Do you know how close you came to actually having sewage sludge allowed for organics? Or how 280,000 people who thought this sounded as disgusting as you do got the government to keep sewage sludge and other nastiness out of organics? (And let me tell you... while manure IS a terrific organic fertilizer, the collective #2s of your city are all mixed up with industrial waste and heavy metals and other things that should NOT go on a farm field.)
Put on your tie dyes and get ready to go back with me on a trip to the 60's, where this story starts. OK, I admit it, I wasn't around back then, but the protagonist of this story was. His name is Ronnie Cummins and I met him at Netroots Nation.
After the convention, I asked him if I could interview him about his activism and his organization, Organic Consumers Association. I've been doing a lot of interviews this year, and I can tell you some are miserable to get through, and some are good... but I never expected to spend an entire hour on the phone with Ronnie, in absolute heaven as I listened to his tale of sixties activism leading into his current role at OCA.
I'll admit that this is a repost... I posted the text of the interview earlier this week and few people read it. And yeah, OK, maybe it was a little long for a diary. But I think this is an important story to hear, so I'm reformulating it a bit and posting it again.
Why is it so important? I mean - it's one person, one issue... and a narrow issue at that... and we've got a presidential campaign going on to pay attention to instead, right? Not exactly.
Organic Consumers implies a narrow issue, especially if you look at it from the USDA's point of view and identify organics as merely food grown or raised without pesticides and other toxic chemicals. The organization takes a much more broad stance than that, working on a number of food-related issues. Ronnie himself is a progressive, just like the rest of us, who got his start in the '60s anti-war, civil rights, and farm worker justice movements.
As someone who's come of age now, I look back on the idealism of the 60's and it makes me almost more discouraged, because look at where we are today. Vietnam ended, and we're in another war. Two other wars, actually, and three if McCain has his way. If we protest, the media doesn't cover it. And whereas Nixon established the EPA, Bush has spent 8 crucial years denying global warming.
Especially leading up to another presidential election - the third I've been old enough to vote in and the third that might be stolen - as our candidate, the one who says he offers us hope, looks less and less like a progressive every day, I'm discouraged.
But Ronnie's story provides true hope. He took the idealism of the 60's and instead of selling out to big business (as others did... read the Whole Foods section of The Omnivore's Dilemma for stories of former hippies who became organic farmers and ended up as General Mills VPs), Ronnie kept his values intact and grew more sophisticated and effective over time.
In Ronnie's own words:
So around about the fall of 1969 and the summer of 1970, literally several million of us across the county started talking about how we can't just be against racism, against sexism, against the war, against pollution... what are we for?
We said let's build a healthy, democratic, and alternative green economy as an example of the kind of society we think we should have. It was a conscious tactic on the part of the people who were trying to stop the war. We had learned Viet-Nam wasn't just a bad or mistaken war, it was part and parcel of an entire history of empire. We had learned in the civil rights movement it wasn't just one company that was discriminating, it was a whole system. We had read The Joy of Cooking and Diet for a Small Planet, and we realized there was a more conscious way to eat.
We came up with resurrecting the old idea of consumer co-ops which had been very powerful in the late 19th century when it was integrated into the last mass radical movement in the US, the populist movement. An integral part of this movement were farm co-ops and buyer co-ops.
Note that this organization all took place without the Internet. I was absolutely fascinated to hear his description of the methods of communication back then, in the days before email and blogs.
So what started out in Houston, TX and Buffalo, NY, a few places where I was involved... you'd call a meeting, announce it in the local paper or radio, and talk about forming a buying club where people would pool their money and start purchasing food in bulk. Then once that got to a certain stage of development people would rent a storefront and it evolved into a regular store with a cash register. The next stage once there were enough of these, people saw the need for wholesalers to supply them and for trucks to bring in the food.
The movement wasn't entirely about food per se, it was about building an entire progressive society. Today organics are widespread but I think most people, and certainly the government and big business, view organic as only pertaining to food. Building an entire society around progressive values, well... the only value business acknowledges is money, and the government isn't much better.
