Visionary is one of our Power Words here at I’m Organic ™. Last week I bought a Visionary T-shirt for an emerging organic friend. I think he is visionary. And I wanted to empower him to embrace the organic lifestyle. To me he is someone with unusual powers of foresight. He can see how the world connects together, how systems interplay, and how our choices impact the future we share together.

Visionary seems to fit an organic person very well. If I may boldly generalize, many people who have chosen an organic lifestyle understand how the world connects together. We recognize that something happening over there — pesticides in fields — affects us over here — unhealthy people.

We understand how systems interplay—that regulations on organic products interplay with marketing and media around the organic lifestyle creating upward spirals of more and more possibility for organic goods in our world. And more of us buying organic goods means a better environment and the more likely that organic farming practices will become more and more affordable. Making it easier for more and more of us to be organic people.

And we definitely understand how our choices impact the future we share together. Whether that is the future of my body cleansed of pesticides and thus more likely to live better, healthier, and longer; or of our interactions together in an environment that has not been destroyed by contaminants.

Can you imagine a future world where we all eat organic, sleep on organic sheets, use organic towels, wear organic clothes, and live the organic lifestyle in a way that helps to improve our world? Maybe you are visionary too.

Rather than news today, I thought I might talk about something I think is going on here at I’m Organic ™. Let’s talk about branding. Lots of companies out there strive to get customers to buy into their products through branding. They create a product, and then they put the spinmasters to work to convince people to buy their product. Often they appeal at the identity level. “I am someone who does or is x.” So they associate their product with x. Say playful, youthful, or wealthy. And so consumers go out and buy the things as a way to tell others that they are indeed playful, youthful, or wealthy.

Here at Imorganic, a different path emerged. Start at the identity level: “I value the environment and my health.” I buy organic foods and goods. Now, how do we give people a chance to share their identity with others? How do we help people promote an organic lifestyle to others?

I believe the story of Imorganic begins with another business. One selling products around political identities. Promoting those products to stores, Jill and Judy met with a storeowner who asked if they had any products about being organic. Jumpin’ fair trade organic java beans! Both women, although proud to be organic, responded no at the time. But they went home wondering what it would be like to create products that celebrated the organic lifestyle. Some serious work and many months later, Imorganic opened the virtual doors.

While I scoff at labels, I am proud to wear Imorganic shirts. I don’t let my kids wander around as promotional material for corporations, but they can wear I’m Organic ™ clothes if they want. It resonates for me. Who are you? Are you organic? If you are, share it with the world! Celebrate it with I’m Organic ™ gear.

This past weekend I met up with I’m Organic ™ founder Jill Palermo in the windy city of Chicago. We had the great pleasure of running into a jazz guitarist from New Orleans, Seva Venet. We shared some Chicago jazz with Seva at the fabulous Green Mill. The next morning we met up for breakfast at the Bourgeois Pig.

In our conversation about I’m Organic ™ and making organic choices, Seva asked about labels. Why don’t they mark them better? You know how they show if a food was processed at a plant that also processes peanuts. Can they be transparent about the water quality used to rinse the food? Can they assure us that contaminants have not ruined our organic foods during processing? And what if this were clear across the whole food industry. What if a coffee label shared that the coffee was tainted with DDT where it was grown in South America?

And I wonder what sort of change that would produce in buyers? Remember when they started putting dolphin-free on cans of tuna. I certainly wanted to make sure I bought dolphin-free tuna. If there were more transparency and labeling about what happens to our food from seed to table, I think more of us would be careful about what we put our value-voting-dollars toward.

What sort of toilet paper do you use? No, I am not suggesting that your toilet paper was made from trees treated with fertilizer and pesticides. But it was most likely made from trees unless you know what to look for. Trees play a large role in our ecology. I want the earth to have more of them not less. I wonder how many trees I am responsible for cutting down over the course of my toilet-trained life?

Well the tree cutting on my behalf chops off here, because a friend of mine pointed out this great resource for discovering paper products that don’t come from cutting trees. Toilet paper. Tissues. Paper towels. Napkins. (My napkin count probably isn’t too high since I use cloth napkins, but I am sure my toilet paper consumption needs to shift.)

