After weeks of painstakingly thorough research and dedicating my body to the noble profession of journalism by acting as my own guinea pig, I have come to the following conclusion: Beer is awesome.

From its humble beginning as a brewmaster’s hazy notion until that sweet moment when it hits your lips, your brewski may be part of a master plan to bring you an environmentally friendly, carefully sourced, community minded, local-economy-driving, happiness-inducing good time. (That is, unless you’re drinking Coors. They want your money but they don’t really care if you have a good time.)

But not all beers are created equal, so in the name of fearless truth-telling, I spoke to brewers and beer experts from across the country, traveled to a distant land known as Soho, and of course, drank plenty of beer. I did all of this in hopes that you, the public, might be better equipped in evaluating the virtuousness of your brew.

The basics: Craft beer vs. everything else

Let’s start with the basics. In the world of beer, there are two main categories: craft and everything else. Under Brewers Association standards, to be a “craft brewer,” you need to meet three requirements. First, you must be small — meaning you produce 6 million barrels of beer or less. (That might sound like a lot, but compared to the nearly 100 million barrels produced by Anheuser Busch in 2012, even the 858,000 barrels produced by Sierra Nevada, the pioneer of craft brewing, looks meager.) Second, you need to be independent: No more than 25 percent of the business can be owned or controlled by a non-craft member of the beer industry. Third, you have to be “traditional.” In this case, that’s defined as brewing “either an all malt flagship” beer “or at least 50 percent” of your volume in all-malt beers. This is really a nice way of saying you can’t water down your beer with additives like rice or corn. On the taste scale, this is what separates your standard craft beer from the mass-produced behemoths like Budweiser, which uses a lot of rice, or Coors, which uses corn, wheat, and other “cereal grains” in its recipes.

Those may be the only technical requirements, but it turns out that craft-brewing guys (and a growing group of gals) have a bit of an overachievement problem. You see, they are really into beer. Like, really into beer. As Dave McLean, brewmaster and owner of San Francisco’s Magnolia Gastropub & Brewery, put it, “Most brewers are simply motivated by the challenge of making great beer.” Some will even break federal laws to do it: Chris Cuzme, the brewer at New York’s 508 GastroBrewery, for example, confessed to smuggling (and not declaring!) chamomile all the way back from Istanbul to make his Sea Witch Wit.

And in addition to being dedicated to the art of beer, some of these brewers also tend to be major environmentalists (not to mention mensches — read on to find out how). As McLean puts it, “Whether they think or articulate it this way, [craft brewers strive to brew] in a way that is good, clean, and fair.”

Ingredients: You are what you drink

At its core, beer is an agricultural product, and the basic recipe is deceptively simple: barley, hops, yeast, and water. But craft brewers go out of their way to carefully source their ingredients, though their relatively long shelf lives means that shipping doesn’t compromise their quality, even if it ups the brewery’s carbon footprint. “It’s not imperative to the quality of the beer that the ingredients come locally or seasonally,” says Megan Flynn, publisher and editor-in-chief of Beer West magazine. “But,” she adds, “there is a movement towards brewing beer with local ingredients where it can be sourced.”

While finding local hops outside of Oregon and Washington continues to be a challenge, a “beer-to-farm” movement, as Jimmy Carbone, owner of New York’s restaurant and beer bar Jimmy’s No. 43 and the co-founder of the city’s Good Beer Seal, calls it, is emerging. “Breweries are realizing they want to have more local hop growers to make beer from and they are building a mini-local beer economy,” he says. The new demand for local hops is bringing the crop back to some of its old stomping grounds. One New York farmer raised more than $30,000 on Kickstarter to import a German hops-harvesting machine, which he plans to make available to any local farmer who wants to use it. Anderson Valley Brewing Co. in Boonville, Calif., began growing hops in the beer garden as an ornamental homage to the region’s history as home to a formerly bustling hops economy. “Then we decided to grow enough to brew a batch of beer, then two batches,” Brewmaster Fal Allen told me, “and now we have about two acres of hop fields in production.”

Sourcing local malted barley is another challenge that craft brewers are meeting head-on. “There are a few big ‘malt houses’ that most of the breweries order from,” Flynn says, both in the U.S. and abroad. “But there’s also a big movement going on right now for artisan malting, or maltsters as they call themselves,” she adds. While there’s no official count on the number of maltsters in the country, Beer West writer Adrienne So reports that they are popping up all over the country, and counts Colorado Malting in Alamosa, Colo., and Valley Malt in Hadley, Mass., as the most prominent. “Malterie Frontenac in Quebec is at the forefront of the movement and helping a lot of people out with equipment and knowledge and the like,” she adds, proving once again that maybe Canada isn’t so bad after all.

Even breweries that aren’t sourcing their main ingredients locally are finding ways to incorporate regional flavors. Brooklyn Brewery infused European malts and Belgian dark sugar with raw wildflower honey from New York for its bomber-sized, cork-finished Local 2, making it an immediate favorite for a certain person who may or may not be drinking it right at this moment.

And considering beer is really just delicious, alcoholic water, brewers care a lot about the quality of their water supply, too. In response to the fracking threat in New York, local brewers have been unequivocal in their opposition. Brooklyn Brewery founder Steve Hindy calls fracking’s potential danger to New York’s water system “criminal,” and in February, Larry Bennett, the operator of Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown, N.Y., told NBC that he’d sooner close down his operation than brew with tainted water.  (Attention Game of Thrones fans: If you’re looking to party like a Westerosi, make sure you try the brewery’s Limited Edition Iron Throne, which combines the blonde sex appeal of a Lannister with the thoughtful complexity of a Stark, making what I like to call the perfect man pale ale.)

What about using organic ingredients?  

Despite some well-intentioned efforts to brew and sell organic beer, the overall reaction from both consumers and brewers has been pretty meh. “There’s not yet a super well-developed organic ingredient pipeline,” says McLean. “And one can always argue that there are farmers throughout the food community who do good work on the sustainability front without necessarily being certified as organic.” Flynn is a little less diplomatic on the topic, noting that some brewers have shipped organic hops all the way in from New Zealand, and the results were hardly noticeable. “There isn’t a discernible taste difference in organic beer versus non-organic. Some of the organic breweries would probably kill me for saying that, but there just isn’t,” she adds.

Factor in the added cost of organic ingredients, and the market just hasn’t really sustained an organic beer industry. New Belgium Brewery, a leading craft brewer in Fort Collins, Colo., learned this lesson the hard way when it had to cancel its gold medal-winning, certified-organic Mothership Wit because, according to its website, “consumers didn’t want to pay more for the increased cost.”

Keeping it clean: Craft breweries take sustainability to the next level

It’s not enough that these brewers are breathing new life into the art of beer and reviving lost agricultural traditions. Environmentalism apparently goes hand in hand with the art of beer making — from the very top of the beer industry all the way down to the bottom.

Somewhere between the time Budweiser pioneered turning leftover grains into animal feed in 1899 — still common practice among brewers, from the small Bridge and Tunnel Brewery in Queens to the expansive McMenamins in Oregon — and Alaskan Brewing Co. announcing it had turned those same grains into “beer powered beer” in February 2013, sustainability has become a hallmark of beer makers large and small. (Except for Coors, which, despite efforts to change its image, has a history of not giving a shit about the environment.) Most of these guys go all out: Sierra Nevada is the only brewery using hydrogen fuel cells onsite, and methane harvested from wastewater supplies New Belgium with 15 percent of its electricity needs. Both breweries also publicly keep track of their efforts.

It should also be noted that Anheuser Busch, despite a long, award-winning history of sustainability, still wants to keep the door open to pollution — in 2010, it spent millions of dollars supporting California’s Prop 26, a pro-polluter ballot initiative.

Giving back: Brewers heart their local communities

But beyond the big picture, breweries excel at spreading their focus on craft and quality in their local communities as well. “Community is where things really, truly shine,” McLean says. “Craft breweries employ local workers, keep money in their communities, and foster a sense of local awareness and pride.” This is true on both ends of the size spectrum: While a large brewery like New Belgium holds the Tour de Fat, raising more than $2 million for local nonprofits, the much smaller Keegan Ales in Kingston, N.Y., for example, hosts community events like free concerts showcasing local musicians. (The brewery’s Mother’s Milk, by the way, is so worth writing home about.)

