This Independence Day: Is Your Organic Hamburger Up to Snuff?

Just in time for holiday cookouts, the Washington Post has a story about uproar over watering down the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s organic label.

It chronicles questions about the purity of the USDA Organic stamp that can be found on everything from t-shirts, cosmetics and pet food to the hamburgers and corn on the cob enjoyed at the typical All-American Independence Day bash. The Post story inquires: Has the country’s preeminent organic label become tainted by the influences of factory farmers and food processing giants? Do products bearing the stamp no longer meet national standards? 

Pressing as those questions may be they are hardly the only controversies surrounding “healthy” and “green” claims used to sell products that have swept into our supermarkets and discount stores in the last couple of years.

TerraChoice, an environmental marketing firm, has published a review of 2,219 consumer product claims. It found that 98 percent of the items had false or misleading advertisements on their labels. 

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