Another friend amplified my awarenes. He started a personal campaign to get people to switch toilet paper. David Frayne has been buying Earth First tree free toilet paper and handing them out for free to his neighbors. Call it tree-free TP grassroots marketing. He researched what was on the shelves of different stores. Tree-free toilet paper seems hard to find in Pheonix. And he wants to change this by getting people to try it, ask for it, and increase the visible shelf space devoted to it. As he is successful, he hopes others will try a similar approach to taking back our consumer power.

To take back more of your power as a green consumer, visit Co-op America’s Green Pages and Environmental Paper.

If you have other resources you want to share with us on this blog, contact me: jean at imorganic dot com.

To be a vegetarian or not to be. It is a question I have pondered often. Sometimes I answered yes and sometimes no. The last few years the answer has been no. And, as I become more organic, I am getting interested in organic meat. Although, I confess, the more research I do, the less I can imagine wanting to eat meat at all.

What is organic meat and what terms might be confusing? I looked again at Joy Bauer’s article from the Today Show and extracted this to share with you.

Organic means:

• Animals have not been treated with: antibiotics, growth hormones, or feed made from animal byproducts. (Gross! Or what was that 80’s Valley Girl saying? Something like “Grody to the max!”)
• Animals must have been fed organic food for at least a year.
• Animals must have access to the outdoors. (Thank goodness!)
• Food hasn’t been genetically modified or irradiated.

Watch out for free-range. I happily bought free range eggs believing the term meant chickens running around outside all day. “Free range” or “Free roaming” does not mean that the animal spent lots of time outdoors. The rule for the label only states that outdoor access is available for “an undetermined period each day.” Natural can also be misleading. The USDA defines “natural” as not containing any artificial flavorings, colors, chemical preservatives, or synthetic ingredients when applied to meat and poultry. And the USDA does not verify the claim.

And for seafood, you may not see the certification on the food. That’s right, there is no USDA certification standard for seafood, and producers can make their own claims. And wild or farmed fish can be labeled organic even in the presence of contaminants like mercury or PCBs.

To minimize your pesticide intake from any meats, trim the fat (and skin) where pesticides concentrate.

Keep up to date on standards by checking into EWG, Greener Choices, or Eco-labels.

Organic on a budget? I am. You will find me standing in the grocery store going bananas trying to figure out when I must buy organic and when I can slide on my peeling budget. Joy Bauer on the Today show listed a “Dirty Dozen” for must buy organic fruits and vegetables. And they are….apples, cherries, grapes, imported chili, nectarines, peaches, pears, raspberries, strawberries, bell peppers, celery, potatoes, and spinach.

According to the Environmental Working Group, choosing organic on these dozen fruits and vegetables can reduce your pesticide intake by up to 90%. If you are trying to cut corners like me, do so with cleaner vegetables like sweet corn, avocados, cauliflower, asparagus, onions, peas, and broccoli or fruits like pineapples, mangoes, bananas, kiwi, and papaya.

I buy organic because I don’t like pesticides on my food, in my body, or in my children. But I also want to support farmers who choose to produce organic food and reduce the pesticides contaminating our environment. So I will still debate if my values can compromise and not buy organic as much as possible. However, now I know that I am doing the best for my family when I choose organic on the “dirty dozen” at the very least.

Last week I bought toothpaste. I looked for my usual brand, and I found they had a version I hadn’t noticed before, one that didn’t include fluoride. No fluoride? Who wouldn’t want fluoride? I thought to myself. Then, yesterday, I opened my newest issue of Ode magazine. There –on page 65 in black, blue, and red– I discovered an article called toxic toothpaste. According to the article, “hundreds of studies link fluoride to birth defects, brain damage, cancer, osteoporosis and –ironically– tooth decay. Fluoride is, in fact, poisonous.” Well, I knew we needed to spit it out but not all of the fluoride ends up in the sink. Some still goes down our throats. And for kids, even more ends up in their bellies.

Natural toothpaste may not be a great alternative. The article encourages us to avoid “sodium lauryl sulfate, triclosan, propylene glycol and hydrated silica.” For more information, Ode suggests www.wddty.co.uk.

