Organic Food standards revisited

Hat tip to DangerousMeta for this link to an article in the NY Times: bq. Federal standards for what foods can be called organic might have seemed like the final word on the issue when they went into effect two years ago. But the Agriculture Department's interpretation of the laws governing the National Organic Program has fed a fierce debate on what should be allowed in such products. bq. Last month the department issued what it called clarifications of the standards, allowing antibiotics in dairy cows, certain chemicals in pesticides and livestock feed containing nonorganic fish meal. bq. The father of national organic standards, Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, called the Agriculture Department's directives "unilateral fiats which may violate the letter of the law," and he added, "They certainly violate its spirit." This is a big can of worms. There are also issues unrelated to this regarding Organic Farming and Food Production -- for our business (Hard Cider), we are allowed to use sulfites to regulate wild yeast activity but these have to come from Sulfur Dioxide gas -- we cannot use powdered forms such as metabisulfites. SO2 is incredibly toxic and using it in a small-scale production such as ours would be impossible. Our Hard Cider will be made from Organic Apples but the Cider itself will not be Organic. And this is just one example -- I"ll post about pesticides at some other time... Sheesh!