Randomly stumbled across something a little scary

So, I've been reading "The Food Revolution" and it's been quite interesting how important it seems to be to be buying organic.

And I'm on a photography message board, www.dgrin.com, that is having a contest and the two words this week - "artificial" and "organic".

So I Googled "organic" to get some ideas for taking photos and saw a picture of veggies that said "At what cost?" Hmmm.... Odd title

I headed here: http://www.worldproutassembly.org/archives/2006/06/the_rotten_side.html and found a very interesting article!

Summarizing it, it essentially says that much of the organic food we are buying right now isn't really organic and may even be coming from other countries where "organic" isn't standardized or enforced. This is happening because of the HUGE demand right now for organic food.

What does this do? It lowers the standards for organic and, because of big business getting into the organic industry, they are forcing the smaller places to work even harder to keep up.

For example, did you know that Silk (as in soy milk) is owned by Dean Foods? They are "the $10 billion dairy conglomerate notorious for bottom line business practices such as injecting their cows with bovine growth hormone and paying the lowest prices possible to dairy farmers"! (See above link.)

I found this site backing it up.

Did you know that Cascadian Farms and Muir Glen are owned by General Mills? Not small companies, as I expected.

Now, if we are getting the same or better quality with sustainable practices from these large companies, while I'm bummed the small farms are going to have a hard time of it, this is bound to happen. But if these mega-corporations are providing less-than-organic products, this is just wrong!

Now to figure out the way to deal with this from a personal level. I know one way is to buy local organic foods. Tough for me during the winter, but they are talking about putting in a Saturday Farmers Market in town. How awesome would that be?