NPR:

If you buy organic products, your options may be about to expand. The U.S. and the European Union are announcing that they will soon treat each other’s organic standards as equivalent. In other words, if it’s organic here, it’s also organic in Europe, and vice versa. Organic food companies are cheering because their potential markets just doubled.

Those formal definitions of “organic” actually were codified quite recently — just a few decades ago. Before that, organic farming was more of philosophy, based on the idea that you could grow healthier food by nurturing natural life in the soil. In different countries, there were different prophets of this idea:Rudolf Steiner in Germany; Sir Albert Howard in England; J.I. Rodale in the United States. All of them became organic advocates early in the 20th Century.

Interesting insight into the business and regulation of organic foods.

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