Drink responsibly: Go local

With more than 2,100 craft breweries in the U.S., the Brewers Association estimates that almost every American lives within 10 miles of one (good news for Toby Keith, who might just have a soulmate in every town). Even cocktail-loving New York City has loads (my personal favorite: The aforementioned 508 GastroBrewery, home of rotating beers with wonderful names, like Spray Tan Pale Ale and the bacon-flavored Hamber). Even if a craft brewery isn’t using local hops and barley, drinking its beers means you’re pumping money back into your community’s economy instead of relying on greenhouse gases to truck in your booze. So whether you’re drinking in a brewery, a bar, or by yourself on the couch, look for something made nearby. You’ll be toasting to the health of your town — and the planet’s.

On the eve of the implementation of one of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s most controversial laws — limiting the allowable size of sugary drinks sold in the city — Justice Milton A. Tingling, Jr., of the New York State Supreme Court, sided with the law’s challengers, including the National Restaurant Association, the American Beverage Association, and the Soft Drink and Brewery Workers Union, overturning the Portion Cap Rule, aka the Soda Ban. Chiding the mayor, the Board of Health, and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOH) for circumventing the proper legislative channels, the decision was nothing less than a direct smackdown of Bloomberg’s “go-it-alone” style of governance.

The now-invalidated law was, according to the mayor’s office, the board, and the DOH, designed to lower the consumption of “sugary drinks,” and in turn lower the rate of obesity. In general terms, the law banned the sale of sugary drinks sold in cups or containers larger than 16 ounces. But, as its detractors quickly pointed out, the law was far from a panacea for the city’s obesity problem.

First, what fell into the “sugary drink” category was itself a matter of debate, as the definition includes only non-alcoholic, sugar-sweetened drinks with more than 25 calories per eight ounces of fluid, and specifically excludes beverages with a 50 percent or more milk or milk substitute content. So despite the calorie count in 16 ounces of a McDonald’s McCafé Chocolate Shake (700), Starbucks’ Double Chocolaty Chip Frappuccino (410), or a standard margarita (500+), sale of these drinks could continue unimpeded. Second, there was a consistency problem. While restaurants, theaters, and food carts would have to get rid of their giant sizes, other businesses — mainly grocery stores, convenience stores, bodegas, and 7-Elevens — would not fall under the regulation’s jurisdiction. So while a New Yorker like myself would no longer be able to buy a 32-ounce Coke at a movie theater concession stand, I could still theoretically — and this is entirely theoretical, as I would never engage in such nefarious behavior — buy a mondo soda at the bodega next door, stick it in my purse, and sip on it through the latest Mark Wahlberg flick. Finally, as Tingling was sure to point out, the law also would not have stopped anyone from getting unlimited free refills or “unlimited sugars after purchase.” (Are people dumping extra sugar into their sodas? Is this a thing?)

While these arguments raise some valid points, the exemptions would hardly have rendered the law ineffective. Even though the court eventually found that “the loopholes in this Rule effectively defeat the stated purpose,” rendering the law “arbitrary and capricious,” a closer reading of Tingling’s opinion quickly reveals that his real problem wasn’t with the law’s substance, but with the process through which it was passed.

Widely seen as Bloomberg’s law — not the board’s or the DOH’s, and certainly not the people’s — the soda ban was considered by many as part of the mayor’s last push to, as The New York Times put it, “burnish his legacy as he enters the final months of his career in City Hall.” And the court expressed its animus toward Bloomberg’s personal hand in the law from the outset.

“No mention is made in the Respondents’ moving papers as to who drafted the proposed rule. Petitioners assert and it is not refuted, that the Mayor’s office proposed the Rule, verbatim, to the Board.”

The court’s obvious frustration continues, as it notes that despite the stated purpose to combat New York City’s “obesity epidemic,” “the words ‘epidemic’ and ‘obesity’ are neither examined nor explained as much as they are stated as fact.” Even after reviewing the supporting science, including a 2004 Harvard University study showing that “women who drank one or more sugary drinks per day had an 83 percent greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes than women who infrequently consumed sugary drinks,” the court chose to leave the connection between obesity and sugary drinks as an open question.

