Apples & Oranges

Coming soon to a bumblefuck, redneck town near you: organically-grown Oreos! Sounds great, doesn’t it?

A few weeks back, our favorite big-box, mega-corporation, Wal-Mart, announced that they would be offering organically-grown food at their hundreds of stores nationwide. No longer will your selection of foods be limited to Red-Hot Cheetos, Capri Sun, or Rollos, but now you’ll be able to get a wide variety of food grown without the use of pesticides, herbicides, or chemical fertilizers. It’s a win-win situation, right?

Wal-Mart accounts for an astronomical 16% of all retail sales in the United States. In many towns, Wal-Mart has become the only option for consumers, who have embraced their bargain-basement prices on everything from tents to tires to basketball pumps.

Organic foods has long been a niche market, but it has rapidly expanded over the past few years, becoming the fastest-growing sector of the agricultural industry. This has been aided by the passing of the USDA Organic Foods standard, which replaced the more stringent and better-intentioned California Organic Foods Act of 1990. Now there is a national standard for organic foods, though it took over twelve years to pass, with much lobbying and watering-down in the D.C. beltway.

Wal-Mart is clearly making an effort to capitalize on this market, and with that will surely come further tampering of our organic standards. Wal-Mart will buy their organic products solely from the providers who can offer their goods at the prices Wal-Mart customers have grown accustomed to, and this will have terrible effects on the organic foods industry.

Whereas traditional organic farmers rotate crops and grow at small-scale operations, Wal-Mart will soon place an incentive on mono-agriculture and the typical practices at factory farms. Organic producers for Wal-Mart will bend the rules as far as they can go, and will be backed by the lobbyists in D.C. who will stretch those rules even further.

This is clearly NOT the intention of the organic industry. The idea behind organic food is buying from local producers and buying seasonal crops, from small-scale farmers who nurture the earth. Out of this comes better food, which comes at a slightly higher cost, though in terms of quality and health that you receive from the food, it really all equals out.

While Wal-Mart’s offering of organic produce will certainly have some positive effects – the reduction of pesticides and chemical fertilizers (of which many are carcinogens that are entering our groundwater supply), and further consciousness of organic foods – it comes at a cost.

Consumers who have been buying organic for years are not likely to go to their local Wal-Mart for their bok choy or carrots, and so the small organic farms who have grown organically for years will probably still stay afloat. But the fact remains: Wal-Mart will contribute to the further degradation of organic food standards and they are only looking out for their bottom line.

The best advice is to continue to buy locally and support the little guys who have their hearts and minds in the right place. But if you’re gonna buy those Oreo’s at Wal-Mart, at least you now have the option of pesticide-free cookies.