situation in which most food is produced on small sustainable farms. But that would require a radical social change that most people don’t care about – most people want cheap food that is bad for them, and they don’t care if they destroy the planet getting that crap.
The organic labeling rules remind me a bit of the manufacturing labeling rules. To have “made in the USA” on a manufacturing product in this country, the requirement is that 80% of the cost of the product prior to leaving the “manufacturing” facility were incurred in the U.S. So my company makes traditionally handcrafted light fixtures that are made entirely in our shop and we label them “made in the USA.” But we have competitors who label their lights “made in the USA” even though the metal structure of the light was entirely made in India or Mexico and all they did at their facility was wire the light, and pack it for shipping. But since the light cost nothing coming from Mexico, and they paid their wiring guy and shipping guy $12 an hour, over 80% of the cost they put into the light was spent at their U.S. facility, thus they can legally label the thing “made in the USA.” That’s ridiculous. The vast majority of the actual physical work that went into the thing was done elsewhere. It doesn’t “count” because the non-American workers who did that work were paid peanuts.