How important is Certified Organic to you?

Like basically everything else in our society (USA), organic food has become a huge industry and bureaucracy (USDA Certified).  Also, some may be aware how the standards have been corrupted (e.g. hydroponics, glorified CAFOs).  Probably fewer are aware of how certain standards aren't even enforced.  For example, where I live there are a lot of small to medium-scale market veggie farms, which is probably the stereotypical vision of organic farming.  However, nearly all of them are covering most of their beds with plastic "mulch", which the USDA standards only allow if completely removed every year.  They try to remove it but a lot gets left behind in the soil.  The certifiers must know about this but they don't enforce it, so more plastic is added to the soil every year.  The certifier gets paid by the farm, and the farm gets their all-important certification.  This kind of thing isn't much talked about or exposed, I think most people would rather be in denial or blissful ignorance, so who knows which standards are truly enforced?  Not to mention how much outright fraud must occur at the large (e.g. global) scale.

So...how important is Certified Organic to you?  I'll buy it as a form of voting with my wallet, but I'd much rather try to know the producer (i.e. eat local) and grow my own.  Probably preaching to the choir here 😄

Yeah, preaching to the choir, I think.

If I have the choice, I'd rather buy organic. But I'd rather rather buy local. And we have some folks at the farmers' market who mock organic for being filthy and are willing to talk up how they do better. I'd really like to have food marked "zero-input" that I could buy.

Certified organic is useful for processed foods or imported ones.  Although, given how certified organic is in north america, I perfer regular EU grown food as their base laws for everyone is usually better than our certified organic.

But most of our food is fresh, and fresh food is local, so I visit the farm and see what they do.  No need for certification.

Like most things 'it depends'. My choices tend to be more restricted for fresh produce if I can't grow it myself, as the delivery to here adds significantly to the price and availability.
In my mind there is an overlapping spectrum of choices with 'grown myself with zero external inputs' being the ideal through to 'grown in a chemical soup halfway across the world with loads of fossil fuel use and slave labour' as the worst case. I like to buy certified organic if I can't buy local, but fair trade would also score highly to me for imported produce.

The term gets my attention. That doesn’t mean I automatically buy into it.  Terms like certified and accredited begs numerous questions:  …By whom? What are the standards?   How are those standards enforced?...etc.    

I don't always buy into it.  Are all the ingredients certified organic or just the main ingredient?

Is it necessary to buy certified organic if you are going to peel what ever it is.  Like oranges and grapefruits.  Watermelons and cantaloupe?

Anne Miller wrote:Is it necessary to buy certified organic if you are going to peel what ever it is.  

The biggest reasons for me for buying an Organic labelled food, with a recognised certification scheme, is the reduced harm to others.

The farming should be free of agrochemicals.  That should mean less harm to the farm workers.  There should be no new persistent chemicals going into the growing environment harming the animals, plants and the rest of the biosphere.

Avoiding all but the persistent background of agrochemicals is an added bonus, but not my primary motivation.

So Fairtrade is also an important certification for me.  That reduces harm through financial exploration.  Last I looked, the standards also required far low use of agrochenicals than unfortunately "typical" these days.

I'm too busy with other important things for my garden to provide a large proportion of our food.  I mostly grow berries, with a bit of top fruit & leafy greens.  

So doing less harm to the world to feed my household is important to me. If I could buy all my food from a farm I could visit, then the burden of independent certification would not be so necessary.

I use the term as a gauge of quality.

A have a made up scale in my head when it comes to groceries. You have the grocery branded (usually lowest quality), name branded (only a slight step better), organic and then local produce. This is very much a generalization with notable exceptions popping up from time to time. I think it really comes down to knowing how the food was grown that inspires the confidence in me.

Like the others, 'it depends'. If I have a full range of choices, like Nancy's example, I'm going with what I can get that's as close to 0-input, homegrown as possible. If my choice is about any wheat product, it has to be either organic or (like r. Ranson) imported from the EU, because the "conventionally" grown and processed stuff makes me horribly and very painfully sick, within an hour or so of ingestion. If we're talking fresh dairy, it has to be raw, unpasteurized, or at the very least, nothing synthetic, no anti-clumping stuff, and no 'added enzymes', for the same reason as the wheat. Oh - and we're now discovering that many frozen fruits and veggies also have the same effect. So, I'm definitely reading all the labels, and giving higher preference to organic, if only because they aren't legally allowed to add... crud to it, that makes me sick.

I was in agony this time last year, one the very few cold sweats I've ever had, for about 5 hours.

Long story short, turned out after an intensive burst of oral antibiotics last summer for a serious infection, I'd developed fructans-sensitive IBS.

