Organic by Peter Laufer

Author:Peter Laufer
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2014-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

“I don’t trust the FDA or the USDA. I’m sorry,” says schoolteacher Amy McKendrick, who is party to a suit against General Mills that charges the conglomerate with a bogus package design because it promotes its Nature Valley granola bars as “naturally flavored.” Nature Valley, she says, fooled her into believing that their slogan “100% Natural,” plastered on the snack’s label, was a claim that nothing “processed” was in the box. “I have to trust what’s on the labels. I can’t test it,” she laments. “I’m not a chemist. I can’t go to the factory, obviously, and see what’s going on there. I have to trust the labels. What else can you do?”

It’s almost one hundred degrees in the California San Joaquin Valley summer shade as McKendrick explains her complaints with gusto in downtown Bakersfield. Sitting at a sidewalk table, she sips her iced latte, convinced locally owned Dagny’s dosed her with nothing unexpected. She shuns Starbucks, concerned that Big Coffee works with Big Agra and hence may well sell coffee and cakes containing unlabeled GMOs. McKendrick’s deep tan, long blonde hair, and cotton lace blouse would make her look at home on the California coast back when the first Whole Earth Catalog was published. She made the forty-mile drive down from her mountain home in Tehachapi—an oasis at four thousand feet between the valley and the Mojave Desert—anxious to explain the links she sees between her daughter’s behavior and diet.

“When my daughter Kalie was five, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, anxiety, and OCD. They put her on some highly antipsychotic drugs.”

“And a powder,” adds Kalie. The eight-year-old is sitting with her ma, actively listening to the familiar story.

“After a month there were so many serious side effects,” says the single mother. She sought alternative treatments, intent on finding options that would wean her daughter from the psychotropic medications. The drugs were replaced with vitamins, augmented with a diet that precluded food preservatives and food additives. After two years of the changed regimen, McKendrick is pleased to report, the negative diagnoses were reversed. And throughout the hour of adult talk about the lawsuit, diet, labeling, and trust, Kalie proves to be a well-behaved child, punctuating her mother’s story periodically and showing her off her new stuffed sheep plush toy.

“It’s all because we raise our own chickens in our backyard,” McKendrick says, summing up her back-to-the-land lifestyle.

“We get lots of eggs,” Kalie chimes in.

“And you learn to butcher your own, right?” prompts McKendrick.

“Yeah,” acknowledges Kalie, with markedly less enthusiasm.

Small-town Tehachapi (the population is about fifteen thousand) doesn’t support a grocery store packed with the organic products McKendrick wants for her dinner table. She belongs to a food co-op and shares a truckload of goods that arrives monthly in the isolated community, supplies she augments with periodic trips down to Bakersfield. So what the heck was she doing buying granola bars without reading the ingredients?

“It was my ignorance and lack of due diligence—just seeing that it said ‘natural’ in front, I assumed that it was.

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