The organic market segment has now grown large enough ($15 billion in 2005) to attract big players. While the nation’s top ten supermarket chains have grown by less than 1 percent, organic-product sales sold outside the chains grew 38 percent in the past few years. That led General Mills Corporation to buy outfits like the Northwest’s Cascadian Farms, makers of organic-food products.

The trend toward acquisition of natural and organic suppliers by global corporations has prompted the remark, “How long before we get an organic Twinkie?” We may already have one. Look at the recent yearly growth in these categories of organic products, according to Natural Foods Merchandiser: prepared food, 37 percent; nutrition bars, 35 percent; snack foods, 29 percent; non-dairy beverages, 26 percent; and packaged grocery items, 23 percent. In addition, organic personal care products grew 42 percent, and organic pet products grew 93 percent—ten times faster than conventional pet products. “People are aspiring to an organic lifestyle,” says Jay Jacobowitz, president of Retail Insights, a marketing service in Brattleboro, Vermont. “It’s no longer just highly educated, higher-income people who are interested in buying these products, but more middle-class consumers are aspiring to an organic lifestyle.”

For years the organic food industry and the large conventional food producers were in very different camps. The organic camp looked at conventional producers as profit-mongers who cared little about the nutritional value of their products and the pesticide residues that might lurk in them—let alone the land where they were grown or the farm workers who labored there. The big food corporations dismissed the organic food producers and consumers as eccentric and marginal. But by the late 1990s, the organic food segment was showing double-digit growth every year, and that caught the attention of companies like General Mills.

With conventional food conglomerates moving into the organic food business, green shoppers—those concerned about the environmental impact of the products they buy, including organic foods—should make a practice of reading labels closely. Eco-friendly sounding terms abound on products these days. I see the term “free range” applied to chicken, and this conjures up in my mind the picture of chickens happily scratching around the yard, giving themselves a dust bath, and in other ways doing what comes naturally to chickens, including laying eggs in a cage-free henhouse. To check my impression against reality, I visited the Consumers Union Guide to Environmental Labels at http://www.ecolabels.org, an excellent web site for the skeptical buyer. According to Consumers Union, to use the term free range “the government only requires that outdoor access be made available for ‘an undetermined period’ each day. That means that the door to the coop could be opened for five minutes a day, and if the birds didn’t see the open door or chose not to leave—even every day—they could still qualify as free range.” So this explains why, when I visited the production facility of a local chicken ranch that boasts its chicken are free range, I found them crammed beak to beak in pens the size of small rooms.