Of all the changes coming to Francisco Baez’s cramped corner grocery store in Newark’s North Ward, he is most excited about the new scanner system at the two checkouts.

But Newark officials, who are paying for the new equipment, are most interested in the new refrigeration units that will be installed near the front of the store. Those new refrigerators, to be filled with fresh fruits and vegetables, are part of a new effort by Newark — with variations in other cities across the country — to improve the diets of low-income residents.

Until recently, small corner grocery stores were seen by public health officials as part of the obesity problem.

The stores, predominantly family-owned, offered convenience, but the accent was on snack chips, canned goods and sugary drinks. Now, because they are often the sole source of groceries in areas with no full-size supermarket, the stores are becoming linchpins in public health campaigns.

“If you are educating people to make good choices, but those choices aren’t available nearby and they don’t have a car to drive out to the suburbs to the supermarket, or an hour to ride two buses to get there,” said Kai Siedenburg, of the Community Food Security Coalition, a group based in Portland, Ore., that promotes access to healthy food, “then it’s really hard for them to make good choices.”

Store owners in Cleveland, New York, Louisville and elsewhere are being approached by public health organizations and economic development agencies with offers of new equipment, marketing expertise or neighborhood promotions to encourage them to stock more fresh produce, whole wheat bread and other healthy offerings.

Newark’s program combines community health concerns with targeted grants to reinvigorate stores and neighborhoods.

“Bags of chips and cans of soda are the options in too many of our small groceries and bodegas,” said Stefan Pryor, a deputy mayor and chairman of the Brick City Development Corporation, Newark’s economic development agency. But, he added, “With the thin margins that small groceries operate under, it’s unrealistic to expect them to make the investment themselves.”

Other initiatives do it differently. The Cleveland Corner Store Project encourages small groceries to sell fruit near the check-out — prime locations where candy and chips are usually found — and promotes these stores with sidewalk signs and posters and at neighborhood health events. New York’s “Healthy Bodegas” initiative has reached out to 1,000 stores in a variety of ways, including helping owners secure zoning permits to allow fruit and vegetable displays on the sidewalk. In Louisville, two small groceries were awarded $20,000 this year to expand their offerings of fresh produce.

The idea of using corner stores in campaigns to improve diets has spread from a few cities over the last decade — among them, Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Hartford and Oakland, Calif. — to “probably a hundred or more organizations that are now either starting interventions or that are in the planning stages,” Ms. Siedenburg said.

Rural areas, too, that have lost local supermarkets to distant big-box retailers are looking for ways to encourage convenience stores to offer healthier choices.

“There are all these neat programs popping up,” said James Johnson-Piett, a consultant to Newark’s program who previously worked with the Food Trust, a nonprofit group that developed some groundbreaking initiatives in Philadelphia.

The movement is driven, in part, by a decades-old problem: the paucity of food shopping options in poor neighborhoods. In Newark, with three supermarkets for a population of 279,000, the city says nearly 40 percent of the money spent on food by residents is spent outside the city.

Campaigns to entice supermarkets, with their expansive produce departments, not to mention scores of local jobs, have met with mixed results. In Philadelphia, a ShopRite opened last year in a low-income neighborhood with help from a Pennsylvania program that provided a $1 million grant and $7 million in federal tax credits. New York is considering a similar plan that would include tax and zoning incentives, but few other cities have such a program in place.

Joseph F. Ritchie, who until recently was executive director of the Brick City Development Corporation, said big chains were used to building stores of 50,000 to 70,000 square feet in the suburbs, and typically wanted larger lot sizes than were available in city neighborhoods. (Mr. Baez’s Food Plaza store is about 3,000 square feet.) He said that the chains worried that local residents would not buy the high-margin prepared foods and delicacies that buoy a supermarket’s profit. Finally, he said, there were worries about crime.

But lately, concern over urban “food deserts” has become a rallying cry, as a drumbeat of medical studies link obesity and diet-related illnesses like diabetes and heart disease to a lack of access to healthy food. Last year, The American Journal of Epidemiology reported that people with no supermarket near their homes were up to 46 percent less likely to have a healthy diet than those with more shopping options.

“In the absence of making gains with supermarkets, we’re trying to take what’s already there and make it better,” said Jerry Jones, executive director of Hartford Food System, a 31-year-old nonprofit group in Connecticut.

The group encourages store owners to replace 5 percent of their junk food and soft drinks each year with regular groceries, including low-salt selections and produce. In return, it provides the stores with market research on what neighborhood shoppers are looking for and negotiates low prices from a big produce wholesaler.

Forty small groceries have signed up and are entitled to display a sticker that says “Healthy Food Retailer,” Mr. Jones said. In 2008, after the program had been under way for about year, the Hartford Food System took measurements and reported an overall 8 percent switch of food inventories from junk food to regular groceries.

This low-budget approach is echoed in Cleveland’s corner store program, a joint effort of the city’s public health department and Case Western Reserve University.

Earlier this year, Anne Gross, who with her husband, Gary, has run the Convenient Food Mart in the city’s Near West Side for 36 years, agreed to push aside some of the candy at the front of the store and make room for two wicker baskets of fruit. The program provided colorful signs encouraging healthy eating.

It also promoted her store with events like a cooking demonstration in her parking lot with samples of banana bread, free cookbooks, and sign-ups for local cooking classes.

The result: a 20 percent increase in fruit sales this last summer. “Bananas are No. 1,” said Mrs. Gross, 65. “After that, cherries have done very well.”

Matt Russell, a coordinator with Case Western’s Center for Health Promotion Research who asked Mrs. Gross to participate, said a big part of any initiative was choosing the right store owners.

Selling produce also takes more work than bags of cookies or chips. “There’s obviously some risk in taking on new products for these stores. We’ve talked to them about issues like spoilage,” Mr. Russell said. “It’s different than a lot of the products they already sell. You know, a can of soup can sit there for a long time.”

In Newark, the Fresh Food program met with 80 store owners before choosing Mr. Baez to be the first of a handful to quality for a grant, Mr. Johnson-Piett said.

“These are folks who are saying, ‘I think I can move fruits and vegetables.’ That’s what you want to hear,” he said. “You can’t spend all your time trying to cajole people to do something they don’t want to do.”

Mr. Baez said he liked the idea of offering customers an expanded selection of produce. “Will I make any more money?” he asked. “I have no idea.”

In Cleveland, Mrs. Gross still sells her customers beer, doughnuts, lottery tickets and other essentials. “As a business person, I have to provide to them what they want,” she said. But she said she is willing to try to improve the community’s health, one banana at a time. “Even if it just changes a couple of people’s habits,” she said, “it would be a huge benefit.”

Mark Kastel

As many of you already know, I have left Capital Press to pursue other endeavors, some of them ag-related.