Hmmm, well I like baking soda toothpastes, so I think I will try following the recipe in Ode: 1 cup baking soda, a third cup salt, half cup water, three teaspoons glycerin, flavored with a few drops of peppermint oil. I still plan to spit that out.

Does being certified organic mean that a product authentically deserves the term organic? There is some debate in the news about the ability of the USDA to regulate organic products. Don’t be easily fooled by “natural” or “organic” on labels. Look for the certified organic seal and check the ingredients list.

On the other side of the issue, some farmers grow organic, yet they don’t obtain certification. Farmers selling at local farmers markets know their consumers, often personally. If you know where your products come from and who handled them, the need for a seal of approval diminishes significantly.

Being organic is a values-based buying strategy gaining quickly in popularity. And for many farmers, growing organic is a core value. However, we do live in a market economy. There are those who apparently will take advantage of our organic values to turn a profit without following through on their promise. And funding within the USDA for organic regulation fails miserably to match the growth of the organic industry.

Take action to strengthen the integrity of the certified organic label. Keep an eye out at the OCA for action opportunities like today’s call to boycott several labels which falsely claim to be organic. Help keep organics pure.

Hello. This is Nicki Ritchie, a member of the I’m Organic Team. For the last week I have been working on the I’m Organic Organi-Giveaway program. There are so many great companies out there with awesome organic products, and we at I’m Organic were looking for a way to tell everyone we know about them. So, what I’ve been doing is researching and contacting organic manufactures to give them the opportunity to sponsor a prize to be given away in a monthly drawing for everyone signed up for the Organigram, our monthly e-newsletter.

So far, I’ve had the pleasure of talking with all kinds of companies that offer organic products, and I’m not just talking food! I’ve been covering the whole organic spectrum, and have already gotten some great companies on board, such as Aubrey Organics, Snikiddy Snacks, Choice Organic Teas, and Foods Alive, to name a few. I’ve been so pleased to see how many options there are out there to go organic and how many companies have the right idea. I’ve been reading the mission statements of these companies about why they are organic, the importance of health for our loved ones and our planet, and how they are taking steps to reduce their company’s ecological footprint.

I ended my workday on friday feeling great after talking with a woman from Ithaca Fine Chocolates, the makers of the Art Bar. They are the first Fair Trade Certified chocolate company in the US. Why Art Bar? Their certified organic chocolate bars feature an art reproduction on a collectible card inside the wrapper and 10% of profits go to support art education. As a fine art major working at a company named “I’m Organic,” their mission definitely struck a cord. It is so reassuring to find people with whom you have overlapping passions and to know that there is a community of people out there who also think what you value is important. Finding and supporting these communities is a way for us to reaffirm to ourselves that what we value is important and that we have the power to be a part of what is positive in our world.

So, make sure to sign up for the Organigram, and each month you’ll get a chance to win some free stuff from your favorite organic brands!

Last year a good friend happened to be out of town often. He asked me to pick up his share from a CSA. We shared the share for the rest of the year. Now that is sharing!

The first time I go to pick up the share I notice the name of the farmer is Henry Brockman. Hmmm, sounds familiar to me but way back in dim memory. Later it comes to me. The Brockman’s farm wasn’t five miles from where I grew up. Our fathers both taught at the University here in Normal. Henry went to school with my sister. And his sister Teresa went to school with my brother. Hey, we are talking small farm towns here. Of course we have a common connection!

My family knows the Brockman family, and they are good folks. I am picking up the share of the CSA, and I trust this guy. I know the food in my bag is just what he says it is. I know it is more than organic, like he says. And I know the Illinois soil on which this food is grown — black and rich. It is the soil that produced the food that I grew up on. These are vegetables and herbs that nurture my family. And the food moved a mere 25 miles all in one day from the time Henry picked it to the time I pick it up. It is even better than that. The guy’s father, Herman Brockman, an environmental geneticist, understands how contaminants change living things. With deep knowledge like that, you can see why Henry’s farm spends so much energy taking care of the soil and has for decades.

So next time I picked up my share, I felt a deeper connection to Henry and to my delicious organic food.

Find a CSA near you. Enjoy fresh organic food while supporting local farmers and your local economy.