Prison dairy farms are not only creating a new generation of trained cheesemakers but also providing incarcerated people with the ideal way to insert themselves back in society.

Prisons have long offered incarcerated people the opportunity to work while serving time: making flags, office furniture, and clothing are common ways for prisoners to make a few extra dollars. But a few revolutionary programs in Colorado, California, and Wisconsin are allowing incarcerated people to take their jobs outdoors: working at dairies allows inmates to enjoy the fresh air and the company of animals while also learning a useful trade that may help them find work once they are released from prison.

Colorado Correctional Industries’ cow dairy is one of the oldest in the nation, dating back to the early 1900s.

“It was one of the very first programs implemented within the Colorado prison system,” explains Mark Fairbairn, Public Information Officer at the Department of Corrections, noting that Colorado’s very first prison occupied over 8,000 acres of pasture land, which was originally used for the raising of beef and dairy cattle.

While these animals originally supplied only the meat and milk necessary to feed the prison population, in 1977, CCi was given the jurisdiction to operate independently as a cash-funded agency. Today, the CCi dairy sells 80 percent of the milk produced by its 800 cows to Dairy Farmers of America; the remaining 20 percent is used in the prison system.

In 2002, CCi expanded to goat milk, opening a dairy with approximately 250 goats.

“To our knowledge, CCi’s goat farm is the largest goat farm operation in the state of Colorado,” says Fairbairn.

The milk produced at the dairy is sold exclusively to two vendors, one of which, Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy, used to supply goat cheese to Whole Foods. That is, until 2015, when the chain announced that it would be removing this cheese (as well as tilapia also produced by CCi) from its stores after consumer complaints over the controversial practice.

While some raised the issue of prison work taking jobs away from non-incarcerated workers, others noted the low wages paid by the program. But in reality, prison work actually helps a lot of inmates get off on a better foot when their incarceration reaches its end.

An NPR story published this summer looked into life at the prison goat dairy in Cañon City, Colorado, a five-minute drive from the buildings where the inmates live.

“When you’re there, you can almost forget you’re in a prison,” writes NPR. “The goats, in their pens, look out over irrigated corn fields, the Arkansas River in the distance, and barren hillsides on the other side. To be perfectly honest, it’s beautiful.”

Most of the inmates working at the dairy are nearing the ends of their sentences. Good behavior and earning their GED has earned the workers this opportunity: outdoor work and better pay than at most prison jobs (a few dollars a day in contrast to less than a dollar a day).

“It’s a great thing,” Jeremiah Pate told NPR – one of several who responded positively to questions about the position. “It beats the alternative. Rather than sitting in your tiny little cell, you get to come out here.”

And best of all, inmates are investing in their futures.

“Part of the deal, when you’re in prison, you have to work anyway,” former inmate and program participant Duwane Engler told NPR; Engler now has small herd of about a dozen goats living in the backyard. “If you’re in a maximum facility, you’re going to do work, you’re never going to leave the facility, and you’re scrubbing walls with a toothbrush, basically. These guys actually get out, they have a purpose, and they make more than 60 cents a day.”

A similar program exists in Wisconsin, where inmates from John Burke Correctional Center can take an eight-week apprenticeship course teaching them how to raise calves, grow cops to feed cows, and operate a dairy farm, with the goal of helping them get work in farming upon their release. In Wisconsin, home to nearly 10,000 dairy farms – 12 of which had already hired graduates of the program as of this summer – it’s a useful way to help inmates learn a marketable skill.

This is especially true given the fact that many of the participants in these programs have never worked in agriculture before. Rob Roehlk, who oversees the dairy and milk processing programs at Corcoran State Prison in California, tells KQED that many workers “come in and they haven’t really seen a cow before, haven’t milked a cow before.”

“We know that if they have gainful employment and employment where people want those skills they have a better chance at success as it relates to reintegration into their communities,” Wisconsin Department of Corrections Secretary Jon Litscher tells Channel 3000, and California Prison Industry Authority tells KQED that their former employees return to prison about 30 percent less frequently than the average.

The field is rapidly growing. CCi is exploring new programs such as the manufacture of ice cream and butter to sell back to Colorado prison facilities or its newest venture, buffalo mozzarella, which began in 2012 and now includes 350 water buffalo.

“The opportunity exists for CCi dairy inmates to work in any number of farm-oriented programs upon their discharge,” explains Fairbairn. “Additionally, the skills, experience and work ethics all CCi offenders gain while working within CCi programs provide opportunities for employment in any industry. Continuing education, soft skills, and the self confidence needed to succeed on their own, are all valuable traits CCi offenders possess after working within our vast division of programs.”

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$13.7 billion. That’s the “Whole Paycheck” number it took for Amazon.com to buy Whole Foods Market.

After more than thirty years as the leading natural food chain, Whole Foods Market announced earlier today that it would surrender its sovereignty to Amazon, the online retail giant. While the deal isn’t done yet, and some experts speculate the offer could lead to an all-out bidding war over the chain, as of publish time, there were no other offers.

The jokes and Tweets about the sale have been entertaining. (My favorite, from Slade Sohmer, because the struggle is real:  “I, too, spend $13.7 billion at Whole Foods.”)

Wall Street is loving the news – Whole Foods’ stock is up 27 percent, Amazon is up three percent. But the news isn’t so great for other retailers: Target opened down 12 points, Walrmart is down five, Costco down six and Kroger fell 15 percent, making it the worst performing S&P 500 stock of the day.

“If you’re in the grocery business and your name is not Amazon or Whole Foods, today is not a good day for you,” wrote Will Oremus in Slate.

Although Amazon built its empire online, it has been testing other brick and mortar stores recently, including an actual bookstore, with what seems to be a clear intent to merge the two worlds in ways that haven’t happened yet. Amazon also recently tested a store without checkout clerks, but rather, an app that tallies up all your purchases as you exit the store, and your credit card is billed just like through other apps (Uber, Bambino Sitters, TaskRabbit, etc) without ever having to dump food in or out of a wobbly-wheeled cart. No lines. No price checks.