The main problem with the law, as the court saw it, is not that it might be “futile” as the challengers argued, but rather that the board and the DOH — and clearly by extension, the mayor — “exceeded their authority and impermissibly trespassed on legislative jurisdiction.” In other words, lawmaking is not a one-man show — not even if you’re Michael Bloomberg.

Focusing on three factors,* the court determined that passage of the law had “run afoul of the separation of powers doctrine.” First, because of the cited health savings (New York City spends more than $4.7 billion on obesity-related health expenditures) and the 7-Eleven exemption, Tingling found the law to be “laden with exceptions based on economic and political concerns.” Second, after a review of the New York City Charter dating all the way back to the first one drafted in 1686, the court concluded that the board’s power to supervise and regulate the city’s food supply was limited to specific situations, “i.e., when the City is facing eminent [sic] danger due to disease.” Third, because the New York City legislature has tried — and failed — to regulate sugary beverages in the past, Bloomberg effectively usurped the democratic process to impose his own will.

In layman’s terms: Screw you and your big ideas, Mr. Mayor. You either play by our rules or you don’t play at all.

Every single one of the factors listed above could have gone the other way. An economic impact could have been seen to strengthen the law’s validity, not weaken it; and Tingling should have recognized that the 7-Eleven exemption is not the result of a political calculus, but rather due to the fact that, because its revenue is primarily from sales of items other than ready-to-eat food [PDF], 7-Eleven falls under the regulation of the Department of Agriculture and Markets and not the Department of Health. The city’s obesity problem could have been classified as a disease posing an “eminent [sic] danger” to the city, even if just an economic one: It spends almost $5 billion annually on the 23.7 percent of New York City adults and 40 percent of New York City schoolchildren suffering from obesity. The earlier failed attempts at legislation — soda taxes and removal of soda from vending machines — could have been distinguished enough from the current one to allow its implementation.

The press is focusing on the “arbitrary and capricious” finding, but as Tingling makes clear, a good law is not just an effective one; it’s one that has passed through the required democratic processes — as frustrating, imperfect, and time-consuming as those may be.

Bloomberg is often lauded as a visionary — a tenacious leader who can drown out the din of opposition and get the job done. But that din is part of the democratic process, and as the New York State Supreme Court made clear on Monday, it cannot be bypassed by any single person or group, no matter how well-intentioned or scientifically driven the idea may be.

Whether we want to stop the Keystone Pipeline, label our GMO-filled foods, or end our reliance on coal, we need more than just good data. Healthy food advocates need to recognize that in a democracy, for better or for worse, facts and science cannot do the job alone. We need to build consensus on these issues, participate in the democratic process, and yes, sometimes even compromise.

* Correction: This article originally stated that the court struck down the law based on four factors, the fourth being that despite the submission of supporting scientific evidence after the rule had been written, its origins in the mayor’s office meant it didn’t have the requisite expertise behind it. While the court found serious fault with this part of the process of the writing of the regulation, it did ultimately find that it met the expertise requirements.

If you’re like most dudes, you probably have yet to make any plans for Valentine’s Day. (Frankly, I weasel out of the deadline by subscribing to the philosophy that this is a holiday for receiving gifts, not giving them.) Chances are you’re planning to just stop by CVS on your way home from work on Thursday, buy a heart-shaped box of Russell Stover chocolates, and call it a day. But unless you were looking to support child labor, environmental destruction, and other generally despicable business practices, you might want to go a little farther out of your way this year when selecting your Valentine’s Day chocolate.

By now our cold, skeptic, liberal hearts know to question the ethics behind a McDonald’s Big Mac or a four-carat diamond ring. And it’s easy to question candy’s origins when we’re shoveling it by the truckful into our kids’ mouths on Halloween. But how many of us would eye a piece of Godiva chocolate with that same level of suspicion? Below is just the beginning of everything you never wanted to know about the origins of your fancy chocolate. And while you might never be able to look at a Hershey bar the same way again, hopefully you will laugh a little less the next time you see a $9 bar of chocolate on sale at Shake Shack.

