Photo from Debbie Bliss Magazine

That baby blanket! That bag! Those cupcake-fondant-colored sweaters! Ever since I stumbled upon Royal Yarns’ sneak peek of Debbie Bliss’ new knitting magazine, I’ve had to hold myself back from licking the screen and then sobbing uncontrollably because I resemble a large cantaloupe and can’t wear any of this deliciousness until I regain my figure. (Well, assuming I have the time to knit anything in the first place with ALL THIS FREE TIME I’m going to have when the baby arrives.) More photos, if you can handle them, online.

Photo from Debbie Bliss Magazine

Photo from Debbie Bliss Magazine

Photo from Debbie Bliss Magazine

Photo by Interweave Press

On sale now: A special felt issue by Interweave Press. As a free online bonus, the editors have thrown up their own favorite ways of recycling and reusing old wool sweaters, including repurposing a “shrunken disaster” into a teddy bear, house slippers, and even a yoga-mat bag.

Photo by Interweave Press

Related articles:
1. One-of-a-Kind Woolen Gifts
2. Recycled Wool Felt
3. Recycled Wool Blankets, Scarves
4. Cozy Up
5. Better Latte Than Never
6. Hello Cupcake!

Graphic from ReadyMade

ReadyMade, my favorite mag “for people who like to make stuff” has generously opened up its print archives online. You can search past issues by keyword or browse the archive by issue (although the latter function is less user-friendly). You only have to part with your e-mail address, but that’s hardly a sacrifice when you can learn tricks such as how to transform a pillowcase into a pencil skirt, how to commandeer the contents of your recycling bin for your garden, and how to turn a pair of metal file cabinets into an island for your kitchen.

Photo by Springsun, under a Creative Commons license. Lordy, I love this house.

Good to know! From the May/June 2007 issue of Sierra:

An energy-efficient mortgage saves energy and money—and increases your buying power. A household with a monthly income of $5,000 can afford a $227,300 mortgage at 6.25 percent interest, according to the Federal Citizen Information Center. With an energy-efficient mortgage, however, the same household may qualify for a loan about $16,000 larger because its utility bills will be lower.¹

Go to energystar.gov and search for “energy-efficient mortgage.”

¹The magazine quotes a real-estate agent in Madison, Wisconsin, who says, “The average monthly heating bill for an old house downtown is $250, compared with $50 for an Energy Star home. We had a young couple who wanted to live in a place where they could walk or bike to work. But they didn’t know if they could afford th energy bills for an old home. Our green mortgage enabled them to buy downtown.”

Photo by Brian Ulrich/The New York Times

Adam Drewnowski, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington, was stymied by the correlation between a person’s wealth (or, more important, the lack thereof) and the likelihood of becoming overweight. To find some answers, he gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend at a typical American supermarket.

In today’s New York Times Magazine, the inimitable Michael Pollan relates how Drewnowski discovered that you got the most calories for your money among “the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink.”

Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

If you’re eating on a budget, Drewnowski concluded, your most-rational economic strategy is to eat nutritionally bankrupt empty calories and pack on the pounds.

Pollan asks: How did we end up in a economic situation where a pair of Twinkies—with no fewer than 39 ingredients, not to mention packaging and marketing costs—is markedly cheaper than a bunch of carrots? “For the answer,” he says, “you need look no farther than the farm bill.”

The farm bill, which is reexamined approximately every five years—it’s come around again in 2007—determines which U.S. crops will be subsidized by the government, and which will not.

Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat—three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades—indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning—U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

The result, Pollan says, is a “food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). When it comes to supporting fresh produce, however, the farm bill leaves those farmers bereft.

As a result of encouraging overproduction, we also end up flooding overseas markets with a glut of cheap crops that undercut world prices, threatening the livelihoods of millions of small farmers around the world, especially in developing countries. And, according to Pollan, the post-NAFTA flow of the Mexican immigrants that gives Bill O’Reilly so much agita, is “inextricably linked” to the flow of U.S. corn south of the border.

Read the rest of this very important issue here. You can also urge your members of Congress to reform the farm bill via Oxfam America’s online system.

Related articles:
1. Unhappy Meals
2. The Vegetable-Industrial Complex
3. Wake up, America!
4. Michael Pollan vs. Whole Foods
5. The School Lunch Test

Photo by Aantonin Kratochvil/OnEarth

California’s San Pedro Bay hosts a sprawling metropolis of polluting cargo ships, trucks, and locomotives filled with bulk cargo and cheap Asian consumer goods. Massive refineries stretch for nearly a half a mile toward the water.