With the merger, we are, in all likelihood, talking about easier and more frequent online ordering and paying, Echos and Alexas in every Prime membership house to assist with the process, better and quicker delivery and access, and, sure, some iterations of drones, robot cashiers, and other Jestonsesque offerings our grandkids won’t believe were preceded by the mundane weekly task of setting aside time for wheeling clunky shopping carts through bright store aisles.

But if you’re everyone on the Internet, you’re less concerned with all of that, and more fixated on the ETA for your Amazon Prime account to kick out your kombucha and quinoa via speedy sci-fi drone delivery. But what’s really most exciting about this merger, even though I recently lamented the probable loss of Whole Foods’ autonomy in a merger like this, is what it means for the plant-based foods category, which is also, as they say, having a moment. In fact, as far as our food system is concerned, in the long-term, it’s immensely more significant than Amazon buying Whole Foods.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder, has been called “the smartest guy in business” (and quite possibly the richest, with a net worth of more than $82 billion). If you can remember back when Internet shopping was like a cold and murky pool no one but porn sites wanted to dip a toe in, Bezos set the bar in 1994 when he dove in with the launch of Amazon — then an online bookstore, now it’s the world’s biggest online retailer, and larger than Walmart when it comes to market capitalization. It’s the fourth most valuable public business in the entire world.

And for the future of our food system, even for all its shortcomings, Amazon, at least with Bezos at the helm, is a lot more promising than Whole Foods selling to a traditional this-is-how-it’s-always-been-done supermarket like Kroger or Walmart (although anything is still possible). Traditional supermarkets have long thought too inside-the-box, quite literally. They have deep ties to the processed foods industry, namely the sugar, meat, egg, and dairy industries, even when they’re trying to be more like Whole Foods.

Mackey’s vision pushed to much success the idea that healthy “whole” food can be delicious food, too. That choosing products better for the planet doesn’t mean sacrificing taste or (too much) money. And most critically, it gave mainstream focus to “alternative” food, notably making vegan staples less the scary hippie wheat-germ-and-sprouts stuff of the 1970s and more the delicious and versatile sustenance it is today — it is the diet of choice enjoyed by former presidents and Beyoncé, after all.

The booming plant-based category, which has been called the most important trend in the tech industry, is an area so ripe and juicy that only a merger of this magnitude can accommodate it appropriately.

“Whole Foods has for many years represented the leading edge of plant-based foods, and CEO John Mackey has been a powerful ally for companies producing healthy, humane, and sustainable foods,” says Bruce Friedrich, executive director of the Good Food Institute, which supports the growth of the plant-based categories. “It’s wonderful that Mackey will remain at the helm and that Amazon and Whole Foods – both innovators in their respective spaces – can now be partners in creating an improved future of food.”

Mackey is a longtime vegan (he recently penned a book about the diet) and Bezos was an early investor in Impossible Foods, one of the leading startups creating plant-based meats that taste and perform just like animal meat. Impossible Foods is poised to produce one-million pounds of its plant burgers a month in its new northern California facility. At a recent launch event of the Impossible Burger at the Umami Burger chain in Los Angeles, Impossible Foods founder Pat Brown said the company plans to see its burgers in major fast food burger chains in the very near future. The company wants to become half of the meat market in the next few decades. The impact of a shift like that sends ripples throughout the food system, and something only visionaries like Mackey and Bezos can translate into the retail space. It’s inevitable. With meat (and egg and dairy and seafood) production topping the lists of both global greenhouse gas emissions and diet-related illnesses, consumers are desperate for alternatives.

“If I owned stock in innovative vegan food companies (which I don’t) I would be *very* excited by today’s news,” the blog Vegan.com posted on Facebook. “Whole Foods + Amazon is an entity that could disrupt the entire grocery industry, and much of this disruption is likely to come at the expense of the crappiest processed foods and animal products.”

Consumers, namely Millennials, are pushing against the big-ag agendas and driving the plant-based industry growth. Nondairy milk sales are skyrocketing (sales are expected to surpass $21 billion by 2022, taking a 13 percent market share of the dairy category) while conventional milk sales lag (except for organic/grass-fed).

While not quite there yet, the plant-based protein category is poised to see the same trajectory as nondairy products over the next decade, perhaps even more so. According to a recent survey conducted by Lightlife Foods, two-thirds of Americans find plant proteins just as satisfying as animal protein, and they’re proving it by eating plant-based protein at least once a week. Somewhat surprisingly, the top reason consumers in the Lightlife survey cited for eating plant protein isn’t the health benefits, the animal welfare, or the decreased environmental impact – which are all key factors driving category growth — but it’s the ease of preparation of plant-based foods that’s turning so many meat-eaters toward plants. (Plant proteins don’t require the levels of safety or cooking temperatures animal products require.)

With the success of products like Beyond Meat’s Beyond Burger, which is strategically (and brilliantly) merchandised in the supermarket meat aisle even though it’s entirely plant-based, and companies like Memphis Meats exciting the category with meat products made without any animals, it’s clear consumers want plant-based products to help them reduce their meat intake. They want to eat healthier and more ethical foods whenever possible. There’s absolutely no reason to think Amazon would veer away from that. It could have purchased any retailer. It chose the one shining a light on a better food system. It’s clearly invested in turning consumers away from not only the processed junk and sugary soda offenders, but the animal products clogging  up our arteries, air, and ethics.

Earlier this week, the Plant Based Foods Association, the trade organization for the plant-based industry, announced the launch of a Research and Education Fund solely focused on supporting the marketing and merchandising efforts for the category. Its goal is to help supermarkets and other retailers better serve the target customer in finding and purchasing plant-based foods. And, at least for the foreseeable future, while consumers are sure to move some purchases online, many are still going to visit supermarkets to buy these things.

