Organic Health Food

Organic Health Food is becoming a more and more important and sizeable proportion of the overall food market. Emerging are various alternative organic standards that basically bypass expensive and cumbersome formal certification to provide their own definition of Organic Health Food. These standards can be beneficial or not, depending on how they are implemented and enforced in the burgeoning Organic Health Food market.

Generally speaking seasonal Organic Health Food that is locally-grown can be brought more swiftly to the point of sale to the consumver, which can not only make the food better tasting but also to some degree more nutritious by virtue of its freshness.

The standard that was first proposed by leading US organic farmer Eliot Coleman is called the Authentic Food Standard (AFS), and it includes criteria that are fundamentally incompatible with current agribusiness of producing Organic Health Food. According to the AFS, the growers who meet the standard must produce all Organic Health Food to these specifications:

1) Meat products, eggs, milk, fresh fruits vegetables and other similar Organic Health Foods must produced within a 50-mile radius of their point of sale to the consumer.

2) Seed and storage crops, such as nuts, potatoes, grains, and beans and other similar Organic Health Foods must be produced within a 300-mile radius of their point of sale to the consumer.

3) "Made with Authentic ingredients" can only be claimed by traditional processed foods such as bread, wine, cheese, and other lactofermented products. This eliminates a large portion of Organic Health Food currently available.

New approaches to defining and buying Organic Health Food are also being implemented by some agricultural and food retail interests. One approach cuts out all the middlemen by having consumers partner with local farmers who are producing the Organic Health Food. This plan is called Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA). Shares in a season's harvest of Organic Health Food are purchased well in advance by CSA members, and their regular allocations are picked up weekly their from distribution sites.

This approach by CSA in purchasing local Organic Health Food is highly valued by both the organic food consumer and producer. The problem with CSA is that it is extremely unwieldly and quite unlikely to be adopted by any but the most radical Organic Health Food enthusiasts.

After all, people are now accustomed to the convenience of shopping at well stocked stores often on a whim and are unlikely to go back to a primitive and unwieldly Organic Health Food distribution system such as CSA.