Last month I mentioned that Dan and I had been to a Sustainable Food Summit, where we were educated on what other companies are doing to be sustainable and how to identify sustainable actions with label certifications. We heard from Safeway, Nature Valley Farms, and Coca Cola, just to name a few. You may be asking yourself, “What was Coca Cola doing at a sustainable food summit”, right? Well, they are using re-usable materials to make their bottles and a couple of other things that I have since forgotten. There was a marketing expert and several companies that do third party certification. The certifying companies gave several presentations as many specialize in specific certifications, such as: palm oil, humane treatment, rainforest, grass-fed, organic, non-gmo, and such. These third party certifiers were on deck to help producers find the best certification or certifications that would help their consumers know what was in, or not in, the products they produce. We were swimming in options, and felt that the certifiers should all get together and establish ONE certification that stated the food produced was clean, and caused no/minimal harm. I realize this is an over simplification and I do feel that labels are a way of educating the consumer and identifying some truths, but the truths are sometimes a little muddied. For instance, we were certified with one of the “humane treatment” certifications listed here, and some of the questions we had to answer in the numerous pages of paper work , were: 1.) How many months do your animals have access to pasture? 2.) How many months are your animals confined to a feed yard during the non-growing season? 3.) Do you provide birthing sheds for you animals? I’m certain this criterion was written for beef cattle, but still, I was surprised. Another example would be grass-fed. When we think of grass-fed or organic, we think of wide-open pastures, but animals can be confined and fed grass or organic feed and still be considered grass-fed or organic. Do not get me wrong, I am supportive of many of these labels, and believe that the perfect should not stand in the way of the good. We were very proud of our humane certification, as we believe in it and practice it whole-heartedly. But certifications can be expensive and our previous one had become cost prohibitive with the collections of annual fees and percentages of annual sales. We are currently seeking out a different humane certification, which does not have such excessive fees, to add to our state inspected claims of: “100% grass-fed, Raised Without Antibiotics, and 100% Humanely Field Harvested”, (no fancy state logo’s). All of this attention to certification, got me thinking: “Why do the folks that are really trying to produce clean, healthy, sustainable products have to go through all of the certifying?” Why isn’t it reversed? Shouldn’t many processed products, or products produced with chemicals, come with a skull and cross bones? How about proteins from CFO’s (Confined Feeding Operations), perhaps they should have a stamp of a sad/sick animal, and a green house gas admission certification? Alcohol and tobacco companies are regulated and their products come with warnings, why don’t other products that are harmful to human health, harmful to animal health, and/or harmful to environmental health come with regulations or warnings? In addition to them not having regulations or warnings, they can actually use claims that can be confusing to the consumer. Hormel Hams are “100% Natural”, Orange Juice is now “Gluten Free”, and so on. I think we may all have a pretty good idea on …