There’s a visceral, necessary experience in walking through those market aisles that online shopping can’t replicate (yet). And with a category as robust as plant-based foods, customers want to stand in the aisles and marvel at it all while stocking their carts. It’s an essential part of the process. Amazon, it seems, finally understands the value of this. (It’s $13.7 billion.)

Find Jill on Twitter and Instagram

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ColumnWhole Foods Market has been compared to heaven on earth. It’s not far off the mark. But what do all those labels and symbols mean? This edition of Behind the Label goes on a journey into Whole Foods’ Whole Trade certification.

The Good

If you haven’t yet set foot in a Whole Foods Market—even if eating healthy isn’t a priority for you—it’s worth a visit. For first timers, it’s kind of like strolling around the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria hotel even if you won’t be staying the night. Eventually though, most shoppers realize there are plenty of affordable products—products with quality ingredients and missions built on integrity.

That’s the core foundation of Whole Foods Market as co-founder John Mackey recently explained on an episode of Oprah Winfrey’s “Super Soul Sunday.” And the “Whole Trade” label is the distillation of his vision.

The Whole Trade certification is a proprietary label established and vetted by Whole Foods Market. According to the company’s website, the Whole Trade guarantee means products meet 5 requirements:

• Meet our strict product Quality Standards
• Provide more money to producers
• Ensure better wages and working conditions for workers
• Care for the environment
• Donate 1% of sales to Whole Planet Foundation®

Because Whole Foods’ standards are extremely high, in places like Ecuador and Mexico, Whole Trade partners pay their employees higher than average wages and provide a quality work experience.

Whole Trade products help to support community development by building in funding models that go directly to the communities to decide how to utilize the money. Examples include vaccinations and other health care needs, education, computer centers, child care and food programs and many more programs decided upon by the communities.

This gives the workers incentives above and beyond their regular earnings and because the community gets to decide how to spend the funding, they’re motivated to ensure the business thrives.

Like all products sold in Whole Foods Markets, the Whole Trade guarantee means products are free from artificial ingredients, preservatives and other undesirable ingredients. These products may be certified organic, certified Fair Trade, or Non-GMO verified, but it’s not a requirement. These products must also use “sound environmental practices that encourage biodiversity and healthy soils,” the company says on its website. “While some Whole Trade products are organic; others respect our planet Earth using a variety of conservation methods or respectful wild harvesting. Third-party certifiers confirm specific criteria is met.”

To bear the Whole Trade guarantee on a product, there must also be a donation to the Whole Planet Foundation—the chain’s microlending program, which has already committed nearly $50 million in loans to more than 3 million people in 59 countries.

The Bad

The Whole Trade guarantee, as well-rounded as it is in its mission, is also reliant on imported products—peppers from Mexico, flowers from Ecuador, chocolate and coffees from all around the world, to name a few. While these products may be grown or produced in conditions that are creating stronger communities in the developing world, there’s the impact of transporting these products to the U.S. This means lots of fossil fuels to fly, ship or truck products into the country.

As a leader in working with producers around the world, could the Whole Trade guarantee also become a label for alternate fossil fuels? Could the brand look at how to make its importing process use a smaller carbon footprint? If Elon Musk can put rockets into space, surely Whole Foods can bring flowers to the U.S. without it being an oil-intensive operation. Wouldn’t it be something to see a partnership with Tesla Motors on all transportation needs for Whole Foods? That may be way off into the future, but hopefully it’s a goal the chain is already considering.

Virgin Atlantic is also working on the fossil fuel issue, and even won an award for its development of biofuel options, which would be quite useful in flying in fresh cut flowers and other commodities requiring air transport. “This is an exciting innovation and a great step forward for Virgin Atlantic’s ‘Change in the Air’ sustainability programme,” the company said on its website. “It’s also another good example of how carbon emissions can be seen as a business opportunity, not just a business problem.” If the developed nations of the world are keen on supporting growth in the developing nations, we’ve also got to look at solving this problem of fossil fuel dependence. It would take the sting out of importing and help to create a truly sustainable global economy.

Another issue is that many of the Whole Trade products are fruits and vegetables—produce that’s not in season locally (or never in the contiguous U.S., like pineapple). This means that local farmers have a harder time selling their seasonal foods. Many American farmers are struggling in today’s climate and economy. So, seeing pineapples from Costa Rica on sale when it’s plum season isn’t exactly the best case scenario for local foods. Creating a year-round season for foods that have specific growing seasons, like asparagus, peppers and melons, also doesn’t help consumers to understand their local produce season. Whole Foods is often the first step to a healthy diet for customers and teaching them that peppers are a year-round commodity is not dishonest, but it’s not necessarily the most forthcoming approach either, even if there are signs that indicate country of origin. Still, making high quality, fresh produce available year-round is a very good thing, and empowering developing world communities in the process is inspiring.

Some Whole Trade products are also processed—even if minimally so. A chocolate bar, cookie or popcorn are certainly not Oreos, Doritos or Snickers, but these products can include high levels of added sugars and salts. So buyer beware when pulling a Whole Trade item off the shelf, particularly if you have dietary restrictions. While it may be an indicator of a healthier supply chain, it’s not always an indicator of a healthier snack choice.

The Questionable

Whole Foods is a cut above the rest of the nation’s supermarkets. It offers more transparency than any other chain of its size, and commitments like the Whole Trade guarantee are certainly good things. But we do have to ask ourselves whether we need some of the products in our lives. Cut flowers make beautiful birthday or Mother’s Day gifts, but so do wild-picked ones. Do we really need to be flying in flowers from high up in the Ecuadorian mountains?

While the Whole Trade guarantee does work with third-party certifiers such as organic and Fair Trade certifying bodies, there is no party verifying Whole Foods’ Whole Trade stamp. Consumers have to just trust that the logo is a guarantee they can feel good about.