But I can’t leave without thanking the many people who have extended their help, expertise, and friendship to me. Farmers, ranchers, researchers, educators, Extension agents, 4-H and FFA members, elected officials, farmworkers, farmworker advocates, ag lobbyists, agency directors and staff members, organization officials and members, tribal leaders and members, environmentalists, ag advocates and so many others — all of you made my job as a field reporter with Capital Press for the past 12 years an incredibly rich and worthwhile experience.

Whether I was driving down country roads looking for “the first big red barn on the left after the Y in the road” or on the bus headed for Seattle to attend a WTO or climate-change conference, I always felt as though I was headed toward yet another adventure.

I sometimes chuckle when I think of how naive I was when I first got the job. I thought farming was about farming. And since I had grown up on a farm in Delaware and later had a small farm in North Idaho, I thought I was well-prepared for the job.

But it wasn’t long before I received a call from Jim Jesernig, the then-director of the state’s Agriculture Department, telling me that we needed to get together as soon as possible and talk about an incredibly important topic that was going to affect farmers for years to come. When I asked what that was, he replied with one word: “salmon.”

Salmon? Well, having been the editor of a statewide fishing magazine for several years, I thought I was well-versed on that subject. Heck, I even knew how to catch them.

Once in Seattle, where we met in former Gov. Mike Lowry’s office, Jesernig, an attorney by trade, immediately brought out an incredible assortment of posters and charts that highlighted all of the legal aspects of doing harm to salmon and salmon habitat.

It was an impressive presentation, and as I rode the bus back home, I realized that because salmon live significant parts of their lives in rivers and streams and because so much farmland is located along rivers and streams that protecting fish and protecting farming as a livelihood were intricately tied together.

I also remember learning about the power of the consumer. I was attending a national biotechnology conference in Seattle, and after checking in at the press room, I rode the escalator upstairs and headed outdoors where a group of people — many of them in costumes depicting fish, tomatoes, carrots and other food items — were ardently protesting the conference. They told me that biotechnology wasn’t a proven science and that humans shouldn’t be used as guinea pigs to test out this new technology.

When I went back downstairs, I asked a scientist who was preparing her presentation if she had gone out to listen to what the protesters were saying.

“What do they know,” she said with a scornful chuckle. “We’re the scientists.”

Years later, when one dairy cooperative after another began prohibiting their members from treating their cows with Monsanto’s genetically engineered growth hormone rbST, I recalled that scientist’s words.

It made me realize that farmers need to keep their eyes on the weather vane of marketplace realties and be proactive in dealing with them. There’s no “hunkering down in the bunkers” once consumers decide that they care about such things as land stewardship, animal husbandry, and food safety.

From watching the news unfold over the years, I’ve come to learn that it’s important for farmers to remember that whether consumers’ concerns are based on science, pseudo-science, gut instincts, or misinformation, they have more power than lobbyists or scientists in the “pocketbook votes” they cast every time they shop for food.

As for me, I’ve come to appreciate the need to buy as much of my food as possible from local and regional farmers. Besides helping to keep farms of all sizes in business, shopping locally also helps keep farmland from being developed while injecting local dollars into the local economy.

Of course, agriculture is much bigger than that, but for many consumers, buying locally is a good way to help preserve the family farmer. I’ll vote for that any time.

Cookson can be reached at: at 360-856-2265 or cooksonb@sos.net.

Washington — A program to test pesticides to make sure they do not affect human hormone systems will be compromised by an Office of Management and Budget order allowing data from studies by pesticide companies to susbstitute for new studies, according to some scientists involved in developing the new program.

Thirteen years ago Congress required the Environmental Protection Agency to screen pesticides for hormonal effects such as reproductive and developmental problems by 1999. Pesticides have been implicated in the appearance of male fish laying eggs in the Potomac River.

But the program to test the chemicals on animals such as tadpoles and rats is only now set to begin, and some scientists say it is already being rendered ineffective.

“What the OMB is asking the [EPA] to do is to accept all the old data from pesticide manufacturers defending the safety of their products,” said Theo Colborn, a scientist who served on panels that designed the testing program and selected the tests that compose it. “This looked like, to me, a very desperate attempt to cover up a decade or more of about 1000 studies and research on the effects of chemicals on the endocrine system,” which regulates many bodily functions.

The OMB, which oversees administration regulatory policies, told the EPA “to the greatest extent possible” accept existing data on the toxicity of the pesticides in lieu of conducting new tests on the 67 chemicals selected for investigation.

“I would view it as a smart, good government way of not making people do costly and duplicative tests,” said a senior OMB official, who noted that the tests can cost up to a million dollars.

But this instruction angered some environmental scientists, who contend the submission of previously conducted tests would allow the pesticide makers to selectively submit industry-financed and outdated studies that show the pesticides are safe. The pesticides should undergo the new battery of tests, they say.

“OMB is telling three federal advisory committees and dozens of scientists that they don’t know what they’re talking about,” said Peter deFur, an environmental scientist who sat on the three panels that selected the tests and designed the program. “It’s either hubris or ignorance.”

But the OMB defended its directive, noting that the EPA’s program already contained provisions allowing pesticide companies to submit existing data.

OMB spokesman Tom Gavin said. “A lot of the concerns were expressed from a lack of understanding about process and from a lack of understanding about the intricacies of the federal government.”

“Where data didn’t exist or wasn’t applicable, we’ve given the agency the full authority it needs to get the information,” Gavin said.

Industry officials cheered the OMB decision. “I am particularly gratified that EPA will allow citation of existing data in response to test orders,” said Jay Vroom, president of the pesticide trade group CropLife America, in a statement. “These positive measures will greatly facilitate the testing process.”

For deFur and Colborn, however, the OMB directive is a capitulation to industry groups. Pesticide makers “have done everything they could to make sure that EPA wasn’t going to put this program in place,” deFur said. But it is common practice for the EPA to look at existing data when making regulatory decisions, said a senior scientist involved in the creation of the testing program, who was granted anonymity to discuss interactions with pesticide companies.

“I get data. I look at it. If it’s junk, I tell them,” the scientist said, declaring that agency scientists can effectively separate good data from bad.

Sustainable agriculture is the fastest-growing sector of the food industry. On the other hand, less than 1% of American cropland is farmed organically.

In light of this conundrum, what keeps the organic farmer going?

I spoke with Richard Wiswall, author of The Organic Farmer’s Business Handbook: A Complete Guide Managing Finances, Crops, and Staff – and Making a Profit, to find out more about what it’s like to be an organic farmer in these tough economic times.

“The future of organic is very, very solid in spite of level sales,” says Wiswall. A farmer first and author second, Wiswall is seeing a groundswell of new organic farmers entering the marketplace, which he and others attribute to the writings of Michael Pollan, films like Food Inc., and the increased concern surrounding food safety issues in general.

However, there are big speed bumps in the way of an organic farmer’s success.

GMOs, or Genetically Modified Organisms, provide what Wiswall dubs as a “very dark cloud” for the organic farmer. Not only do GMOs operate outside the boundaries of nature, they are the source of expensive lawsuits for farmers. Companies like Monsanto regularly accuse farmers of “stealing” their seeds, even though GMO-tainted pollen often lands in an organic farmer’s land unknowingly via mother nature.