The twin ports spew more pollution than the top 300 industrial sources and refineries in the Los Angeles Basin combined, most of it from ships and boats—themselves many times more polluting than all the power plants in Southern California put together. They form a “diesel death zone” that sets off allergies and asthma attacks in children, while sending the risk of developing cancer from air pollution skyrocketing. Welcome to the New Economy.

From the latest issue of OnEarth:

The off-shoring of manufacturing has moved some of the smokestacks away, but it has stoked countless new ones in the breakneck industrialization and urbanization of the developing world. And all that stuff made abroad has to be brought back to us, on demand, satisfying our ever-greater desire for speed and low cost. We click off our wishes on Web sites, setting in motion diesel engines by the tens of thousands: trucks, loaders, cranes, and locomotives, armadas of little smokestacks toiling to deliver us the goods. Ninety percent of international trade still moves by ship, as it has since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

What makes diesel exhaust different from ordinary exhaust is the soot particles typical disesel engines emit. Fine particulates that make up 94 percent of diesel emissions can penetrate lung tissue and cause genetic and cellular damage. You also get volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as benzene and formaldehyde, along with smog-causing nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxides. Add to that arsenic, cadmium, dioxin, mercury, and nearly 40 other cancer-causing substances, and you can see why diesel exhaust is responsible for 71 percent of the cancer risk from air pollution in the state of California. (The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach contribute more than 25 percent of the diesel exhaust in the region; emissions have gone up at least 20 percent since 2001.)

The article quotes Noel Park, a long-time San Pedro resident and a community activist who has finally decided to leave town after years of trying to convince officials that public health was a greater concern than “economic growth”:

“I swore to God I was going to live my life out in that house,” he said. “I’ve lived here 38 years.” Most of all, he was saddened by the implications of his own departure: “Anyone who takes the trouble to understand the issues leaves. And who’s left behind? The people who can’t leave. Well, God have mercy on them. If that’s not environmental injustice, I don’t know what is.”

Read the entire article here.

Before you check into your favorite online store and start clicking frenetically on your mouse button like a famished woodpecker, click over to a virtual swap meet such as Freecycle or Craig’s List, instead. Chances are, you’ll find what you need at only a fraction of what you’d have paid for something brand new, without sending your carbon emissions whizzing into the stratosphere. We recently snagged a like-new Ikea craft table (with a solid-wood top and steel legs) for $20 because the previous owner didn’t have room in his new apartment. Because the guy lived only 2 blocks from a PATH station, I made my humans haul it back home via mass tranist and their own God-given pedal power.

Photo by Tamara Muth-King/Natural Home Magazine

Natural Home Magazine has a fantastic feature on how to create a nontoxic nursery in its Nov. 2006 issue. A hardwood floor finished with nontoxic sealant (such as such AFM Safecoat’s Polyureseal BP), for ince, is safer than conventional carpet, which outgases harmful chemicals. Use natural-fiber area rugs, instead. (Check out LifeKind’s organic cotton throw rug or pick up a recycled rag rug.)

Also available online: Five nursery-decorating tips that help your kidling snooze and how to choose the best nursery colors.

Further resources:
1. Earth Mama Angel Baby
2. EcoChoices
3. Harvest Moon Boutique
4. Kushtush Organics
5. LifeKind
6. Mama’s Baby
7. Our Green House
8. Sage Baby NYC
9. Sage Creek Naturals
10. Tiny Birds Organics

Related posts:
1. EllaRoo Baby Carriers
2. Mail Call: Used Baby Bottles
3. An Eco-Friendly Nursery is a Healthy Nursery
4. Chemical Pollution Harms Kids’ Brains
5. Maybe Baby: Chemicals & Kids
6. Color Me Bad and Color Me Better: Eco-Friendly Paint

Illo by Leo Jung/New York Times

What should humans eat in order to glean the maximal health benefits? According to Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, the formula is simple:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Read the rest of the magazine feature here. (Warning: long, so you might want to clear your calender first.)

Related articles:
1. Michael Pollan vs. Whole Foods
2. Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children
3. World’s Healthiest Foods

Image by World Ark

During the second half of the '90s, the number of people suffering from “chronic extreme hunger” jumped by 18 million, which means that a total of 842 million people in developing and transition countries are severely undernourished.