Often, but not always, Whole Trade products are sold as premiums—meaning they cost more even though there may be products sold for less that rival the quality and mission behind the Whole Trade guarantee. Those premiums are usually sent back to the communities to support the programs that make the Whole Trade label desirable, but for the budget-conscious shopper they may not be the best choice.

Still, when most other supermarkets are filled with unhealthy foods and products that rely on deceptive marketing campaigns, working towards a Whole Trade guarantee is huge step towards healthier economies and consumers.

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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Whole Foods Market, the Austin-based supermarket chain, began opening doors around the country more than thirty years ago. At the time, the company saw a limited market opportunity. Today, things are quite different.

Whole Foods Market founder, John Mackey, thought a reasonable goal for his organic and natural food-focused chain was about 100 U.S. locations. Now, closing in on 400, the market opportunities continue to increase, showing little sign of slowing down.

Even among the nation’s most destitute neighborhoods, Whole Foods customers seek what the store excels at: high quality—and high-priced—food, household and personal care products. CNN reports:

When will I be able to get wheatgrass in my smoothie? Do you sell dehydrated pineapple? They want how much for this organic coconut oil? It is the kind of earnest banter you might hear at any Whole Foods Market store in Manhattan or San Francisco — only these snippets were among the full-on foodie conversations picked up in the aisles of Whole Foods’ lone store in Detroit, a gleaming 21,000-square-foot food and natural-products emporium that opened in June 2013, six weeks before the city filed for bankruptcy protection.

Detroit may be the best example of a modern U.S. city struggling to survive. And while the pricey Whole Foods Market offerings may seem antithetical to the city’s survival, the store may actually be helping to lift Detroit out of its melee with the present day economy.

How does Whole Foods Market’s costly inventory equal cities like Detroit getting healthier and more stable? Mainly because people want to, and need to, get healthier, too. The well-deserved nickname “Whole Paycheck” that Whole Foods is often known as, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is the place people want to spend all of their money. And for good reason. Lifting a city like Detroit out of its decades of poverty can’t be done by unhealthy people. Aside from the healthy foods sold in Whole Foods, there’s an otherworldly quality being inside the stores emits, too—be it disorienting and a little bit terrifying at first. “As the great, sliding glass doors part I am immediately smacked in the face by a wall of cool, moist air that smells of strawberries and orchids. I leave behind the concrete jungle and enter a cornucopia of organic bliss; the land of hemp milk and honey. Seriously, think about Heaven and then think about Whole Foods; they’re basically the same,” writes Kelly MacLean, Stand up comic, actress and writer.

But it’s not just Detroit. The 100 locations maximum envisioned by Mackey has now been stretched to 1,200 (including UK and Canadian locations). It’s likely to stretch past that eventually, too. In the Northeast, or here in Los Angeles, the number of Whole Foods locations is particularly dense compared with the rest of the country. But more are still popping up, sure to succeed, sure to lure new customers and devotees—converts from the drab aisles and uninspired food of conventional markets.

While conventional grocery store sales are flat, or even declining, Whole Foods Market is at the core of the booming organic food industry that generated more than $35 billion in U.S. sales last year. Count “natural” foods and that number skyrockets to an estimated $150 billion, explains CNN. Whole Foods itself raked in nearly $13 billion last year (and more than 7 million customers each week). Target and Wal-Mart are now getting in on the action in a big way, too. And even though the two larger chains sell more organic products than Whole Foods by volume, it’s Whole Foods’ lead they’re following. Whole Foods “is tiny by comparison, but it’s had an outsize impact on the industry and defied the headwinds facing its brethren by dominating in the food category that’s growing — one that, not coincidentally, it helped create,” reports CNN.

A big part of its success in offering healthier food is that it doesn’t offer judgment, explains CNN, “You can buy vegan cheese at Whole Foods, but you can also buy cheesecake.” If anything, it softens the transition to living a healthier lifestyle, buffering those Brussels sprouts and brown rice with beer and chocolate. Over time, though, customers may find themselves buying more of the truly healthy foods, and less of the other stuff. It’s why those potential market limits continue to expand. Where once maybe only ten cities could support such a health-minded institution, moving towards more than 1,000 now, makes sense. Says CNN: “Whole Foods didn’t alter or dumb down its formula for Detroit, and why should it?” What would be the point of a Whole Foods Market that reflected the destitute state of a city like Detroit? If a city–or a country– is going to reinvent itself, the magic might just be most likely to sprout up surrounded by organic fruits and vegetables, organic chocolate, hemp milk and honey.

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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The post Welcome to the United States of Whole Foods Markets: Is Organic Food Saving America? appeared first on EcoSalon.

Whole Foods Market, the nation’s largest certified organic retail chain, has always been ahead of its time. And now it seems the chain has also taken a step slightly backwards into a bygone era: selling records.

Cruise through the aisles of Whole Foods and you may find your head bopping and hips swaying a little more than usual as you peruse the tree ripe peaches. That may be due to the live DJ spinning vinyl records, which are also on sale in five of the chain’s SoCal locations.

Selling music is not new to Whole Foods Market. Checkout aisles often feature CDs a la Starbucks selections, or the eclectic world music offerings from Putumayo. But selling LPs is a new venture, and one that takes up considerably more valuable retail selling space than a compact disc. It’s a commitment. (But records always have been. Perhaps that’s one reason we went smaller in the first place. People were getting tired of building Ikea shelves to hold all their vinyl.)