Other issues with GMO foods include:

* GMO seeds are costly to patent and by law, can’t be saved for replanting. This is a far cry from the claims that GMOs help poor farmers from around the world
* GMOs need increased levels of toxins to control weeds, an unsafe option both ecologically and from a human health standpoint.
* GMOs are artificially injected with foreign proteins. Check out Robyn O’Brien’s book The Unhealthy Truth How Our Food is Making Us Sick – And What We Can Do About It to learn how foreign proteins are negatively affecting human health.

GMO “developers have not failed at making huge profits in a system where farmers are forced to market on volume, and have no market rewards for nutritional quality or penalties for ecological impact,” according to Timothy J. LaSalle.

Another huge challenge for organic farmers are Good Agricultural Practices or GAP, which audits food growers for safety standards (see the debate about one such GAP program, the Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement, which is raging on OrganicAuthority.com). While the premise is solid – to ensure food is safe – GAP certification can be cost-prohibitive for small organic farmers, ranging from $5,000-$10,000. Plus, the strict standards of sanitization required by GAP are geared for big corporate agriculture – not organic farmers.

With food safety issues on the rise, insurance companies are also heavily involved. “Insurers are pressuring retailers for GAP certifications, and retailers are pressuring farmers,” says Wiswall.

The light at the end of the tunnel

According to Wiswall and others, one of the challenges faced by organic farmers is price. In a tight economy, many consumers aren’t as likely to spend the on-average 20% extra for organic products.

But a look at Maine’s Own Organic Milk Company, or MOOMilkCo, showcases how consumers are willing to rally around the healthiest, most fairly-produced product – regardless of price.

MOOMilkCo consists of 10 organic dairy farms that were dropped by “big milk” manufacturer H.P. Hood. This new brand of company will funnel 90% of the company profits directly to the farms as payment for their milk. The remaining 10% will be retained for the business end of the company, which is a joint effort of the Maine Farm Bureau and the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association.

“This company is not set up to make money,” writes David Bright, Farm Bureau Marketing Committee member and the MOOMilk’s secretary. “It is set up to allow the farmers to make money farming.”

According to Bright, there is an “extremely large demand” for local farm products in Maine and New England, which is working in the company’s favor. “Consumers want it and the retailers are welcoming our milk into their stores.” In fact, several hundred people have logged into their web page – http://MainesOwnOrganicMilkCompany.com to indicate support and pledge to buy the milk, which will initially be available in Maine and New Hampshire.

As for growth, prospects are bright; sales negotiations are in process with Shaw’s and Wal-Mart, and cream, half & half, butter, yogurt, ice cream and other products may become part of the brand in coming years (in the meantime, these by-products will be organically certified and sold into the wholesale market).

Show and Tell: The Future of Food

MOOMilkCo. is an inspiration; a business community that has banded together to make the freshest, healthiest organic product available in a country where huge agri-business doesn’t make it easy to achieve.

Transparency is a vital start: the more people start to think about the origins of their food and ask questions, the better for the organic farmer. After all, organic farming, in its most simple form, is raising crops and animals for food in a way the laws of nature intended.

“I think that in 30 years, there won’t be a difference between organic and conventional foods,” says Wiswall. This hope is already a reality in Europe, where ‘every day,’ store-bought food is what Americans know as organic.

Why is nutritionally inferior food that is GMO-grown and sprayed with synthetic toxic chemicals considered our nation’s “normal” food? Our food – as a matter of course – should all be nutritionally-rich, free of toxic chemicals and GMOs. It is the pure food grown on organic farms; a beacon of hope for the future of our food and the health of our nation.

Laura Klein is the publisher of OrganicAuthority.com and LauraKleinGreenClub.com. She is also the TV Host of Better Living with Laura Klein and The Andrew and Laura Show. She is a passionate organic foodie and promoter of all things green.

Genetically modified squash plants that are resistant to a debilitating viral disease become more vulnerable to a fatal bacterial infection, according to biologists.

“Cultivated squash is susceptible to a variety of viral diseases and that is a major problem for farmers,” said Andrew Stephenson, Penn State professor of biology. “Infected plants grow more slowly and their fruit becomes misshapen.”

In the mid-1990s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved genetically modified squash, which are resistant to three of the most important viral diseases in cultivated squash. However, while disease-resistant crops have been a boon to commercial farmers, ecologists worry there might be certain hidden costs associated with the modified crops.

“There is concern in the ecological community that, when the transgenes that confer resistance to these viral diseases escape into wild populations, they will (change) those plants,” said Stephenson, whose team’s findings appear on October 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “That could impact the biodiversity of plant communities where wild squash are native.”

Stephenson and his colleagues James A. Winsor, professor of biology; Matthew J. Ferrari, research associate; and Miruna A. Sasu, doctoral student, all at Penn State; and Daolin Du, visiting professor, Jiangsu University, China, crossed the genetically modified squash into wild squash native to the southwestern United States and examined the resulting flower and fruit production.

Unlike a lab experiment, the researchers tried to mimic a real world setting during their three-year study.
The researchers then looked at the effects of the virus-resistant transgenes on prevalence of the three viral diseases, herbivory by cucumber beetles, as well as the occurrence of bacterial wilt disease that is spread by the cucumber beetles.

“When the cucumber beetles start to feed on infected plants they pick up the bacteria through their digestive system,” explained Sasu. “This feeding creates open wounds on the leaves and when the bugs’ feces falls on these open wounds, the bacteria find their way into the plumbing of the plant.”

The researchers discovered that as the viral infection swept the fields containing both genetically modified and wild crops, the damage from cucumber beetles is greater on the genetically modified plants. The modified plants are therefore more susceptible to the fatal bacterial wilt disease.

“Plants that do not have the virus-resistant transgene get the viral disease,” explained Stephenson, whose team’s work is funded by the National Science Foundation. “However, since cucumber beetles prefer to feed on healthy plants rather than viral infected plants, the beetles become increasingly concentrated on the healthy — mostly transgenic — plants.”

During a viral epidemic, the transgene provides modified plants with a fitness advantage over the wild plants. But when both the bacterial and viral pathogens are present, the beetles tend to avoid the smaller viral infected plants and concentrate on the healthy transgenic plants. This exposes those plants to the bacterial wilt disease against which they have no defense.

“Wild and transgenic plants had the same amount of damage from beetles before viral diseases were prevalent in our fields,” said Stephenson. “Once the virus infected the wild plants, the transgenic plants had significantly greater damage from the beetles.”

Results from the study show that over the course of three years, the prevalence of bacterial wilt disease was significantly greater on transgenic plants than on non-transgenic plants.

According to the researchers, their findings suggest that the fitness advantage enjoyed by virus-resistant plants comes at a price. Once the virus infects susceptible plants, cucumber beetles find the genetically modified plants a better source for food and mating.