A common misconception regarding world hunger is that we don’t have enough food for the teeming masses. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 2,807 food calories per capita were produced worldwide in 2001—far more than what everyone needs to be well-nourished.

In “Poverty: Why the Poor Stay Poor,” published in the July/August 2006 issue of World Ark, Stephen C. Smith, an economics and international affairs professor, says the answer isn’t “to ship more food, except as an emergency response to families and food crises.”

Instead, we must work to help improve agricultural productivity—especially among poor farmers in Africa. And, as a priority, we must work harder for increased income for the poor and for local food entitlements as a safety net among the rural and urban poor. This includes supporting proven programs such as nutritional supplements for mothers and infants, as well as compensation in food or in cash for impoverished parents who must forgo income to send their children to school.

Despite the manifold traps of poverty, whether due to illiteracy, debt bondage, undernutrition, or a lack of skills, experts like Smith believe that ending hunger and poverty within our lifetime is a real possibility, but we lack the political will. “The fact that ending global poverty is possible but not inevitable gives us a moral imperative for action,” he says.

Even if that action is as simple as insisting on a cup of fair-trade coffee. Unfortunately, there is no salvo for human indifference.

You can read the rest of the article here (PDF).

Related articles:
1. Mapping Poverty
2. Still Hungry

Further resources:
1. Global Giving
2. Heifer International
3. Kiva: Loans that change lives
4. Transfair USA

Photo by Kareem Black/Getty Images

(Part of my Green This House program.)

I make no secret of the fact that the hub, our cat Chekhov, and I live in little more than a glorified closet. A very desirable glorified closet by Manhattan/downtown Jersey City standards, but a constricted padded cell with little room to grow, nevertheless. And so the Great Purge of 2007 came to pass, as we’re struggling to pare down and simplify our external and internal lives to preserve whatever modicum of sanity we have left.

I’ve mentioned my doomed love affair with home-decorating catalogs before, which I put the brakes on this time last year, along with cancellations of as much junk mail I could get through in several determined sittings.

Last night, I sorted through our towering pile of magazines, most of which we have never—and could never—stay on top of before they were exiled to a corner of our living room or relegated to the recycling pile. I realized I needed more signal, less noise, and began striking off magazine subscriptions I could live without, whose pages I knew I’d never revisit. Real Simple took the axe last year, along with Paste and Heifer International’s World Ark. Today, they’re joined by The Herb Companion and Plenty. The hub even cancelled The New York Times, which, much to my consternation, always came in a blue plastic bag. (He can read it online like the rest of us, his snitty wife decided, although he made it clear that you can pry The New Yorker and Time Out New York from his cold, dead hands.)

Remaining subscriptions:

• Country Living
(I really love this magazine)
• Interweave Knits
• Martha Stewart Living
• Natural Home
[Update: Cancelled for the moment]

Online subscriptions, but mostly for access to their archives (tree-free, yay!)

• The Green Guide
• E: The Environmental Magazine

On probation:

• Sierra Club’s Sierra
• The National Resource Defense Fund’s OnEarth

Quality over quantity. More time to savor each page; more signal, less noise—my unintentionally made New Year’s resolution. Bonus: I save some trees (or recycled pulp, as the case may be) and some extra dough I can put towards causes I feel are making a more measurable difference. That or ice-cream. (I make no promises.)

Semi-related: To cannibalize some existing square footage, I’m hauling out the two boxes full of issues of Real Simple I’ve accumulated (I’m such a pack rat) and tearing out, and then filing away, only the articles I want to keep.

Photo by Martha Stewart Living

The January 2007 issue of Martha Stewart Living has an extremely comprehensive feature on how to clean your kitchen, from oven racks to your toaster’s crumb tray, chemical-free, with such household staples as baking soda and lemon juice. I like the fact that this story isn’t being touted as being particularly “green” or “eco” but is just what it is—the best way of keeping your home clean and healthy for the people (and critters) you love … or at least tolerate. (Treehugger blogged about Shaklee’s Get Clean starter kit of concentrated, nontoxic, biodegradable cleaning supplies that might be of further interest to some, as well.)

Also in the issue is a look at photographer Bill Abranowicz and family’s environmentally friendly ski house in the Catskill Mountains, built with sustainable building materials and with energy-saving features in mind. Take an online video tour of their home on MarthaStewart.com, and the explore some ideas you can use to make your home more energy-efficient.

