Authentic Food

Author, inventor and organic farming guru, Eliot Coleman, has come up with a new food label - "Authentic Food." Pyewacket, of the Seasonal Cook blog, wrote about this yesterday.

Here is the opening paragraph of Eliot's article, originally printed in Mother Earth News:

The label "organic" has lost the fluidity it used to hold for the growers more concerned with quality than the bottom line, and consumers more concerned with nutrition than a static set of standards for labeling. "Authentic" is meant to be the flexible term "organic" once was. It identifies fresh foods produced by local growers who want to focus on what they are doing, instead of what they aren't doing. (The word authentic derives from the Greek authentes: one who does things for him or herself.) The standards for a term like this shouldn't be set in stone, but here are the ones I like to focus on:

He goes on to list standards that take into account not only organic production but also sustainability.

There has been a lot of talk lately, in the blogosphere and other places, about organic farming and sustainable farming and the dichotomy that sometimes exists between the two. The Cornucopia Institute has ranked certified-organic dairies and found that some of the largest "industrial-organic" farms are operating to the letter of the law rather than the spirit. I guess we all should have known that would happen when the USDA got involved in setting the standards. Big agribusiness wants some of that "increasing" organic pie. Scratch that - they want to own the whole darn thing.

Authentic Food - the future label of traditional organic?

tags: authentic food, eliot coleman, organic, farm, sustainable