Matching Walmart’s aggressive entry into the organic market, Target announced last week that they too will begin to distribute organic food products in their SuperTarger stores.
The Archer Farms brand, exclusive to Target, will now include organic whole-grain pizzas, pastas, complete dinners, fruit strips, and even fair trade organic coffee.
It’s great to see the big boys getting with the program, regardless of their true intentions, but this puts eco consumers in an entirely new dilemma. As larger businesses jump on the organic bandwagon the overall need for organic products increases, thereby jeopardizing some fundamental elements of organic living.
As food companies scramble to find enough organically grown ingredients, they are inevitably forsaking the pastoral ethos that has defined the organic lifestyle. For some companies, it means keeping thousands of organic cows on industrial-scale feedlots. For others, the scarcity of organic ingredients means looking as far afield as China, Sierra Leone, and Brazil — places where standards may be hard to enforce, workers’ wages and living conditions are a worry, and, say critics, increased farmland sometimes comes at a cost to the environment.
Still, it seems a step in the right direction.
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