Related articles:
1. Chemical Pollution Harms Kids’ Brains
2. Hub’s Guest Review: Seventh Generation Laundry Liquid Detergent
3. Eco-Me Home
4. Vinegar: Disinfectant of Champions
5. Test Kitchen Witch
6. Eulogy for Swiffer
7. Maybe Baby: Chemicals & Kids

Illo by Stuart Bradford/Consumer Reports

Consumer Reports has just released the findings of its analysis of 525 fresh, whole broiler chickens purchased in 23 states last spring—83 percent harbored campylobacter or salmonella, which colonize the birds’ intestines and are the leading bacterial causes of foodborne disease that sickens 1.1 million or more Americans each year. (Interestingly, this was a “stunning increase” from its 2003 findings, where 49 percent tested positive for one or both pathogens.)

The spiral-shape campylobacter has seemingly wriggled onto more chickens than ever, because although the U.S. Department of Agriculture tests chickens for salmonella against a federal standard, no such standard exists for campylobacter. (CR insists that there now should be.)

The biggest surprise: Overall, chickens labeled organic or raised without antibiotics (and costing $3 to $5 per pound) were more likely to harbor salmonella than were conventionally produced broilers that cost around $1 per pound¹. (Tested were 10 organic and 12 nonorganic no-antibiotics brands, including three that are “air chilled” in a newer slaughterhouse process supposedly designed to reduce contamination.)

Most of the bacteria CR tested from contaminated chicken (both conventional and no-antibiotics) showed resistance to one or more antibiotics, including some fed to cluckers to speed their growth, as well as those we’re prescribed to treat infections. This wasn’t unexpected even in the no-antibiotics birds, says CR, because “those germs are widespread and can persist in the environment.”

Without knowing more about the magazine’s methodology, there’s not much I can say about its results, which seem to run counter to what we’d expect from organic animal husbandry. (Should we blame big-box organics for the dilution of stricter standards; who knows?) I mean, it’s no skin off my nose personally since I’m vegetarian, a position that’s proving increasingly merited in light of news that cows, pigs, sheep, and poultry are the world’s greatest environmental threats.

But even CR concedes that you should purchase any meat directly from small farmers, via farmers’ markets and Community Supported Agriculture programs, so you can engage in a dialogue with the farmer about how the animals are raised, what they eat, and so forth. And of course, CR’s analysis doesn’t take into account the fact that organically raised livestock isn’t force-fed pesticide-soaked, genetically modified corn feed mixed in with ground animal parts, or kept so tightly confined that they are unable to shuffle more than a few feet for their entire lives. (More reasons for eating organic meat here.)

Alright, I’m going to rip out the ol’ bleeding heart here: Organic animals are raised more humanely—with a species-appropriate environment to roam—and are fed well-rounded and nutritious diets that boost their health (and by that same token, yours) significantly. Smaller farms also means less manure, which is a human-health risk because any overspill can contaminate our water sources with E. coli and other pathogens. In just one region of North Carolina, for instance, hog farms produce 10 million metric tons of waste annually. That’s A LOT of poop to scoop.

And organic meat? Well, as far as I can tell, it’s not just a load of crap—which is more than I can say for some of the health and environmental policies in this country.

¹One exception was Ranger, a no-antibiotics premium brand sold only in the Northwest, which CR found to be “extremely clean.” Of the 10 samples it analyzed, none had salmonella, and only two had campylobacter.

Cartoon by C. Covert Darbyshire/The New Yorker

(For Siel.)

Photo by Spare Cloth at Etsy.com

I’ve been running the feed dogs of my trusty sewing machine ragged making reusable fabric gift bags from vintage Christmas fabric I found on Etsy for about a buck per yard. They’ll be going to family members who want a waste-free Yule.

Today on the Martha Stewart 12-month calender: Make apple and pumpkin pies. Um, I ATE a slice of apple pie last night, does that count? We’ll be offsetting our way to California to celebrate the slaughter of the natives, bearing gifts of organic potatoes and squash (for our pantry overfloweth). See you on Monday, my freaky darlings.

Related article:
1. Flying the Eco-Friendly Skies

Photo by Art Wolfe/Getty Images

Perhaps I’m courting a divine smiting, albeit the positively perfect kind, from the sainted Martha herself, by ignoring her edict to order my Thanksgiving turkey on Nov. 13.