“Our study has sought to uncover the ecological cost that might be associated with modified plants growing in the full community of organisms, including other insects and other diseases,” said Ferrari. “We have shown that while genetic engineering has provided a solution to the problem of viral diseases, there are also these unintended consequences in terms of additional susceptibility to other diseases.”

Adapted from materials provided by Penn State.

On a sunny morning in July, Alicia Jabbar’s tank top is wet with sweat along her spine from the nape of her neck to the small of her back. She climbs onto the horizontal ledges at the bottom of a metal stake next to an ankle-high tomato plant. Jabbar, who’s wearing two ponytails under a baseball cap, has to use all of her body weight to push the stake into the earth. When she’s done with a row, she stands on tiptoes in her running shoes to drop a metal cylinder with two handles on the top of each stake.

Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang. The noise echoes off the trees.

“Twelve more rows,” she says.

“What time is it?” her friend Jessica Stanley calls. She’s busy looping string from a box at her waist around the stakes to support the tomato plants.

“Ten-thirty, and we’re halfway done,” Jabbar, 26, replies. They’ve been working since 7 a.m. and staking for the past two hours. “Sore back?”

Stanley says with a sigh: “There’s no way to avoid it. I try to move my hands in a different way — doesn’t matter. Well, I guess I’ll pound with you.”

Stanley, 26, who’s working in a camisole tank top, lives in an uninsulated barn on the farm and spends more than 50 hours a week weeding, mulching, harvesting and selling at farmers markets.

Just a year ago, she was making $110,000 a year at Cisco Systems in Herndon, often telecommuting from the two-bedroom condo she owns in Georgetown. Now, she makes $7 an hour. She and Jabbar, along with Jabbar’s fiance, Steve Hirschhorn, work for Chip and Susan Planck on Wheatland Vegetable Farms in Loudoun County.

They’re part of a growing pool of young, educated, politically motivated workers drawn to farming. Books such as bestseller “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” in which Michael Pollan championed the local food movement, are sparking interest in sustainable agriculture, or small-scale farms that embrace humane and eco-friendly practices. Such operations are getting a boost from Community Supported Agriculture, a system that lets customers pay in advance for a weekly share of a nearby farm’s crop; the number of members participating in CSAs grew 50 percent between 2007 and 2009. The number of farmers markets in the United States has jumped by almost 13 percent over the last year. Even the White House now has its own organic garden.

Some young workers are looking for a career change; others are in it for a season or just a summer. Their passion for small farms is real — but so is the physically exhausting, often tedious labor that comes with it. And reconciling theideals of local food and farming with the reality of sore backs, sweaty days and low pay isn’t easy.

***

Chip and Susan Planck have owned their 60-acre spread in western Loudoun County since 1979. Stanley said she and her friends chose Wheatland Farms because they wanted to work for “someone who was profit-driven and making a life of it, doing well.”

In the past few years, Wheatland has had far more inquiries from young people looking to try their hand at farm work. Even without a Web site, Chip was getting three inquiries a week as late as July.

Katherine Adam, agriculture specialist at the National Center for Appropriate Technology, said there were only six sustainable farms on a list for prospective student workers in 1989. Now there are 1,400, with 236 added from January to May. More than 3,000 workers spend their summers or a whole growing season on these farms.

“The whole zeitgeist about this stuff is changing. We couldn’t ask for a better climate for our business,” Chip says. He likes hiring college kids, because over the course of a season they can see the food through from start to finish; they plant the seeds, pick the produce and sell it at the farmers market. He smiles as he flips through a photo album with group pictures of 15 to 20 workers standing in front of a wagon. “It’s almost like hiring yourself.” Chip says fondly, “How could you not enjoy this group of people?”

But he admits they weren’t all good workers. If someone was a bit of a slacker, the rest of the crew had to work around it. Since many recruits have never even gardened before, it takes some time before they become efficient in the field. Despite a greater pool to pick from than ever before, there’s a risk that even the most idealistic worker will become disenchanted once the reality of long hours of hard work sets in.

That retention risk made it difficult for Stanley, Jabbar and Hirschhorn to get hired. “A lot of them didn’t want three people who knew each other,” Jabbar says, because farm owners feared if one left, they all would. “I’m quitting my job and moving across the country! I’m not quitting after two weeks,” she says indignantly.

She’d worked as a business analyst for Williams-Sonoma in San Francisco, earning $80,000 a year. But she felt she was just marking time until she discovered what she really wanted to do with her life. Stanley felt the same way. “I was making a ridiculous amount of money and not working very hard, to be honest.”

It was during a 2008 vacation that the college friends started to talk more seriously about how to escape. They wanted outdoor jobs, and their feelings about the politics of food — such as their belief that industrial farming is headed for collapse, and is a culprit behind obesity and global warming — drew them to farming. But it’s more than that. Jabbar says its appeal is “a simplicity of life.” Joined by Hirschhorn, they decided to learn how to grow food so that they could launch their own farm in 2010.

Jabbar, Stanley and Hirschhorn keep a blog, iheartnature.com, that documents their experience at Wheatland. In her first week, Jabbar wrote: “The first few days were rough and I was addicted to taking Tylenol in the morning, afternoon, and night — most of you know I hate taking medicine so that in itself is a lot for me.” She said on the seventh day, after six hours of staking tomatoes, she was chanting in her head: “You can do this, you can do this, you can do this.”

The trio and their fellow workers live together in a converted barn on the farm and cook together in a cabin-kitchen. They get to know other workers from neighboring farms and swap stories. It’s a tightknit community, although Stanley, Jabbar and Hirschhorn’s background of corporate jobs sets them somewhat apart.

“I feel I don’t have a lot in common with them. Nobody I know is even considering going into the jobs they were in. Seemingly to me, they have a much more extravagant lifestyle,” says co-worker David Giusti, a 23-year-old graduate of Oberlin College with a curly ponytail and beard bleached blond by the sun. This is his third summer at Wheatland, and he has spent time studying sustainable agriculture in Vermont in between. Next year, he plans to rent land from the Plancks and farm for himself.

Stanley says that some customers raised an eyebrow when she wore her engagement ring to the farmers market. Women would see the glittering diamond and say, “You’re a farmer?”

Jabbar, Stanley and Hirschhorn spend their off-the-clock hours refining their business plan to get their own farm started — investigating land prices, considering financing options. The hundreds of thousands in equity Stanley has in her Georgetown condo will help, but they’re realistic about the risk involved. In the middle of the summer, they imagine buying at the end of the year, but by late August, renting is sounding better.

“We think it might be good to test the waters to make sure we really love it,” Stanley says. “If it turns out this isn’t for us, great, we haven’t put a huge investment in it.”

***

While Stanley, Jabbar and Hirschhorn are gearing up to attempt a future in farming, others are just in it for an alternative summer experience or a working vacation. But for Dave Kane, 27, a season on Upper Marlboro’s Clagett Farm is about starting over.

