Wal-Mart Accused of Mislabeling Organics

[The Sushi Bandit]

JANUARY 23, 2007 -- A year after Wal-Mart laid out ambitious plans to become a much bigger player in the organic foods business, the giant retailer is running into trouble over its organic effort with consumer activists and government regulators, reports BusinessWeek Online.

It was March of 2006, at an analysts' conference, when Wal-Mart's vice president of marketing, Stephen Quinn, said that the company would double its offerings of organic products within weeks. The company promised to make organics affordable to more consumers by offering what executives called "the Wal-Mart price."

In July, the Bentonville, Ark.-retailer even launched an ad campaign on The Food Network, HGTV, and in parenting and women's magazines, with tag lines like: "Know what goes well with organic milk? Organic cereal and knock-knock jokes."

http://www.gourmetretailer.com/gourmetretailer/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003535792

[Trillo]

1. This generally was predicted back in the 90s.

This generally was predicted back in the 90s.

I believe the year was 1990 or thereabouts, and in the prior 2 or 3 decades the organic pre-industry had been carefully fertilized by the flower children and hippies. It was when there were efforts to certify the label "organic" for the first time. Earth communities and wholistic orientied groups claimed that certification would lead to a big business takeover of the organic industry, which up until then had been composed of enthusiasts and their customers, and which would also lead to all the same types of "Big Business" corporate games that had occurred in other industries.

Among other things, it was hypothesized that genetic labeling would be disallowed as a "compromise" that would be made and which the wholistic communities were against (they often were for 'older', more 'natural' food plant strains), as well as all sorts of other labeling games which would serve, not to the benefit of organic consumers, but corporate and their competitive strategies of 'pretending to love competition' while doing everything it can to put the competitor out of business, especially the small competitor.

In summary, the people who started the organic industries and the personalities responsible for its growth in the 70s and 80s believed the very ethic that they espoused as enthusiasts and which were partly responsible for organic's growing popularity would be shut out by the corrupt machine that swallows everything. They believed that certain chemicals and preservatives that they were so against would be allowed for the organic label once they had taken over the biz.

Color me "shocked" that a big company like Wal-Mart would allegedly misstock non-organic products on their shelves devoted to organics. It is precisely what was predicted so long ago. Big business and the regulators they own through high-paid lobbyists and government of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation, are mucking up an industry that at one time had a strong honesty and health ethic.

In the future, if you want true organic, I guess you'll have to grow it yourself. Among other things, that will mean that another great change is going to be made in the social contract, as most citizens don't have the land or access to suitable land or even "the time" to personally tend to a garden or farm.

Why do the greedy ones have to continually undermine and ruin everything for the rest of us? Money, power, and control.