ESSAY OF THE WEEK

Ben & Jerry’s #DirtyDairy

The Vermont brand has been built on a bucolic image of cows grazing on endless pastures . . . Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and other Vermont companies have used this idyllic imagery to sell their products. Gone are the days, however, when most of Vermont’s cows were grazing in spectacularly scenic landscapes. Now a majority of Vermont’s cows are locked up in . . . ‘confined animal feeding operations’ or CAFOs . . . grazing on concrete with a diet rich in GMO corn and pesticides. – “Vermont’s GMO Addiction: Pesticides, Polluted Water and Climate Destruction,” Regeneration Vermont

The most important thing we can do today as conscious consumers, farmers and food workers is to regenerate public health, the environment and climate stability.

How? By moving away from industrial, GMO and factory-farm food toward an organic, pasture-based, soil regenerative, humane, carbon-sequestering and climate-friendly agricultural system.

What’s standing in the way of this life-or-death transformation? Rampant greenwashing. The proliferation of $90 billion worth of fraudulently labeled or advertised “natural” and “socially responsible” food products in the U.S. confuses even the most well-intentioned of consumers and lures them away from purchasing genuine organic or grass-fed products.

Perhaps no company personifies greenwashing more than Vermont-based Ben & Jerry’s.

As the New York Times reports, OCA recently sent samples of Ben and Jerry’s top-selling ice cream brands to an independent testing lab for analysis. Ten out of 11 samples tested positive for Roundup (glyphosate and AMPA) herbicide contamination

So much for being “natural” and “socially responsible.”

Read ‘Dirty Dairy: Why Consumers Need to Force Ben and Jerry’s to Go Organic’

Read our press release on glyphosate in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream