Jim Hightower

Organic food has moved from the fringes of the food economy into the mainstream, with sales now reaching $3.5 billion a year and consumer demand outstripping supply.

A problem, though, is that anyone with a load of tomatoes has been able to slap a label on them and call them "organic," even when they're not. But now there's good news -- a set of standards has been drawn-up to define what's organic and what's not, and a new national label will tell us consumers which is which.

Unfortunately, there's bad news, too: the U.S. Department of Agriculture did the defining. USDA, long a captive of giant agribusiness and chemical companies, took seven years to come up with its new standards, which fill 600 pages. Yet this new document is more notable for what is not in it than what is.

While the agency properly required that no pesticides, hormones or synthetic fertilizers be used in producing foods labeled organic, it deliberately avoided prohibiting certain high-tech, factory-farming practices that the agribusiness giants want to use. These are practices that you would hardly consider "organic," since they mess with mother nature -- and our food -- in most unnatural ways.

For example, genetic engineering. Under USDA's proposal, man-made edibles with a genetic make-up that has been altered, spliced and otherwise manipulated in the lab still could get that "organic" label.

So could irradiated food -- meat, veggies and other items that are zapped with radiation from nuclear waste, a process that changes the very DNA of the food product. Likewise, cow cannibalism would be allowed -- the practice of feeding waste cow parts back to cows, which are vegetarians in nature, never eating meat.

This is Jim Hightower saying . . . To stop these perversions of the organic label, call S.O.S. -- a citizens group fighting to Save Organic Standards: 218-226-4164.