Still, the move may prove to be profitable, if not also elevating Whole Foods to uber-hip status. After all, kale can only do so much. According to TIME Magazine, Urban Outfitters, the trendy clothing store, has become one of the nation’s top-sellers of vinyl records. Like healthy eating, vinyl is making a comeback among music purists who reject compressed electronic music files as spoiling sound and experience. An MP3 file is to vinyl what Uncle Ben’s is to organic heirloom Fair Trade brown rice. Iceberg lettuce to Upland Cress. Sprite to GT’s Kombucha. While music industry sales were flat (at best) last year, vinyl sales rose 19 percent. Whole Foods may still always be considered a place to purchase food first and foremost, but “adding records helps move the chain from a grocery store to a lifestyle brand,” reports TIME.

Also available alongside vinyl selections Whole Foods Market customers can pick up a pair of LSTN Headphones, which work on a TOMs and Warby Parker model with the Starkey Hearing Foundation. Proceeds from every pair of headphones sold help a hearing impaired person in need of hearing assistance.

So, next time you’re making out your grocery list, remember to add the Rolling Stones, Daft Punk, Frank Sinatra and Bob Marley for an organic meal that’s most aurally delicious. And be sure to invite Henry Rollins to dinner.

Keep in touch with Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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Don’t believe the hype.

These days, big brands are falling over themselves to prove they are toeing the planet-friendly line and sticking to wholesome products – and that’s good for everyone (when it’s not a lie, of course). Over the last 4 years we’ve been keen to champion the companies choosing the natural and sustainable over the artificial & toxic. Here are 6 posts from our archives where we ask – is it natural?

I purposely put all of the prominent, still-independent brands in this list because I want to tell their stories. But this isn’t a story about small vs. big, small being good and big being bad.

All the independents listed below are big companies, but they have the ability to uphold higher standards and work within their missions because they aren’t beholden to the intense scrutiny of the money managers.

Just for fun, can you guess which ones they are?

The Stories (And Money) Behind 10 Of Your Favorite Organic And Natural Brands

We use conditioners to keep our hair healthy, sleek and shiny. Or just to avoid looking like the Scarecrow from Oz.  Whether you’re a daily conditionista or someone who simply smooths it on once or twice a week, you’re going to want to keep it organic.

Why? To avoid the common ingredient in conventional conditioners called Lauramide DEA. It strips away important amino acids like serine, histamine and other hair and skin proteins. This can leave hair feeling dry and unmanageable – creating the need to use more conditioner. Who knew hair conditioner could be so conspiracy-theory! While the debate continues to rage about how conditioners will eventually destroy us all, we’ve got you covered with products that won’t.

6 Best Organic Hair Conditioners

Greenpeace recently reported that clothing items bearing the logos of 14 global brands – including Adidas, H&M, Calvin Klein and Abercrombie & Fitch – have been found to contain nonylphenol ethoxylates (NPEs), chemicals that can break down to form the hormone-disrupting substance nonylphenol (NP). Just this morning, Reuters released the news that Nearly 300 Cambodian workers fell sick this week at a garment factory producing goods for Swedish fashion brand H&M.

14 Fashion Brands Test Positive For Hormone Disrupting Chemicals

A Perfume Organic offers four scents, each for $65: Green, Urban Organic, Perfumed Wine-Rose and White Magik. Green is rose with hint of chamomile; Urban Organic is lemon with ginger and grapefruit; White Magik has white flowers with spearmint; and Perfumed Wine-Rose is berry, crisp apple and peppers. I have to be honest – with my history of fragrance headaches, I approached these perfumes as one might approach a root canal. You know you gotta do it, but you just want it to be over with. Commence crushing headache, right?

Cue the ringing of church bells and throwing of confetti! Nary a headache did I have with these scents. They smelled fresh and botanical. If you want to smell like fruit, you smell like fruit. If you want a hint of floral, it’s there. My favorite was White Magik for its sage and spearmint “aftersmell.”

A Fragrance Without The Fragrance: Organic Perfume Review

There are a lot of eyeliners on the market, with pencil, liquid and cake eyeliners being the most popular. The only true skill you need is a steady hand, and what I mean by that is the steadiness it takes to make your eyes look superbly lined and cat-like, without appearing like something The Joker may have applied!

The trick to lining your eyes is to start small. Do little dashes along your lid and then blend with a brush to avoid that weird eyeliner strip of flesh – you know, when there is a space of flesh between your eyeliner and your actual eye. Start from the middle and do small strokes, front to back. Short strokes, small dots even, can help you look more Catwoman than Scary Makeup Clown.

Five Of The Best Natural And Organic Eyeliners

Take a stroll through the cereal aisle and you’ll see box after box of sugary confections that look more like desserts than breakfast. Of course, all of those glazed mini cinna-buns and marshmallows are clearly not healthy, but what about the whole grain oats, shredded wheat and flax flakes? General Mills’ Oatmeal Crisp Crunchy Almond is “whole grain guaranteed,” but the ingredients include brown sugar, sugar, high-fructose corn syrup and honey, making it 27% sugar. Kellogg’s Raisin Bran may be mostly wheat flakes, but it still has just as much sugar as Lucky Charms at 19 grams. In contrast, Kashi 7 Grain Whole Puffs has zero grams of sugar, and Cheerios have just 1. Check out this chart at Harvard School of Public Health to compare dozens of varieties.

10 Health Foods With More Sugar Than A Coke

Images: stublog, kaibara, kaibara87 and

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Whole Foods has undoubtedly changed the organic and natural foods industry, but is it for the better?

For some, Whole Foods is a god-send – a convenient, well-stocked supermarket filled with a trustworthy, if somewhat overpriced, mix of natural and organic foods. For others, Whole Foods is a symbol of capitalism’s ills, a cornerstone of the “Industrialized Organic” complex that is contributing to the death of the small farmer.

Most people I know lie somewhere in the middle: they can’t deny the appeal of a one-stop-shop for their healthy yuppie lifestyles, but they’re skeptical of how conscience-friendly a company can be once it’s grown into a publicly traded corporation. In this week’s Behind the Label, we take a look at the good and the bad of Whole Foods, with a particular focus on its in-house 365 Everyday Value^® brand.

