Hightower Lowdown

Organic food, once scoffed at by the corporate food giants, is now the fastest-growing segment of the food industry, topping $15 billion in sales last year, so the giants have gone from scoffing to co-opting.

Philip Morris, Kellogg, General Mills, PepsiCo, Dean Foods, and Coca- Cola have all taken over popular organic brands in the last few years, though they're careful not to put their own conglomerate names on the goods.

Now they're perverting the very meaning of the word "organic." After a herculean effort, the small farmers, marketers, and consumers who are the essence of the burgeoning organic movement won a federal consumer-protection label in 2002. Last October, however, corporate lobbyists got eight Republican senators to sneak through an amendment (in the middle of the night) that allows the food giants to add nonorganic ingredients, synthetic additives, antibiotics, and other impurities to processed food, yet still label it organic. Bam! It was doneno hearing, no discussion, no vote.

Then, last December, George W appointed Katrina Heinze to be the consumer representative on the national organic standards board, which is supposed to protect the purity of the federal government's organic label. Guess what our consumer representative does for a living? She's the manager of global regulatory affairs for General Mills.

The Organic Consumers Association (218-226-4164) is working to restore the integrity to the label.