Utne - "Focus: Organics"

The latest issue of the Utne magazine, September-October 2004, has a group of articles about organic food: "Focus: Organics".

The article titles are: "Back to the Heart of Organics", "It's Not Easy Buying Green", "Beyond Organics -- to Bliss", "Can Organics Feed the Masses?", "The Future of Farming: Outsmarting GM" and "Another Backyard Is Possible!".

And a few interesting quotes:

"The way we spend our food dollars is one of the most important votes we cast, and the choice we consumers are increasingly going to be faced with is not organic or conventional, but local or organic. I come down on the side of local. When you buy local, you're voting for a short, highly legible food chain - one that supports all three legs of the original vision. This shorter food chain brings consumer and producer together, and the producer gets to tell the story. Organic label or not, it had better be a good story: clean food, grown without pesticides, the animals treated humanely. Another reason to buy local is that farms produce more than food - they also produce a kind of landscape, which your food dollars help to conserve." Michael Pollan

"With such a huge gap between producers and consumers, qualities like integrity and honesty are reduced to hearsay. It seems that no label can substitute for the face-to-face assurance of the farmer growing your food, which is why many people choose to buy their produce at farmers' markets and through subscriber-supported farms." Andi McDaniel

"In other words, buying food in the modern world is a political act. To realize the full potential of the organic movement in building a better world, we have to learn to think of healthy food not as an exclusive luxury but as a basic human right." Leif Utne