Certified Organic

What does this phrase mean, "certified organic." It depends on who you ask. There has been significant legal wrangling over the term "organic," and what must be done (or not done) in order to lable a product as such.

With the "USDA Organic" seal stamped on its label, Anheuser-Busch calls its Wild Hop Lager "the perfect organic experience."

But many beer drinkers may not know Anheuser-Busch got the organic blessing from federal regulators even though Wild Hop Lager uses hops grown with chemical fertilizers and sprayed with pesticides. [...]

[...] Many nonorganic ingredients, including hops, are already being used in organic products, thanks to a USDA interpretation of the Organic Foods Protection Act of 1990. In 2005, a federal judge disagreed with how the USDA was applying the law and gave the agency two years to fix it. [...]

[...]

"There is no effective mechanism for identifying a lack of organic ingredients," complained executives of Pennsylvania Certified Organic, a nonprofit certifying agent, in a letter to the USDA. "It is a very challenging task to 'prove a negative' regarding the organic supply."

All of this is quite frustrating. The law was clearly not intended to be used in this way, and yet here it is being twisted by large moneyed interests.

Fortunately for me, the certifying authority for the apple, IMO Control, is using the a standard adapted from and meeting two European Union organic certification standards. While this may not be to the caliber of Demeter International organic certified grapes, we are moving in the right direction, but it seems like it's two steps forward and one step back with organic certification.

Articles like "Towards a post-materialist understanding of science – lessons learnt form the interface of biodynamic agriculture and research"give me hope for the future of this movement:

Sustainability-oriented development research aims to contribute to reshaping current relations between ecology, society and economy as part of a social learning process. This requires that the role of science be redefined as part of a societal form of knowledge production. This means to integrate science and so-called ‘local knowledge’. Local forms of knowledge cover a wide range of issues related to organic and biodynamic agriculture, complementary medicine, solidarity based economy and currency systems. Science and scientists are playing an important role in these movements. But by bringing science into a process of social change science becomes transformed form a disciplinary towards a transdisciplinarity framework of orientation.