It’s still a niche market, but increasingly Americans are willing to pay premium prices for food they think tastes better or feel is better for them.
That might explain why agribusiness giant Monsanto is leading a so-called “grass-roots” effort to get rid of labels such as those above at the expense of guys like Leroy Shatto, who sells hormone-free milk in glass bottles hereabouts.
“Everybody that buys our product,” said Shatto, a dairyman from Clinton County, Mo., “that’s the first question they ask: ‘Do you treat your cows with growth hormone?’ People need to have the right to know what is in their food.”
Or what’s not in it.
Yet for two days this week, a Kansas Senate committee heard testimony on a bill that would make it illegal to label food “as having a compositional claim that cannot be confirmed through laboratory analysis or to state a compositional or production-related claim that is supported solely by sworn statements, affidavits, or testimonials.”
Translation:
Because milk can’t be tested for the presence of growth hormone, dairies like Shatto’s couldn’t represent their products as hormone-free in Kansas, even if they had mountains of proof that their cows weren’t injected with growth hormone.
A similar challenge would face the farmer who sells grass-fed beef, or raises chickens the old-fashioned way, rather than in a huge warehouse.
“People want more information, not less,” complained Otavio Silva, who coordinates the “buy fresh, buy local” program for Bridging the Gap, a Kansas City environmental group. (For the sake of full disclosure, Silva is the husband of Jill Wendholt Silva, the food editor of The Star.)
“I think they are on the wrong side of the battle.”
The “they” in this case is an outfit called AFACT — American Farmers for the Advancement and Conservation of Technology. While headed by a couple of dairy farmers, critics contend that the force behind the effort to pass new food labeling laws in Kansas, Missouri and other states is St. Louis-based Monsanto, maker of the genetically engineered growth hormone rbST.
There’s evidence to back it up — beyond the fact that a Monsanto spokesman told me the company supports the group.
AFACT and Monsanto also share the same public relations firm, Osborn & Barr.
Speaking for both clients, an Osborn & Barr spokesman said his firm set up AFACT’s Web site free of charge and provides other assistance, also gratis.
“We are working with the producers on a pro-bono basis, but Monsanto is also a client,” is how Osborn & Barr’s Jason Gerke answered my question about the connection.
Then he offered to put me in touch with AFACT co-chairman Carrol Campbell, who farms near Winfield, Kan., and uses Monsanto’s genetically engineered hormone product to boost milk production.
Dairy farmers like him, Campbell says, are being inconvenienced and put at a disadvantage by today’s market trends.
Inconvenienced because more milk processors are demanding hormone-free milk to meet the demands of supermarket chains responding to the demands of their customers.
Disadvantaged because some shoppers perceive hormone-free milk to be better than the kind his cows produce, and he thinks that’s unfair.
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