Organic food? Not for you 47 percenters. Kristin Callahan/Ace Pictures/Zuma
Mitt Romney
hasn't divulged many details about what kind of agriculture policy he'd pursue as president. (Sound
familiar?) But all signs suggest that he'd follow the agribiz party line. As Wayne Barrett showed in a recent
Nation piece (my comment
here),
Romney has ties to agribusiness giant Monsanto that date to the '70s,
when GMO seeds were an R&D project, not a business model. According
to Barrett, Romney, then a young Bain consultant, helped nudge Monsanto
on its path away from disgraced industrial chemical concern toward its
current status as world-beating agribiz player. Then there's the
agribiz execs and shills the GOP nominee tapped for his campaign's Agriculture Advisory Committee.
But guess what? In the privacy of his campaign jet, the beleaguered presidential contender apparently eats organic,
reports the
Today show's Peter Alexander:
And, while I've never been invited up front, sources close to the
campaign tell me the shelves are stocked with a wide variety of healthy
fare. Kashi cereals, hummus, pita as well as organic applesauce.
Everything's organic, I'm told, including the ingredients to Romney's
favorite, peanut butter and honey sandwiches.
Nor is this the first time the Romney family has been linked to organic food. Get a load of this
2002 profile of Ann Romney from the Worcester (Mass.)
Telegram & Gazette:
Mrs. Romney was introduced to several practitioners of holistic
medicine, who persuaded her to adopt alternative therapies. She now
eats organic foods and very little meat. She practices reflexology and
undergoes acupuncture treatments. She credits the lifestyle with
turning her health around.
I have calls and emails into the Romney campaign to confirm these
reports. I have yet to hear back. But if they're true—and it's hard to
imagine either the Romneys or the journalists would make them up—Romney
would hardly be the only prominent politician to publicly promote
genetically modified foods while privately avoiding them by sticking to
organics. (USDA organic code
forbids GMOs from any food labeled organic, along with the application of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides).
Indeed, he's following a tradition that dates to Bill Clinton,
includes George W. Bush and his family, and is alive and well in the
White House of Romney's opponent, Barack Obama. What's my evidence that
the Clintons and Bushes ate organic? Get this, from someone who knows—
Walter Scheib, who served as White House executive chef during the Clinton and Bush years:
From 1994 to 2005 I was the executive chef at the White House. This
offered me not only the personal honor of serving two unique and
interesting first families, but the professional challenge of
fulfilling Hillary Clinton's mandate of bringing contemporary American
cuisine and nutritionally responsible food to the White House.
This meant that nearly all the product used was obtained from local
growers and suppliers. There was a small garden on the roof of the
White House where produce was grown.
The ethic of the purchasing and the cooking at the White House under
my direction and under the continuing direction of [current Obama
White House executive chef] Cris Comerford is one of respect for the
pedigree of the product and manner it is grown, gathered, raised or
caught.
The Clinton and Bush families dined regularly on organic foods. Both wagyu and grass-fed beef were frequently used.
And here's Scheib again, in an
interview with the blog
Obama Foodorama, on Hillary Clinton's unheralded rooftop veggie garden:
"Not certified organic," Mr. Scheib said. "But everything
was absolutely grown without pesticides and fertilizers. I guess it's
what these days we call 'natural.'"
And "the emphasis on organics became even more important when the Bushes arrived in the White House,"
Obama Foodorama reported. "Laura Bush was 'adamant' about organics, according to Mr. Scheib." Scheib also
told the
New York Times
that Laura Bush "insisted that fresh, organic foods be served in the
White House," but she just didn't talk "much about it outside the
house."
While the Clintons and Bushes quietly dined on organic and grass-fed,
their administrations pushed policies that propped up industrial
agriculture and the companies that dominate it. Clinton
promoted GMOs to the very end of his term—
a cause his wife Hillary has kept up as secretary of state. At least Clinton was fairly progressive on maintaining strict USDA standards for organic farming; Bush
matched Clinton's zeal for propping up industrial farming but
also tried to weaken organic standards.
As for the Obamas, Michelle Obama, unlike her predecessors, was
pretty open about her preference for organics—at least at first. For a
pre-election 2008 profile, Ms. Obama told the
The New Yorker
that "in my household, over the last year we have just shifted to
organic." She added a little critique of a famous industrial-food
sweetener:
And the fruit-juice-box thing, and we think—we think—that's
juice. And you start reading the labels and you realize there's
high-fructose corn syrup in everything we're eating. Every jelly, every
juice. Everything that's in a bottle or a package is like poison in a
way that most people don't even know…
And, of course, soon after she moved into the White House, Ms. Obama famously broke ground on an organic garden on the lawn—and
launched a campaign to inspire children to make healthier food choices.
But the agrichemical industry quickly chided the Obamas for not using
"crop protection products" (i.e., pesticides) in their garden; the
administration
began making pro-agribiz appointments and policy moves (a trend that
continues to this day); and Michelle Obama
shifted her kids' health campaign to emphasize exercise over diet change.
Now the Obamas appear to have settled into the pattern established
by their predecessors: privately eat organic while publicly maintaining
the food system status quo—a pattern that Romney, if he wins, seems
ready to maintain. So, organic for the elite, GMOs for everyone else?
That's precisely the kind of exclusive mindset that gives organic food a
bad name.
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