There was also joy in our movement - we were determined to put joy back into every day life, including food growing, food cooking, and food selling. This alternative culture was not just about a more ethical, more sustainable, healthier lifestyle but it was also about life is meant to be enjoyed and capitalistic type commerce has just squeezed all the joy out of people.
Ronnie continued his activism over the next few decades, and in the 1990's he led a few campaigns pertaining to food. Remember the Flavr Savr tomato? I remember back in the early '90s hearing that the first genetically modified product was finally available, and that was the Flavr Savr tomato. Ronnie coordinated a large campaign against it, and got the term "frankenfood" into the lexicon. The Flavr Savr's not sold anymore :)
It's actually not accurate to say that the tomato was the first GM food on the market. It was the first plant. Monsanto's recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) truly came first. It's still around, dying a slow death due to consumer outrage about it. Ronnie campaigned against rBGH when it came out too. It's been a long-lived campaign, but it's really working. The public is truly driving this product off the market.
And then, in 1997, came the sewage sludge the title of this diary refers to... and the birth of Organic Consumers Association soon thereafter:
We organized a mass campaign in 1997 called SOS - Save Organic Standards. The reason we launched SOS was that we had been given inside information that Monsanto and some of the big agribusiness corporations had prevailed on the USDA to allow genetically modified food and other industrial practices under the organic label - sewage sludge, GM, irradiation, a range of toxic ingredients and pesticides - and so on.
Six months before the federal government published these proposed rules, I was able to get a hold of documents - insider documents - that showed what they were about to do and I was able to blow the whistle before it happened. This got circulated around the country and it caused quite a stir, although many people said "Cummins, he's a total conspiracy freak, they could never do this."
But on December 16, 1997 the Federal Register posted the USDA's outrageous proposed standards, and the proof was right there. We immediately printed up leaflets and petitions, sent out emails to our lists of consumers and retail stores, which then got forwarded, which in turn stimulated requests from several thousand co-ops and natural food stores for leaflets and petitions. This was just when the internet was starting to be used so we made sure we had room on our petitions for people's email addresses and we had quite consciously been building up an email list.
Congress and the USDA had never seen so many emails before on any issue other than tobacco. Congresspeople had never seen so many emails and irate phone calls. The Organic Trade Association, which is just as its name describes, used to claim that they represented consumers as well (although they never did) but they were siding with the USDA, saying "Oh well, we've got some differences but we can work this out."
Basically the public sided with us when we said there is NO compromise, you cannot have GM allowed, you cannot allow them to take sewage sludge and put it on organic farms. SOS and our allies generated 280,000 letters in this campaign and basically freaked out the government and corporate America. By April Monsanto was saying to the govenrment "We think you should pull this request to include genetically modified food in organics," and the same thing for the irradiation and the biosolids (the sludge) front groups, because they had angered millions of Americans.
So right at this point, we decided there's no one speaking up for these millions of people who want to preserve strict organic standards so let's set up the Organic Consumers Association. So we started out in 1998 with an email list of 800 people but it grew over the years to a quarter of a million that we've got now and millions more who read our newsletter, Organic Bytes, and go to our website.
Is that not amazing? In ten years, Ronnie's grown his organization to a quarter of a million people. In my own personal experience, Organic Consumers was one of the first groups I found when I began looking into food issues, and the newsletter is a source I continually use to stay current on the issues so I know when it's time to call my congresscritter about something.
Obama hasn't been giving me too much hope lately (despite the cutesy ads about "this is your brain on hope") but Ronnie has. Just when I was feeling like it was time to throw in the towel, his story gave me proof that we CAN make a difference. I hope Ronnie's had the same effect on you, and if food issues are your thing I recommend signing up for his newsletter because it's (in my opinion) the single best way to make sure you take action whenever an important issue comes up.
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Ronnie had quite a lot more to say - we talked about Wal-Mart, etc, and greenwashing, plus the war, global warming, and more - and it's all available if you read the full interview. He's also looking for bloggers to get involved keeping tabs on state & local issues, so email me if you want more information on that.