The drugstore is selling you blood chocolate.

OK, that sounds dramatic, but a day in the African cacao trade isn’t too far from a Blood Diamond outtake (Leonardo DiCaprio not included). For the world’s biggest chocolate makers — Hershey, Nestle, and Mars account for more than 35 percent of global chocolate production — practices like child slave labor, rainforest demolition, and heavy reliance on GMOs are just a part of doing business. But lucky for them, the supply chains between the African farmers and the American manufacturers are so long and winding — links include plantation owners, chocolate dealers, African government officials, and cocoa suppliers — that companies can claim ignorance. A 2010 documentary called The Dark Side of Chocolate laid those supply chains bare and also exposed the major chocolate companies’ willful ignorance; the filmmaker’s repeated attempts to force the truth on them are met with refusal and eventually physical removal from company premises.

Even worse: For African children, chocolate poses a much bigger threat than just cavities. A 2011 Tulane University study found a “projected total of 819,921 children in Ivory Coast and 997,357 children in Ghana worked on cocoa-related activities” in 2007-2008. (I use the term “work” loosely: That implies payment, when most of these children are in fact slaves who are imprisoned on farms, beaten for trying to leave, and denied any wages.) NGOs, politicians, and even a Hershey shareholder have tried to force the industry to change, but so far, these efforts have been stymied by the powerful chocolate barons, who are surprisingly evil for folks who make candy for a living. An example: In 2001, after heavily publicized reports of child labor in the cocoa industry, U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) tried to pass legislation to require chocolate companies to show that they were “child labor free” and label their products as such. But after intense industry pushback, the Harkin-Engel Protocol that passed made certification voluntary; the idea of labeling products was abandoned entirely. In the more than 10 years since it was signed, the new rules have done almost nothing to liberate child workers in the chocolate industry.

And by the way, these companies crush more than children’s dreams. They are also responsible for encouraging farmers to clear West African rainforests to make room for more cocoa plants, as well as mowing down the Indonesian and Malaysian rainforests for palm oil plantations. The multi-continent deforestation subsidized by Big Chocolate also releases tons of greenhouse gases and displaces indigenous peoples.

Just in case these weren’t reasons enough to steer clear of the big brands, you can also expect your drugstore chocolate to be filled with everyone’s favorite ingredient: GMOs. (Hershey and Mars are reported to have spent a combined $1 million-plus to defeat California’s Prop 37.) So all of the dicey politics and questionable science you taste in your cornflakes are in your Russell Stover’s chocolates, too.

The bottom line: Most chocolate is very, very bad — even if it’s expensive, comes in a fancy box, or calls itself “gourmet.”

Don’t depend on labels like “organic” and “Fair Trade” to single-handedly soothe a guilt-stricken sweet tooth.

OK, so you don’t want to support child slavery but you still want to buy some special Valentine’s Day chocolate. So you head to your local Whole Foods and scan the bar for text that says something like “Fair Trade” or “Organic.” Those are cool, right? Maybe. According to Clay Gordon, creator of chocoholics’ website The Chocolate Life and a recognized authority on everything from cacao taste to business practices, “sustainability has three pillars: environmental, economic, and social.” While the available labels can provide some indications about how a company scores on these metrics, no single one fully satisfies all three.

“Organic,” for example, refers to strict adherence to environmental and processing requirements. Peter Meehan, co-founder and CEO of Newman’s Own Organics, notes that his company’s chocolate (my personal favorite: Newman’s Own Organic Orange Dark Chocolate), certified by third-party agency Oregon Tilth, is made according to strict U.S. organic standards, using cacao beans grown without pesticides for at least three years and without GMOs. But because the term says nothing about, for example, economic or social sustainability, it can’t tell you much else.

To bolster their cred, companies like Newman’s Own Organics often pursue additional certifications, like the Rainforest Alliance label. That one, Meehan says, “is about quality of life,” protecting wildlife, the environment, workers, and the larger communities. “It reflects more ‘would you want to live in that village?’” he says. A gift of Newman’s Own Organics chocolate also supports the Newman’s Own Foundation, which to date has given more than $400 million to charity. “I don’t know how a gift can get any nicer than that,” Meehan adds.