Earlier this year, he quit his sous-chef job in Florida, where he’d stayed after graduating college. “Florida’s just not really a fun place. Well, it can be, it can be too fun,” he says. His social circle — mostly other restaurant workers — included a lot of heavy partiers. “I need to be done with that, put that behind me. Quit drinking, make a new start.” Looking for a way out, he moved home to Calvert County to live with his parents.

In March, he went to Clagett to try some of the tasks and interview with the farm’s managers. Once his hour-long tryout was over, Kane was free to go. But he stayed — the job wasn’t done yet, he told them. They decided right then to hire him. He even worked for a month without pay until the farm could pay him $9 an hour.

The fields are familiar territory for Kane. His father had run a University of Maryland livestock research farm in Carroll County. They moved away when Kane was just 7, but those early years of dad picking him up from soccer practice on horseback made a deep impression.

“I had a cowboy for a dad. It just made me want to be one. When you’re that young as a kid, you think that’s what a man’s supposed to be,” Kane says. He chuckles at his own romanticism — after all, his father ended up working with databases at the National Archives.

When he’s in the fields, Kane is as silent as the Marlboro Man. A Stetson hat shades his eyes. A tooled leather belt, clasped with a large metal belt buckle decorated with a steer, holds up his 32-inch-waist Levi’s. He’s back into that size after losing 30 pounds in three months from the manual labor.

On a sunny day in early July, Kane leads a group of suburban Maryland teenagers. In addition to producing enough fruit and vegetables to feed 400 people all summer and fall, Clagett, which is supported by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, also has a mission to educate about organic farming, so it hosts tours throughout the season.

Kane speaks to the teens volunteering on a camp field trip only when he has to. He takes off his work gloves, shakes a plant to get a potato bug to show them, and says, “They all need to die,” before pinching it between his fingers. “Ohh!” the girls cry.

He pushes a wheel hoe through the dirt and weeds, and dirt makes little clouds ankle high. Only the muscles in his forearms — and the fact that when the teens use the hoe, the dirt barely stirs — betray the effort. Every once in a while, a sarcastic sense of humor peeks out. “There’s so much space that could be turned into soccer fields,” says one boy of the 200-acre farm.

“Or Wal-Marts, or parking lots, or an airport. That’d be cool,” Kane replies.

“They told me that was part of the job, wrangling school groups,” he says later. “It’s not my favorite.”

He prefers a solitary stint in a field, just thinking. “You can get into a work meditation mode, where you kind of clean your mind, if you’re doing something kind of simple and repetitive,” he explains. He thinks about “where I’m going, where I’ve been.” He falls silent, clenching his jaw as he decides how much he wants to reveal. “I had some situations with a live-in girlfriend in Florida. Think I need to let go, but it’s hard to let go.”

Being busy helps. In addition to working five days a week at Clagett, he works full time as a $12-an-hour line cook at Sam’s on the Waterfront restaurant in Annapolis. He helps create specials and amuse bouches, such as a shot-glass amount of heirloom tomato gazpacho with avocado creme fraiche. He spent months looking for an apartment but had trouble finding a place in Annapolis that fit his $650-a-month budget. It was discouraging, but Kane considered moving out of his parents’ house a critical part of moving on. “Once I’m out, I’ll feel completely whole. Just like I’m an adult again. I’m only dependent on myself,” he explained. By the end of September, he’d finally found a place with a roommate, and now he’s preparing to move.

Kane has no plans to be a full-time farmer in the long term. But the farming experience has given him a greater appreciation for the food he cooks. After seeing all the hard work that goes into creating a tomato or a cucumber, “I really try to make vegetables a feature of the dish. Not just something to put on the plate to fill up space.” He’s hoping for a promotion at the restaurant. But he won’t leave the farm completely behind — he’ll volunteer there over the winter and might come back part time next season.

***

When the harvest peaks in late summer, the workload gets more intense at Wheatland, where Jabbar, Stanley and Hirschhorn are picking vegetables seven days a week. As the nights turn cold in the fall, the trio puts plastic up around the barn where they sleep, remembering how they took it down in the spring. “It kind of feels like a full circle,” Jabbar says.

Stanley goes to Colorado to visit her fiance at the end of August. She looks into a land rental there, but it isn’t a good fit. Her parents still wonder if she knows what she’s getting into. Her mother works on the farm with them for a weekend in September. There are a lot of things you could do that are related to this, Stanley recalls her mother saying: “This is really hard work!”

But the physical labor is normal for Stanley now — on her rare days off (one every other week), she misses it.

She, Jabbar and Hirschhorn are still moving to Colorado in December. But their hopes of getting their own farm running by next season have dimmed. To start producing in the spring, they’d need to be tilling now or planting a cover crop. So 2010 will be a year of looking for a property, buying tractors, preparing the land — and, they hope, finding jobs on organic farms in the Boulder area in the meantime.

“It’s definitely a bitter pill to swallow,” Jabbar says, but she recognizes that more experience will be helpful before launching a business.

Despite that, they’re still committed to their path. They went to see “Food, Inc.,” a documentary critical of industrial agriculture, and Jabbar says she came out with renewed confidence about her future in farming. “Dude, I’m totally doing what I want to be doing,” she says. “I’ve never felt so enthusiastic about how I spend my hours in a day as when I got out of that theater.”

Mara Lee is a Washington journalist. She can be reached at wpmagazine@washpost.com.

If you believed a certain baby formula would make your child smarter, would you buy it?

Infant formula manufacturers are banking that you would. That’s why, since 2002, several companies have fortified their products with synthetic versions of DHA and ARA, long-chain fatty acids that occur naturally in breast milk and have been associated with brain development.

The oils are produced by Martek Biosciences Corp. from lab-grown algae and fungus and extracted with hexane, according to the company’s patent application. Hexane is a neurotoxin.

A growing number of parents and medical professional believe these additives are causing severe reactions in some babies, and it has been repeatedly shown that taking affected babies off DHA/ARA formula makes the problems go away almost immediately. The FDA has received hundreds of letters to this effect by upset parents, even as products containing the additives are being marketed as better than breast milk.

Karen Jensen says that due to health complications she was unable to breastfeed her daughter, and so fed her daughter Neocate, a formula with DHA/ARA.

“At two weeks, my daughter would often stop breathing in her sleep and was having various other serious health conditions. She cried constantly and couldn’t sleep due to gastrointestinal upset.”

After many trips to the hospital, a CT scan, an EEG, time on an apnea monitor and thousands of dollars in bills, “we tried the Neocate without the DHA/ARA in it. Within 24 hours, we had a brand-new, entirely different baby. She had no abdominal distress, no gas, she smiled and played, and for the first time ever we heard her laugh.”

Jensen’s story is echoed many times over in similar letters urging the FDA to ban DHA and ARA from baby foods, or at the very least to put warning labels on the product advising that some babies may experience adverse reactions like bloating, gastrointestinal distress, vomiting, and diarrhea.

While only a fraction of babies seem to react in this way, it’s a common enough occurrence to have earned DHA/ARA baby formula the nickname “the diarrhea formula” in the neonatal unit of an Ohio hospital.

