Ever since Wal-Mart decided to significantly increase its organic offerings, they have been bombarded with accusations of selling substandard organic food, produced at factory farms, not small, organic farms like consumers are led to believe.

The accusations, it turns out, are well-founded, as I suspected from the beginning. Now the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) is calling on consumers to boycott Wal-Mart for degrading the organic standards. According to OCA, despite their requests to Wal-Mart to stop, the mega-store chain is:

• Selling Horizon and Aurora Organic milk that comes from intensive confinement factory farm dairies
• Importing cheap organic foods and ingredients from China and Brazil
• Posting signs in its stores that mislead consumers into believing that non-organic items are actually organic

As always, your best source of food will be from local farmers, not huge superstores, but you can also use some commonsense no matter where you shop by remembering that processed food is still junk food, even if it’s labeled “organic.”

Organic Consumers Association January 17, 2007