If you’re a natural foodie on a budget, you’re probably familiar with 365 Everyday Value, which encompasses a range of products from butter to body wash to balsamic vinegar. 365 products tend to be basic in nature and cheaper than their shelf-mates. But how trust-worthy are they?

The Good

Whole Foods had a humble start as a small natural foods store in Austin, Texas, started by 25-year-old college drop-out (and current CEO) John Mackey, his then-girlfriend Rene Lawson, and a staff of 19. Today, Whole Foods is a publicly-traded company with more than 310 stores in the U.S. and United Kingdom and plans for aggressive expansion in secondary markets over the next decade.

In addition to stocking a wide variety of organic, natural, and locally-sourced foods, Whole Foods also offers a number of generic products under its 365 Everyday Value^® brand, which claims to “fill your pantry without emptying your pocketbook.” All 365 products are either certified organic or enrolled in the Non-GMO Project, which verifies that genetically modified organisms are not present in the product. As mentioned in the recent Behind the Label on Kashi, verification from the Non-GMO Project can be difficult given the preponderance of genetically engineered crops in America, so Whole Foods’ commitment to this issue is worth noting.

Whole Foods has also been a heavy proponent of GMO labeling, a popular topic in the natural foods community.

Our goal at Whole Foods Market is to provide informed consumer choice with regard to genetically engineered ingredients (also known as GMOs or Genetically Modified Organisms). Clearly labeled products enable shoppers who want to avoid foods made with GMOs to do so.

In addition to its stance on GMO transparency, Whole Foods’ quality standards have been recognized as being among the top in the industry, and the company maintains a list of “unacceptable ingredients,” which it says will never appear on its shelves.

This dedication to quality doesn’t stop at food. In 2008, Whole Foods launched the Premium Body Care standard, its very own verification system for natural beauty products. The system focuses on a number of categories, including preservatives, surfactants, and fragrance, and has labeled more than 400 ingredients “unacceptable,” including parabens, polypropylene and polyethylene glycols, sodium lauryl, and laureth sulfates. And in the household cleaning aisle, there’s the Whole Foods Market Eco-Scale rating system, which marks products on a scale from orange (high standards) to green (super duper high standards).

The Bad

The 365 Everyday Value^® brand’s reputation hasn’t always been so squeaky clean. In 2008, a television report from WJLA in Washington, DC, questioned if consumers can trust Whole Foods 365 organic products if the label says that they are made in China.

What do you know about organic foods? It’s pesticide free and more expensive… but it’s worth it… right? Not necessarily. Would you believe “organically grown” in China? How organic can that be?

In a detailed rebuttal to WJLA, Whole Foods’ Organic Certification Coordinator Joe Dickson said that organic products from China can absolutely be certified organic. In the rebuttal, Dickson points out that USDA organic certification measures food integrity regardless of where in the world crops are grown.

Whole Foods Market is a pioneer in promoting and selling natural and organic foods and we have done more in our history as a company to promote and build organics than any other retailer … This is not “selling an image;” this is actually making sure that every one of our 275 stores is operating in compliance with the National Organic Standards and upholding organic integrity in everything they do.

Whole Foods’ assurances have done little to appease foods activists like the Organic Consumers Association, which picketed a Chicago Whole Foods in 2011 for selling genetically modified brands like Tofutti, Kashi, and Boca Burgers. The OCA continues to publish articles attacking Whole Foods practices, including a controversial piece insinuating that Whole Foods was “in bed with” factory farm bad boy Monsanto. That article led to rumors that Monsanto was buying out Whole Foods, which Whole Foods vehemently denied as “crazy talk.”

The Questionable

Whole Foods has taken major strides toward offering organic and GMO-free products at reasonable prices, particularly with its 365 Everyday Value^® line. But naturally, the company’s growth and success have earned it many critics, including author and food activist Michael Pollan, who associated Whole Foods with what he calls the “Industrialized Organic” in his popular book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey responded to Pollan’s claims in an open letter:

I am not sure if merely because of our size and success Whole Foods Market deserves the pejorative label “Big Organic” or “Industrial Organic,” or even to be linked to those categories. I would argue instead that organic agriculture owes much of its growth and success over the past 20 years to Whole Foods Market’s successful growth and commitment to organic. As an organization we continually challenge ourselves to be responsible and ethical tenants of the planet. Through our stores, large and small organic farmers, both local and international, can offer their products to an increasingly educated population that is more interested in organics every day.

Pollan, who professes much respect for Mackey and Whole Foods, responded:

After visiting a great many large organic farms to research my book, many of them your suppliers, it seems to me undeniable that organic agriculture has industrialized over the past few years, and that Whole Foods has played a part in that process–for good and for ill … And as I tried to make clear in my account of the organic industry, much is gained when organic gets big … But surely we can recognize all these important gains without turning a blind eye to the costs: the sacrifice of small farmers and of some of the founding principles of organic farming (its commitment to polyculture, for example; to “whole” rather than highly processed foods; to social and economic sustainability, etc.)

It all seems to trace back to the big corporation/small business dilemma: do you buy your organic kale and locally-harvested honey at the strip mall supermarket, or do you support your local farmers and neighborhood natural foods store? If price wasn’t an inhibitor, I’m sure most conscious consumers would go with the second option.

But even on Whole Foods’ shelves that conundrum exists. Buy the locally-sourced salad dressing for $13.99, or the generic 365 version for $3.99? The up-and-coming fair trade brand body lotion for $15, or the 365 cream for $5?

While I appreciate the lower-priced options, I can’t help but notice a disconnect. If Whole Foods wants to truly support local farmers and small businesses, the company should stop undercutting their offerings with its lower-priced, mass-produced, 365-branded items.

SEE ALSO:

Behind the Label: The Kashi Controversy

Behind the Label: McDonald’s See What We’re Made Of Campaign

Behind the Label: Chipotle, Food With Integrity

Check out all Behind the Label columns here.