In 2001, the FDA expressed concerns about the safety of adding DHA and ARA to infant-formula additives and notified Martek of the agency’s plans to convene a group of scientists to study these concerns.

Martek wrote back: “… convening a group of scientific experts to answer such hypothetical concerns would not be productive.” Within months, the FDA wrote to Martek that it would allow DHA and ARA in infant formula, without any scientific review of its own.

While quick to protest hypothetical safety concerns about DHA/ARA, Martek was ready to pounce on the hypothetical benefits of its oils.

In a 1996 investment brief, Martek explained, “Even if [the DHA/ARA blend] has no benefit, we think it would be widely incorporated into formulas as a marketing tool and to allow companies to promote their formula as ‘closest to human milk.’ ”

Mead Johnson Nutritionals took this opportunity to heart, drawing the ire of breastfeeding advocates when it began promoting its DHA/ARA Enfamil Lipil as “The Breast Milk Formula.”

Mead Johnson was also involved with a report in current issue of the journal Child Development, in which a Dallas team of scientists provided evidence that DHA and ARA in baby food improves brain development. Several members of the team have received Mead Johnson money in the form of research funding, as well as the coveted currency known as “consulting fees.”

The report claims that infants fed DHA/ARA baby formula (supplied for free by Mead Johnson) showed greater ability to solve certain problems, like pulling a blanket with a ball on it toward them. The researchers say this problem-solving ability correlates with enhanced IQ and vocabulary development.

“New evidence favors baby formula,” announced the Los Angeles Times, in an ambiguously worded headline that begs the question: Over what is baby formula favored?

Breastfeeding advocates went on the warpath over the suggestion that formula could be better for babies than breast milk.

“Parents will be encouraged to forgo breastfeeding in favor of a hyped-up infant formula,” complained Barbara Moore, president and CEO of Shape Up America. “Breast milk has other benefits not related to mental development. It confers protection against infection, including viral infections, and the CDC promotes breastfeeding to confer maximal protection against swine flu and other infections.”

Charlotte Vallaeys, a researcher for the Cornucopia Institute, wrote a substantial report on the risks and benefits of DHA/ARA in baby formula. She says the Mead Johnson-funded team behind the Child Development story is “the only group that has found real differences in cognitive development” resulting from the addition of DHA and ARA to formula.

Not that other research teams haven’t looked. To make sense of the growing body of research on the subject, a team of scientists led by Karen Simmer compiled a review, published in January 2008, of all available literature. The team found “feeding term infants with milk formula enriched with [DHA and ARA] had no proven benefit regarding vision, cognition or physical growth.”

A March 2009 review by the European Food Safety Authority also found the available data “insufficient to establish a cause-and-effect relationship” between DHA, ARA and brain development.

Nonetheless, the use of DHA and ARA has grown, and has even won approval for use in organic baby formula, as well as in organic milk.

In an article for the Washington Post on the eroding integrity of the “certified organic” label, Kimberly Kindy described how these laboratory produced oils received organic approval.

… in 2006, [USDA] staff members concluded that the fatty acids could not be added to organic baby formula because they are synthetics that are not on the standards board’s approved list. … Barbara Robinson, who administers the organics program and is a deputy USDA administrator, overruled the staff decision after a telephone call and an e-mail exchange with William J. Friedman, a lawyer who represents the formula makers.

While the FDA has raised serious questions regarding the safety of DHA/ARA, the issue remains in limbo, with concerned parents, medical professionals and advocacy groups pushing one way, and the deep-pocketed corporations pushing the other.

The FDA did instruct Martek and the formula companies to conduct post-market surveillance of its DHA and ARA products, but after seven years none has been submitted.

Until conclusive proof emerges on the safety and/or benefit of DHA and ARA in baby formula, it’s buyer beware for parents of newborns. And last I checked, breast milk — the product of millions of years of evolutionary shaping into the perfect food for babies — remains widely available and free of charge.

Ari LeVaux writes a syndicated weekly food column, Flash in the Pan.

Beekeeping is rising in popularity — from urban rooftops to backyard hives, the world is abuzz with interest in homemade honey. And who better to comment on the nature of bees than the former president of the Vermont Beekeepers Association, Ross Conrad. He’s led bee-related presentations and taught organic beekeeping workshops and classes throughout North America for many years, and Conrad’s small beekeeping business supplies friends, neighbors, and local stores with honey and candles among other bee related products, not to mention provides bees for Vermont apple pollination in spring. I talked to Conrad about organic beekeeping, the state of pollination, and tips for aspiring bee farmers.

Makenna Goodman: Your book, Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Apiculture, offers up a program of natural beehive management, and an alternative to conventional chemical-based approaches. So — why organic beekeeping?

Ross Conrad: History has shown us that the industrialized “economy of scale” approach does not work when applied to agriculture because we are dealing with living biological systems, not an inert assembly line food production system where the economy of scale approach can be applied across the board. One of the biggest issues is the large number of chemical contaminants that are being found in beeswax and pollen, often at very high concentrations. Toxic chemical contamination has been implicated in Colony Collapse and the reality is that there is no effective regulation of chemicals in Western society. Let me tell you why:

When the EPA was created in 1970 and sanctioned with the task of regulating chemicals, all the chemicals that were already used in commerce up to that time were grandfathered in. Additionally, since the EPA is given very limited personnel and financial resources, the agency ends up relying on the chemical manufacturers for the majority of the scientific data that is used to evaluate the safety of the regulated toxins…a serious conflict of interest. When chemicals are evaluated for toxicity, they are studied in isolation. Little thought is given to the chemical’s break down products which can prove to be more toxic and longer lasting than the original chemical itself, such as in the case of Imidacloprid Olefin, which is produced as the neonicotinoid, Imidacloprid degrades. Once in use and released into the environment, chemicals, and their breakdown products, will combine with other chemicals already in the environment to form new compounds. The synergistic effects of some of these combinations have proven themselves to be hundreds of times more toxic than either compound on its own.

Recent research into endocrine-disrupting chemicals (the kind often used as pesticides), reveals that the timing of exposure combines with the amount of exposure to produce a chemical’s effect. Thus, a certain dose might be very toxic to an organism in its developmental stage, while not having any obvious detrimental affects on the organism once it has matures, or vice-verse. To make matters worse, in some cases low doses of a chemical can be more damaging than higher doses. These new understandings of chemical toxicity have proven wrong Paracelsus’s 450-year-old maxim, “The dose makes the poison.” Today we know that often the timing can make the poison and that sometimes less is actually worse.

Add to this the many studies that now show that a cocktail of “insignificant” doses of several chemicals each acting on their own can combine to have significant results. In other words, exposure to very low concentrations of several chemicals at the same time can cause biological effects that none of the chemicals would have on their own. Thus when an living organism is exposed to a mixture of chemicals, every component contributes to the overall effect, no matter how minute their concentration. The only sane answer to our ignorance in the use of these toxic compounds is to stop using these chemicals, not only in our hives, but in our everyday lives. Thus, organic beekeeping came into being in just the last 20 years as a response to the fact that chemical use in bee hives has became the common way to try to control Varroa mites. Organic beekeeping is not only possible, but necessary.

