If you don't know about Cornucopia, you should.  It's an NGO that defends the conservative view of the federal government's organic labeling program.

Yesterday I received a come-on from them for a proxy letter-writing campaign targeting Whole Foods Markets, Costco, Target, Safeway, Walmart, and Kroger for  complicity in fake organics.  Apparently fake is the word of the hour now for everything.  But why not?  Almost nothing is as it appears to be.  That the word fake now permeates everything in society simply proves a rampant breakdown in trust.

Here is the opening zinger from Cornucopia: "We need the stores we shop at to quit trying to sell us fake organic food from inhumane livestock factories, masquerading as organic, or hydroponic vegetables fertilized with conventional soybeans and grown in ground up conventional coconut waste … or even ground up recycled plastic!"

 I appreciate the effort.  But what if we quit shopping at stores?  This campaign assumes you and I don't have a choice but to shop at these mega-stores.  If all of us who cared quit shopping there, we'd see an explosion of direct sales, farmers markets, Community Supported Agriculture, farm-to-door schemes and others we cant even imagine.  My point is that we all only have so much bandwidth to take on activities.  Don't let good be the enemy of better.

As a side note, this is why our farm has not taken the organic label.  It's fake.  Bless Cornucopia for exposing the scofflaws.  My only question is the time and effort to try to change Whole Foods; how about just bypassing them by buying direct from the farmer.  Have you heard the ditty  "know your farmer, know your food?"  I like that alternative.

Do you know your farmer?