I think the harmful effects of agrochemicals and industrial additives on me are much more gradual and insidious: nothing you can "hang your hat upon".

I mention this, because my reading suggests that fructans sensitivity is starting to be taken more seriously, after being largely ignored for decades.

Significantly more people are fructans sensitive than gluten sensitive, it seems, for example.

But because wheat, barley & rye are rich in both fructans and gluten, a lot of fructans-sensitive people have wrongly thought they were gluten-sensitive. (Coelic disease is real, very serious, but only about c. 1% of the population have it).

So real Organic sourdough bread is such a boon to so many of us, not least because authentic sourdough fermentation pre-digests the fructans in a way that baking yeast proofing does not.  Plus lower agrochemical resides too!

Garlic & other alliums are even higher in fructans. Sunchokes too. Lots of vegetables & fruits as well.  But there are lots of fruits & veg low in fructans (carrots, green beans, strawberries, honeydew melon, I think for example).

So I feel the past year of learning to eat again, in a way that's mindful of fructans, has been really valuable for me.

And now I cultivate a sourdough culture, on my kitchen worktop, too!

On my own land, I'm as organic as possible, with the exception that I will use my own composted humanure on the land, which most organic certifications do not allow. The certification is of no interest to me on my own land, but the principles very much are.

If a neighbour who follows similar principles has produce available, I will gladly accept or purchase that produce. I've had fruit, milk, cheese and goat meat that is absolutely top quality, fully 'organic' in principle but not certified.

Beyond that, when it comes to choosing what to support with cold hard cash, first of all I would choose waste streams. Too-Good-To-Go bags of bread aren't organic, but I'm happy to eat the bread and it saves me money that I can then invest in making my property more productive. I will buy a kilo of chicken liver which is not organic and which then entitles me to ask for a big bag of free meat scraps which get rendered down into lard and supply meaty bits for adding to meals and skinny bits that get chopped up and added to rice as a collagen supplement. There's usually bones for making bone broth in the bag too. The price of liver has dropped by over 50% over the last twenty years because so few people want to buy it, so whilst it's not quite a waste product I'm pretty sure my money doesn't support the system very much. And again, I save money that can be invested into my own land.

I eat a fair amount of rice. Organic rice is very expensive here but there is a new variety that is being sold for very little more than the cheapest rice available that is grown here in Portugal and has been bred to need far fewer inputs and be naturally resistant to local pests and diseases. I do pay the little extra for this. When it first came out the price was right down at the cheapest level to get everyone to try it. Then it gradually rose to the point that I said -NO MORE! and stopped buying it, reverting to the cheapest available rice. Apparently enough other people did the same and the price dropped to exactly my cut off point so I'm now buying it again. From I can deduce that either someone is watching my every purchase and I have far more power to control such things than seems reasonable, or my cut off point was the same as plenty of other people's. The rice is packaged in paper, not plastic, which is another bonus. The used bags get used as kindling for the rocket mass heater. In my mind, if it's bred to need fewer inputs then they don't need to be charging more for it!

I buy in bulk bags of split red lentils. Not organic because the price difference is too extreme - literally over four times the price for organic! I figure that the lentils I buy are part of a rotation that will then reduce the nitrate needed for the next crop. If I was a bit younger with a bit more energy I'd grow my own. I'm very tempted to try a patch anyway this year but my common sense (which knows exactly how many projects aren't getting done, not to mention the essential stuff that's also being neglected) has stepped in and told me to invest in a blight resistant chestnut tree instead because my attempts to grow my own haven't worked yet. I'm also running an experiment with perennial beans, though I don't think they'll be able to take the place of lentils, at least, not they way I use the lentils. I could learn different ways though!

In short - I focus on my own land first, well grown stuff second, waste stream a close third, least impact fourth. Certification of itself is of no interest to me.

To me it’s just a stamp that says “there is much less synthetic chemicals and colors in this”. Some things are close to organic like pasta or flour from Italy, and if I buy local I just ask if they spray or use chemical fertilizer. Sometimes it’s just a matter of washing things before you eat them. Most of the other labels are meaningless or flat out lies, like ‘all natural’, ‘cage free’, ‘free range’ ect. so it wouldn’t surprise me that the organic label doesn’t mean as much as you think it does. It shouldn’t be this hard to buy food that doesn’t have poison in it.

I prefer certified organic when buying things that are not local, because I know that it is up to a certain standard. Is it entirely the way I want it grown? Probably not. But I know it's closer to it than the non-organic.

If it's local, I can visit and see if I agree with how they are growing things.