What are the biggest obstacles faced by organic beekeepers today?

The biggest challenge beekeepers face today is the same challenge facing all of Western industrial civilization…

In his 1980 book, Overshoot, William Catton, Jr. states, “Infinitesimal actions, if they are numerous and cumulative, can become enormously consequential.” This statement refers to the problem of cumulative impacts where actions that are harmless or tolerable at the individual level can degrade the planets life support systems if thousands or millions of people do them. One person fertilizing their lawn near Chesapeake Bay for example makes no significant impact, but when thousands do it the bay becomes degraded and Blue Crab populations decline precipitously.

When it comes to chemicals the current regulatory approach to controlling pollution does not deal with global pollution. The main focus has instead been on the maximally exposed individual. In the United States, we conduct risk assessments (used when conducting “cost-benefit” analyses) to evaluate the risk to a hypothetical “maximally exposed” individual. If the threat to that individual (or honey bee) is found to fall within acceptable limits, then regulation does not occur and these so-called acceptable amounts of contamination are allowed to be released forever after. Then another risk assessment and cost benefit analysis gives the go-ahead to another acceptable release or use of a different toxic substance or harmful activity. Then another and another. What we have not started to look at until recently is the total impact of all these acceptable risks. Our society has assumed that it could tolerate unlimited small amounts of harm as a byproduct of economic growth. It is only when a particular activity is demonstrated to fail to provide a net benefit to society that most of our property and environmental laws are permitted to interfere with economic activity.

Biochemist and lawyer, Joseph H. Guth, legal director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, has analyzed this situation and offered solutions in several scholarly papers one of which was published in the Barry Law Review, titled “Cumulative Impacts: Death-Knell for Cost-Benefit Analysis In Environmental Decisions.” In this paper Guth points out that our laws only forbid damage when the perceived benefits are not considered to outweigh the cost or destruction to the environment or human health. The law also puts the burden of proof that an activity is creating more harm than good on the injured party, or the government. If the victim (or the government) can not meet the burden of proof, then the damaging action is allowed to continue by default. This burden of proof transforms doubt, and missing scientific information into a barrier to legal protection for the environment (and honey bees). The default presumption is that the benefits of economic activity always outweigh the costs unless a specific cost-benefit analysis (often based upon incomplete or faulty research conducted by those that stand to profit) can show otherwise.

According to Joe Guth, “These laws do not permit regulators broadly to take account of what is happening to the world around them. They embed regulators in a decision-making structure that may seem scientific but in fact is profoundly unscientific because it prevents them from responding to the ever more detailed findings by the world scientific community that we are overshooting the Earth’s ecological capacities. Rooted in the assumption that ecological overshoot does not occur, our current statutes are incapable of containing the cumulative scale of ecological damage… It is an approach that has become outdated because it is based on assumptions that are no longer valid.”

Guth sums up by stating, “To maintain a functioning biosphere in which humans can prosper, the law must turn its attention to the problem of cumulative impacts. The law will have to abandon its use of cost-benefit analysis to justify individual environmental impacts and instead adopt the goal of maintaining the functioning ecological systems that we are so dependent upon.”

In Section II of his “Cumulative Impacts” paper, Joe Guth states that “Our legal system already harbors examples of decision-making structures that establish a principle of standard of environmental quality or human health and do not rely on cost-benefit balancing.” and that these examples “show that such legal principles or standards can enable the legal system to contain the growth of cumulative impacts.” The cumulative impacts of our culture are destroying the life support systems of the planet and the bees are simply acting as the proverbial “canary in the coal mine.” As a result we don’t have an environmental problem that we can “solve” we have a situation we must learn to adjust to. The actions that needed to be taken to rectify our predicament should have been taken years ago. At this point the damage is done. The only real question left is whether our actions today are going to result in our great grandchildren living a difficult life in a crippled world that is a shadow of the world we live in today, or are we going to inflict damage that is so devastating that we will have created a total catastrophe for future generations?

Describe briefly beekeeping as a business. How much energy do you focus on honey production?

Honey production is not the focus of my beekeeping business at all. The focus is on caring for the honey bees and keeping the colonies as healthy and vibrant as possible. This means primarily reducing stress on the bees. In fact the only consistent observation that has been made of hives suffering from Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is that the bees in infected colonies are always suffering from stress that has caused the bee’s immune systems to collapse. While there are numerous stresses that the bees must deal with that we cannot directly control (see below), there are numerous other stresses on the hive that we do have control over. Such stressors include reducing chemical contaminants in the hive, eliminating the presence of antibiotics in the hive, making sure that the bees are fed a healthy diet of honey and pollen from a wide variety of plants and that the hives have access to clean uncontaminated water. When the bees health needs are taken care of, a honey harvest tends to be the natural result.

Let’s say I’m an aspiring small-scale farmer, or beginning life on a homestead, or merely thinking of expanding my urban garden. Why should I keep bees, in terms of honey production, and their pollination benefits, etc?

The biggest benefit honey bees provide is pollination. Pollination fees are what is keeping the beekeeping industry alive today. Honey is really a byproduct of pollination. Why should anybody keep bees? As suggested above, the life support systems of our planet are collapsing. The forests are disappearing, desert regions are growing, the climate is shifting so that some areas are getting dryer, other areas are getting wetter, some areas are getting colder, other areas are getting warmer, and our oceans are collapsing with large dead zones, acidification, giant “islands” of floating plastic debris, collapsing fisheries, and ocean animals that are dying in greater numbers every day from cancer. My observation is that it is our industrial civilization that is, if not the actual cause of all this destruction, it is certainly contributing to the devastation. As a member of this society then, I am partly responsible and part of the problem. This is a wonderful thing, for if I am part of the problem, then I have the responsibility and am empowered to be part of the solution.

One of the greatest lessions we learn from the honey bee is in observing how they go about making their “living” here on earth. As they go about their business collecting pollen, nectar, propolis and water (everything they need to survive) they do not harm or kill anything in the process. Unless they feel threatened and are forced to defend themselves, not so much as a leaf on a plant is harmed. In the process of taking what they need to survive they in turn give back more than they take and make the world a better place through the pollination the plants. This gift of pollination ensures that the plants can thrive and reproduce in vast numbers which produces a large variety of seeds, nuts, berries, fruits and vegetable in all shapes and sizes, which in turn ensures an abundance of food for all the rest of the insects, animals and people on the planet. This is the ultimate lesson that the bees teach us and challenge us to accomplish: How to live our life in a way that by taking what we need from the world around us we leave the world better than we found it.

Each one of us who takes care of the honey bees and makes sure that there is adequate habitat and flowering plants for the native pollinators in our regions, is indirectly through the good work of these pollinators, making the world a better place for all of creation. This is the kind of healing our beautiful blue-green planet needs desperately at this time in history.