Image: Robert Banh

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How to move on from the holiday excess and truly feed yourself.

If, like many, you overindulged during the holidays, you might be feeling tempted to subsist on raw carrots, lettuce, and water for a few weeks – but this approach is all wrong. It’s not what your body needs right now and it will leave you starving, in more ways than one.

First Step – Forgive yourself and stop feeling guilty so you can move on. If you need help, visit the very cool Choose Love Project and view videos of women talking about their struggles with body image. Now, go take a nice brisk walk or head to a yoga class. Do whatever it is that makes you feel balanced. Don’t punish yourself for enjoying the holidays by overdoing it at the gym.

Feeling better? Now, let’s get sensible.
Whether you’re a vegan, a vegetarian, or an omnivore, you can follow the same set of principles for healthy winter eating. Make sure everything you eat is seasonal, prioritizing deeply colored foods; use long, slow cooking techniques to concentrate flavor (and satisfaction), adding plenty of warming spices; make sure everything you eat is whole and unprocessed; foster healthy digestion by adding fermented foods to your diet; and don’t be afraid of fat in moderation. Just make sure it’s healthy, high quality fat.

Seasonal and Colorful

If you want to know what’s in season, take a stroll through a farmers market. If you don’t have year-round markets in your area, think roots, and dark leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables like cabbage and broccoli, winter squashes, citrus, and the last of fall’s pears and apples.

Warming

Long, slow cooking, high heat roasting, and braising are the most satisfying cooking styles for winter, lending themselves well to fibrous vegetables and greens, as well as beans, whole grains, and certain cuts of meat – all are foods that are good to eat right now. Think slow simmered meat and/or vegetable stews, chili, roasted root vegetables and squash, bean dishes, chewy grains, and braised greens. Add plenty of warming spices like ginger, cumin, pepper, and cinnamon to your cooking.

Whole

Stay away from processed and packaged foods. Shop the perimeter of the store for fresh fruits and vegetables, meats, seafood, and high quality, minimally processed diary products. Shop the bulk bins or grocery shelves for beans, lentils, and whole grains. Try cutting out sugar in favor of less processed sweeteners like maple syrup, honey, and molasses. If eating meats and seafood, whole versions are more economical and tasty. Try baking, steaming, or broiling a whole fish, such as trout or bass, enjoy omega-3 rich sardines, or roast a whole chicken.

High Quality Healthy Fats

Don’t be afraid of fat as it warms, promotes satiety, and carries flavor. Just make sure it’s a healthy fat enjoyed in moderation. Think olive oil, organic butter from pasture raised animals, good quality lard that you’ve rendered yourself from a humanely-raised animal, coconut oil, and organic peanut oil.

Digestible

Promote good digestion and that feeling of lightness you’re seeking by eating reasonable portions more often, and making sure you’re including unprocessed (and unsweetened) yogurt, kefir, and aged raw cheeses, like parmesan in your diet. Try pairing fermented pickles or sauerkraut with fatty or rich foods, stir a little miso into dressings or marinades, or drink kombucha between meals.

A few recipes to try that illustrate the principles above:

Lentil Soup with Spinach and Lemon

Butternut Squash and Coconut Curry

Celery Root Soup with Bacon and Honey

Warm Farro Salad with Roasted Squash, Oyster Mushrooms, and Chard

Quinoa Salad with Dried Cranberries and Pumpkin Seeds

Chickpea Hotpot

Simple Farro and Bean Stew

Chicken and Lentil Cholent

Whole Steamed Fish with Ginger and Scallions

If you sometimes crave a little something sweet before bedtime, instead of grabbing a cookie or diving into the ice cream, try a cup of warm milk with honey and vanilla. It is mighty satisfying and will help you sleep.

For a more in-depth look at these principles and a Chinese Medicine perspective on what to eat for best health and most enjoyment (as well as delicious recipes) visit Gastronicity, and look for the author’s upcoming book, Real Food All Year, from Harbinger Press, due out in April 2012.

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate,  on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

Images: Vanessa Barrington

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In the absence of all the conveniences that make America so cozy, Shelter Editor K. Emily Bond ponders life without microwave ovens, HBO and good lighting. 

My husband, kid and I live in an ancient walled city. We don’t have a basement because, I suspect, someone’s skeletal remains are down there. There are lots of antediluvian dead people underfoot; you can’t dig in Seville, Spain without bumping up against a pile of bones or Roman cutlery, which invariably leads to bureaucratic disaster. As a result, there are few swimming pools within city limits and even fewer basements.

Bones I can live with, permitting they pre-date Columbus. The lack of a basement (despite my storage issues) is something I’ve learned to live with, too.

Here are a few more typically American conveniences that I’ve loved and left, the dearth of which has improved my quality of life tremendously.

A Microwave Oven
Over 90% of American homes have a microwave oven. They’re the ultimate in convenience, and admittedly more energy efficient than conventional ovens. That’s the good part.

Now, I’ll refrain from stating the obvious “but!” that follows (hint: it concerns the nutrients lost to your beloved Black & Decker). Instead, I’d like to direct your attention to the story of Norma Levitt. She was transfused a bag of blood that the nurse made the mistake of zapping in a microwave oven.

Guess what happened?

Norma died.

If the convenience of microwave heating could so dramatically alter the molecular structure of blood, thus killing poor Norma Levitt, imagine what it’s doing to your leftovers.

HBO
Apparently too much television can kill you, this according to an Australian study. The more hours you spend watching TV, the greater your risk of dying at an earlier age. Seriously. Like, by the hour. The study found that each hour spent in front of the TV increases your risk of dying from heart disease by 18 percent.

Is True Blood really worth it? Not if it was like last season.

