A decent portion of what is labeled organic in the supermarket is produced not by a small farm but by a corporate conglomerate; Cascadian Farms, Back to Nature, and Morningstar Farms are brands owned by General Mills, Kraft, and Kellogg’s, respectively.
You can bet these companies are getting the cheapest possible organic ingredients they can get their hands on — which means importing them from other countries. Of the estimated $1 billion consumers spent at Whole Foods on organic produce, only 16 percent of it was grown locally. Factor in the pollutant by-products of all that shipping and transportation, and you wonder if these companies really deserve the reputation of being environmentally friendly or “natural” at all.