Describing a “Butterball house of horrors,” the November 2006 issue of Satya reaffirmed just some of the reasons why I went vegetarian (after a college trip to a chicken farm, coincidentally). From an interview with Matt Prescott, PETA’s Manager
of Factory Farming Campaigns:

This Thanksgiving, 45 million turkeys will be slaughtered and eaten. That’s one sixth of all turkeys sold in the U.S. each year—675 million pounds of animal flesh in one day! While most people think of turkeys as their Thanksgiving dinner centerpiece, turkeys are extremely social and good-natured. Their personalities are as strong and varied as cats and dogs, perhaps even a bit smarter. People may also not be aware that turkeys raised for food are confined to grow-out sheds where they are forced to stand on mounds of fecal waste and breathe in toxic ammonia fumes. When only a few hours old hours old, a portion of their beaks and toes are severed without the aid of anesthesia. Although birds constitute more than 98 percent of land animals eaten in the U.S., the USDA refuses to list them in the only federal law designed to protect animals at slaughter, the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. …

PETA’s [undercover] investigators witnessed Butterball workers punching and kicking live birds, slamming them against metal transport crates and trailers, and throwing them into concrete walls and floors. In one instance, a bird was slammed so hard against a handrail that her spine popped out. Another time, a worker stomped on a live turkey’s head until her skull exploded under his foot. One worker even sexually abused a bird, inserting a finger into her cloaca (her vagina). Aside from the sadistic acts of cruelty the workers would commit for “fun,” they routinely hung birds improperly—by broken legs, one leg or by the head.

PETA’s investigators also discovered that management at this plant had a flippant attitude about animal welfare. Unlike the procedures, forms and handbooks for everything else, the content of the animal welfare form was not covered in new employee training. Furthermore, employees who could not read or who could not read well, were provided no assistance in understanding the form. Management made comments about how “animal rights activists don’t like it when you kick a turkey” and that “animals have more rights than people now a days.” They also told workers not to worry if they hear a “popping” sound while working, that’s “just” a bird exploding under the tire of a truck.

If you’d still prefer a real turkey over Tofurkey, here are some of the things you can do. (Full disclosure: I have never actually tasted Tofurkey but am convinced it tastes like rubber cement after it’s been rolled in the gunk under the fridge a few times. I don’t understand “fake meat” in general.)

1. Go humane: According to The Green Guide, labels like “free range” and “free roaming” are minimally verified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and “assure little besides some access to some air.” Look, instead for the American Humane Association’s “Free Farmed” label on certified turkeys in the supermarket. The certification ensures that the animals are “free from unnecessary fear, distress, pain, injury, and disease,” as well as given ready access to water, a healthful diet, and a comfortable, species-appropriate environment.

2. Order locally: Search through listings on Local Harvest to find an organic turkey farm near you. Besides supporting small-scale organic agriculture that encourages biodiversity over standardization, you’re also cutting down on fossil fuels that would have been used hauling your turkey from across the country, not to mention the pollution transport engenders. You can also choose to go with Slow Food USA’s Heritage Turkey program, which supports breeds of turkey near extinction because of the homogenization of large-scale factory farming. Raised on organic feed, the turkeys are given more exercise and a more varied diet than their industrial brethren. And, get this, they can actually fly, unlike factory-farm turkeys which have been anatomically manipulated to be so large-breasted and heavy that they have trouble standing upright, frequently develop leg and hip infections, and require human intervention in order to reproduce.

3. Don’t waste anything: Liz from Pocket Farm, who rears her own meat in the most humane way possible, encourages you to make the best use of as much of the animal as you can, as a part of “honoring the animals that are giving up their lives for us.” Simmer the leftover turkey bones in water with some vegetables, herbs, and spices, for a stock you can use to create soups or stews.

If all this turkey talk has driven you to decide to feast without the beast, mouthwatering vegan and vegetarian Thanksgiving recipes abound. And if the spirit of Thanksgiving really moves you, you can even adopt a turkey that can either go home with you or live out its natural life at Farm Sanctuary’s¹ shelter for farm animals. Start a new family tradition by leaving a place card at your dining table for Hildy, Blossom, Laila, Tinkerbell², or whichever feathered fowl you are not eating. Then, get your kids in the act by reading them one of the many turkey-friendly Thanksgiving books available.

¹A Charity Navigator four-star charity. It has rescued 1,000 turkeys over the past 20 years.

²Actual turkey names!

Cover by BusinessWeek

From the cover story of the latest issue of BusinessWeek: “Pastoral ideals are getting trampled as organic food goes mass market.”

Next time you’re in the supermarket, stop and take a look at Stonyfield Farm yogurt. With its contented cow and green fields, the yellow container evokes a bucolic existence, telegraphing what we’ve come to expect from organic food: pure, pesticide-free, locally produced ingredients grown on a small family farm.

So it may come as a surprise that Stonyfield’s organic farm is long gone. Its main facility is a state-of-the-art industrial plant just off the airport strip in Londonderry, N.H., where it handles milk from other farms. And consider this: Sometime soon a portion of the milk used to make that organic yogurt may be taken from a chemical-free cow in New Zealand, powdered, and then shipped to the U.S. True, Stonyfield still cleaves to its organic heritage. For Chairman and CEO Gary Hirshberg, though, shipping milk powder 9,000 miles across the planet is the price you pay to conquer the supermarket dairy aisle. “It would be great to get all of our food within a 10-mile radius of our house,” he says. “But once you’re in organic, you have to source globally.”

Hirshberg’s dilemma is that of the entire organic food business. Just as mainstream consumers are growing hungry for untainted food that also nourishes their social conscience, it is getting harder and harder to find organic ingredients. There simply aren’t enough organic cows in the U.S., never mind the organic grain to feed them, to go around. Nor are there sufficient organic strawberries, sugar, or apple pulp—some of the other ingredients that go into the world’s best-selling organic yogurt.

Now companies from Wal-Mart (WMT) to General Mills (GIS) to Kellogg (K) are wading into the organic game, attracted by fat margins that old-fashioned food purveyors can only dream of. What was once a cottage industry of family farms has become Big Business, with all that that implies, including pressure from Wall Street to scale up and boost profits. …

As food companies scramble to find enough organically grown ingredients, they are inevitably forsaking the pastoral ethos that has defined the organic lifestyle. For some companies, it means keeping thousands of organic cows on industrial-scale feedlots. For others, the scarcity of organic ingredients means looking as far afield as China, Sierra Leone, and Brazil—places where standards may be hard to enforce, workers’ wages and living conditions are a worry, and, say critics, increased farmland sometimes comes at a cost to the environment.

The story goes on to say that, by becoming successful “beyond [its] wildest dreams,” the organic industry has shot itself in the proverbial foot. The big, looming question, it seems, is if organic food production can be replicated on a mass scale—and if it can feed the world. (The short answer: Yes, yes, yes, and yes.)

Even BusinessWeek agrees that most adherents of the organic movement don’t want any part in the conventional big-box system of production.

When consumers shell out premiums of 50 percent or more to buy organic, they are voting for the Butterworks ethic. They believe humans should be prudent custodians not only of their own health but also of the land and animals that share it. They prefer food produced through fair wages and family farms, not poor workers and agribusiness. They are responding to tales of caged chickens and confined cows that never touch a blade of grass; talk of men losing fertility and girls becoming women at age nine because of extra hormones in food. They read about pesticides seeping into the food supply and genetically modified crops creeping across the landscape.

Yet neither the article nor organic food production’s staunchest critics lay any blame on conventional farming’s chemical-intensive, monoculture approach, the insidious federal farm subsidies that sponsor them, or our cheap oil policy. Nor do they address our nation’s two-tiered food production’s contribution to the growing divisiveness between the rich who can afford nutritious, pesticide-free food, and the poor who can’t. The entry of big-box-companies such as Wal-mart into the fray may, as Slate’s Field Maloney says, help “democratize the nation’s food supply,” but it still sounds like it’s conventional, industrial agriculture that needs to be turned on its head—and completely overhauled—for impeding the evolution of an alternative, truly sustainable model of food production (not to mention making us fat and sick).

Until that happens, I’ll continue to do the localmotion, supporting my neighborhood small farms, and, where possible, making the choice for both local and organic. My food doesn’t need to travel more (and thus pollute more) than I do, organic or not.

Also on BusinessWeek Online:
1. Video View: Talking with Stonyfield’s Gary Hirshberg
2. Slide Show: Look Who’s Vying for the Organic Dollar
3. Why the Stink Over China’s Organic Food?
4. Table: Tale of Two Cows
5. Graphic: Healthy Profits

Related articles:
1. Organic/Eco Classifications
2. Unfair Organics
3. Organic’s Edge Questioned
4. Eat Shoots and Leaves
5. Not All Organics Created Equal
6. Chekhov’s Eco Tip: Local or Organic?
6. Blog Love: Pocket Farm
7. The Oy in Soy