Central Heating and Air
Air conditioning works by raking air across a thermostatically controlled refrigeration system and directing it back into our living environments. It’s really quite awesome on a hot day, but it also increases energy costs by about 50 percent and puts enormous strain on our environment.

Like it or not, a lot of our electricity is still produced by burning coal, thus contributing to dirty air, acid rain and global warming.

Stan Cox, author of Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths about Our Air-Conditioned World, writes that, “if people in India, Brazil and Indonesia used as much air-conditioning per capita as we do (and why not, their climates are hotter than ours), they would consume not only their own electricity supplies but also all of the electricity in Mexico, the United Kingdom and Italy – plus all 60 nations of Africa! The air-conditioning of America’s homes, businesses, schools, and vehicles causes the release of greenhouse gases equivalent to 400 million tons of carbon dioxide annually.”

Whole Foods
The joy I feel during a shop at Whole Foods is fettered only at the checkout line. No matter how good, ethical, healthy, organic and “local” Whole Foods makes me feel, when I take an objective step back and really look at the store – the layout, the lighting that makes the produce look like it’s being bathed in late afternoon sunshine – I can’t help but feel that I’m being marketed to and, in fact, kind of duped.

Is it really better to buy organically grown tomatoes flown in from Chile? Am I really helping small, local farmers in my native Maryland if most of the organic produce in this country comes from California? Particularly if “five or six big California farms dominate the whole industry,” as suggested by this article in Slate?

More pressing, do I really need a $10 bag of cherries?

Probably not.

Thankfully, opportunities to buy roadside produce abound in this fine nation of ours, as do hyper-local food co-ops. The lighting might not be as pretty (nor the parking as convenient) but at the very least you’re adding value to the quality of your life and the community.

Images: Walker Art Center; jmv; marlambie; Joe Shlabotnik

The post HBO, Whole Foods & Other American Conveniences We Can Live Without appeared first on EcoSalon.

I first heard about Alejandro “Alex” Velez and Nikhil “Nik” Arora’s plan to grow mushrooms from coffee grounds about two years ago. At the time, I dismissed it as one of those ideas that sounds great as part of a green business contest for graduate students but that would probably get dropped as soon as the lucrative job offers came along.

And, for awhile, that’s essentially what happened. Nik and Alex did the MBA thing, interviewing for jobs in investment banking and consulting and securing offers from great firms. But fast forward a year: I’m meeting Alex in a dodgy parking lot under the freeway overpass in Emeryville to tour the warehouse of Back to the Roots Ventures, his and Nik’s start-up. He drives up in an old beat-up sedan and hops out in jeans and a plaid shirt … not exactly banker garb.

We head into the warehouse and Alex introduces me to their warehouse manager and a young intern who’s busily packing cardboard kits. “We came to a point where the mushroom thing was really taking off and Nik and I decided to go for it,” Alex explains. “We turned down our job offers and became farmers instead.”

Well, sort of. What started as a small agricultural business is now a booming consumer product business: Nik and Alex’s Grow-Your-Own Mushroom Garden, a do-it-yourself mushroom-growing kit, is currently sold at all Whole Foods around the country. It’s a pretty amazing trajectory for a business that started just over two years ago as a project in the boys’ fraternity kitchen, with a few buckets-full of coffee grounds and some mushroom seeds.

Both MBA students at Berkeley at the time, the two had shared a class focused on potential business uses for the world’s waste products, during which they learned about various uses for coffee grounds. For some reason Alex still can’t quite explain, he and Nik were drawn to the idea of growing mushrooms from the stuff. They began experimenting and eventually managed to grow oyster mushrooms. “We took them over to some people we know at Chez Panisse to have them try them and tell us whether they thought we had something, and they said wow, these are really good.”

That was their first stroke of good luck: Not every MBA student has connections at Chez Panisse. Buoyed by a thumbs-up from that venerable Berkeley slow food institution, the two took their next batch of product to the popular Berkeley Bowl market. “Then the guy at Berkeley Bowl introduced us to the regional buyer for Whole Foods and once they were interested we started to realize this could really become a business,” Alex later told me.

It may sound like a string of amazing coincidences, but it’s partially the pair’s passion for what they’re doing that has managed to get so many other folks on board so quickly. The Whole Foods buyer loved the idea of mushrooms grown from a waste product and soon had Nik and Alex supplying oyster mushrooms to all of the Bay Area’s Whole Foods, and participating in the market’s local producer loan program as well. The problem? It’s tough to make money in mushrooms unless you’re running a major agricultural operation, and the Back to the Roots guys weren’t really interested in that. That’s where the mushroom kit came in.

Packed with about a pound of coffee grounds plus the mushroom seeds, the Grow-Your-Own Mushroom Garden promises a pound of mushrooms within 10 days. All you have to do is spritz it regularly with the tiny water bottle enclosed in the kit, and keep it out of direct sun. The kit retails for $19.95 and is available at Whole Foods and through the company’s own website. To get coffee grounds they need, the two also inked a deal with Peets, which pays them to pick up over 10,000 pounds a week of grounds, and also sells the kits in some of its shops. Meanwhile, the spent mushroom substrate they’re left with after they make the kits turns out to be an excellent soil amendment, which they’re now selling as well.

Bouncing around aisle after aisle of mushroom kits, Alex is excitedly describing their journey, a tale punctuated often by segues like “Oh! And kids really love the kits, too, and any kid that sends us a photo of them with the kit, we send them a free kit.”

He’s so genuine it’s hard not to get swept up in the excitement, despite the fact that I’m cold and everything smells vaguely mildew-y. And the excitement continues at home, where I’m thrilled to find that even with my minimal gardening skills, the mushrooms were sprouting out of the kit on my counter in days. Sure, I forgot the spritzing half the time, but I still managed to get some nice shrooms out of it, and it’s hard not to feel pretty pleased with yourself when you’re harvesting mushrooms you grew from coffee grounds.

Follow Amy on Twitter @amywestervelt.

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