Currently abundant on most grocery store shelves, seals of approval for purportedly healthful food selections may become scarcer in the coming year. Some labels claiming foods are “smart choices” or “heart healthy” are patently misleading, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which has threatened to prohibit such promotional labeling when it ignores unhealthy aspects of a product.

“There are some foods that have gotten the Smart Choices check mark that are almost 50 percent sugar,” Margaret Hamburg, Commissioner of the FDA, said in a Tuesday call with reporters, the Associated Press reported.

Cereals such as Froot Loops and condiments including regular mayonnaise have been awarded the “Smart Choice” label (a program launched earlier this year by large food conglomerates including Kraft, General Mills and Kellogg’s) despite high sugar or fat levels. Many labels also now tout a product’s high fiber, antioxidant or vitamin content despite hefty helpings of other more deleterious ingredients.

In the call, Hamburg described the “growing proliferation of forms and symbols, check marks, numerical ratings, stars, heart icons” that adorn food packages, the cornucopia of which she compared to the Tower of Babel, the AP reported. “There’s truly a cacophony of approaches,” Hamburg said, which can be confusing to consumers who are trying to make quick and healthful selections for themselves and their families.

The FDA warning went to food-makers in a letter on Tuesday.

Those in the industry assert that nutrition labels of their own design (and policing) are based on recommendations from the government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the AP reported. “We believe in the science behind the Smart Choices Program,” Mike Hughes, chairman of the program wrote in a statement. “And we also note that the Smart Choices Program complies with all U.S. laws and regulations,” The Washington Post noted.

In order to bring the various corporate labels in line with actual, overall nutritional value, the FDA is looking to establish a cohesive system of evaluation and front-of-package demarcation, perhaps an abbreviated version of the standardized Nutrition Information label, instituted in the 1990s, the Post reported. As a possible model, the U.K. has a standard, green-yellow-red label system warning consumers which food items are the most (green) and least healthy (red).

“We believe we can offer important benefits in terms of developing the science- and nutrition-based criteria for the use of dietary guidance claims,” Hamburg said. New, more standardized labels may go into effect as early as next year, The New York Times reported.

The complaints are the latest salvo into a growing controversy whereas corporate agribusiness and major retailers have been accused of blurring the line between “natural” products and food that has been grown, processed and properly certified organic under tight federal standards.

“Major food processors have recognized the meteoric rise of the organic industry, and profit potential, and want to create what is in essence ‘organic light,’ taking advantage of the market cachet but not being willing to do the heavy lifting required to earn the valuable USDA organic seal,” said Mark A. Kastel, Senior Farm Policy Analyst at Cornucopia.

The Wisconsin-based farm policy research group discovered Target nationally advertised Silk soymilk in newspapers with the term “organic” pictured on the carton’s label, when in fact the manufacturer, Dean Foods, had quietly shifted their products away from organics.

Dean Foods, and its WhiteWave division, received media scrutiny, and industry condemnation, this past spring for not notifying retailers or changing the UPC codes, when they quietly switched to conventional soybeans in their core-products.

Dean/WhiteWave also received heat in the organic food and agriculture community when they decided to convert some of their Horizon products, the leading organic label in terms of sales volume, to cheaper “natural” (conventional) ingredients. “This really hit a nerve because one of these new Horizon products, Little Blends yogurt, is aimed specifically at toddlers, at an early stage of development, where the nutritional superiority of organic food, and its utility in avoiding chemical residues in our food, is so critically important,” Kastel added.

A front-page story in the Chicago Tribune in July outlined a consumer survey that showed the public was unclear about the difference between natural and organic labels and that some corporations, particularly Dean Foods, were taking advantage of the confusion in the marketplace.

The story quoted Suzanne Shelton, president and CEO of the Shelton Group which conducted the survey, as saying, “They [consumers] think ‘natural’ is regulated by the government but that organic isn’t, and of course it’s just the opposite.”

In fact, a strict set of farm and food handling standards have been developed and implemented by the federal government to regulate food that qualifies for the USDA’s organic seal. For the most part, food products containing “natural” ingredients represent little more than soothing marketing puffery aimed at consumers.

This is not the first tangle involving Cornucopia and Target. The giant Minneapolis-based retailer’s own upscale private label food line, Archer Farms, which blurs the line selling both natural and organically labeled food, came under scrutiny when Cornucopia discovered that it’s organic milk supplier, Colorado-based Aurora Dairy, was flagrantly violating federal organic livestock standards and filed a complaint with the USDA.

USDA investigators determined that Aurora had willfully violated 14 federal organic regulations. In what was condemned as a “sweetheart deal” by some in the organic industry, the Bush administration allowed Aurora to stay in business. Unlike some other retailers, Target stuck with Aurora as their milk supplier for their Archer Farms label.

“In an industry where educational achievement and passion are the common denominators in describing its clientele, Target could certainly be viewed as arrogant to think they can take advantage of consumers by ignoring both the spirit and letter of the laws governing organic commerce,” Kastel affirmed.

SuperTarget stores have gained significant market share around the country and are, according to a recent Nielsen/Shelby report, now the number two grocer in Minnesota’s Twin Cities market.

“We feel very strongly about taking seriously the use of the regulated term: Organic,” said Lindy Bannister, general manager of The Wedge, the nation’s largest member-owned cooperative store. “Although we welcome all the players that bring organic food to people, we must insist that, for the unregulated (the non-certified retailers), they at the very least should proof their ads as they are subject to a federal fine for misusing that regulated term.”

This is not the first time The Cornucopia Institute has found that specialty retailers, like the nation’s approximately 275 co-op grocers, have faced unethical competition from big-box chains. After the group filed complaints with federal and state regulators against Wal-Mart in 2006, also alleging misrepresention of conventional food as organic with improper signage in their stores, the nation’s largest retailer signed consent agreements with the USDA and the state of Wisconsin committing to change their practices.

“Wal-Mart did indeed clean up its act, as we expect Target to do, but it should not take the judicious oversight of an industry watchdog to cause these giant corporations to comply with the law, said Will Fantle, research director for the Wisconsin-based Cornucopia. “One of the reasons these companies can undercut other retailers is they do not invest in the kind of management expertise necessary to prevent problems of this nature from occurring.”

“It’s bad enough Target steals real farmers’ identities with that fake ‘Archer Farms’ label,” said Barth Anderson, a consumer long involved in the organic movement and chief blogger at Fair Food Fight. “But blurring the lines between natural and organic is just plain wrong. Target is trying to profiteer at the expense of consumers like me.”

Anderson was adamant that, “There’s nothing wrong with larger corporations being involved in organics but if they squeeze out ethical companies by cutting corners, or play fast and loose by the rules, everyone loses — real farmers, organic consumers and retailers alike. Blurring the lines between natural and organic is just plain trying to profiteer at the expense of consumers like me.”