“Fair Trade” is another common chocolate label, guaranteeing that a fair price was paid to local farmers for the cacao beans, fair labor practices are being observed, and local communities are being supported. But farmers have to pay thousands of dollars [PDF] for that certification, and Gordon points out that money that farmers could’ve otherwise invested in their employees, land, or communities is instead going first to farmer cooperatives and then to international certifiers and auditors*, adding more links in the chain between the bean and the customer.

While these labels can provide some level of comfort to conscious consumers, the companies using them usually don’t have direct relationships with their suppliers. It adds another link in the chain — and more room for potentially shady practices — between bean and bar.

Look for the shortest supply chain whenever possible.

Despite all the fancy labeling options, “it’s the companies that don’t feel the need to [fulfill the requirement] of the certification that are in fact doing the best work rather than abdicating responsibility to a third party,” Gordon says. These bars might cost significantly more than what you can get at Duane Reade (think $7 and up per bar), but that’s because you are paying a fair price that actually accounts for the labor, shipment, and processing of the beans, instead of one artificially subsidized by abusive practices.

Clay advises that instead of a Fair Trade label, consumers should look for words like “direct trade” and bars with single origins. According to Susie Wyshak, a food business consultant specializing in chocolate and confections, if the packaging says the chocolate is “bean-to-bar,” then “the company whose name appears on the chocolate bar has made that chocolate starting with the actual cacao bean.”

For San Francisco-based chocolatier Dandelion Chocolate, that means actually traveling to Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Madagascar to meet the farmers and negotiate the terms of their contract. “When we go directly to the farmers we tend to get the best beans, because we have personal relationships, and we also get a really good price,” co-founder Todd Masonis says. “And then because there are no middlemen, the farmer gets a really good price.” Each of their single-origin bars is made from beans that came from the same country, and because the only added ingredient is sugar, you can really taste the distinctions between them — in the same way you can taste the difference between vintages of wines. (My personal favorite: the fruity flavored Madagascar bar.) One of Wyshak’s picks: Wisconsin-based chocolatier Gail Ambrosius, who regularly travels to Costa Rica for her supply. Gordon’s top choice, Askinosie Chocolate, doesn’t just buy directly from farmers: They use an open-book accounting policy, giving the farmers full access to their financial records, and therefore the best possible position at their negotiating table. Recently named one of the “15 Guys Who Are Saving the World” by O: The Oprah Magazine, founder Shawn Askinosie led a group of American students to Tanzania to meet with his farmers, as well as build the local village a well, tank, and windmill.

So this Valentine’s Day, skip the lazy drugstore candy. If you can’t afford the $9 stuff, so what? I personally think most women would prefer something more personal and less cliché, anyway (a great mix CD still does it for me.) But if you really need to satisfy a known chocolate craving, spend the time — and money — finding a chocolate as special as the person you are buying it for. They’ll thank you for it.

*The original article incorrectly stated that certification money goes to Fair Trade’s expenses. Certification money is in fact distributed to other certification services.

If you missed the news about McDonald’s recent sales slump, that’s probably because the company planned it that way. Using the oldest corporate trick in the book, McDonald’s announced its disappointing news on a Friday afternoon, hoping it would get ignored as the weekend started. But the timing of the announcement only underscores how bad the news really was. For the first time since 2003, the company’s global sales rose less than 2 percent, and its net income dropped almost 4 percent.

CEO Don Thompson blamed the economy for the fast food giant’s lackluster performance, pointing to “the external environment including declining consumer sentiment, high commodity and labor costs and heightened competitive activity.” Translation? Between the rising price of food (thank you, climate change), growing consumer awareness of McDonald’s bad business practices, and competition from the likes of Taco Bell, McDonald’s was having trouble maintaining its normally high rate of growth. Thompson said the company would respond by promoting its Dollar Menu and bringing back the shockingly unhealthy McRib in December, as a way to show the “value” of eating at McDonald’s. But Thompson is either missing the point or playing dumb.

A brief review of the company’s 10-K, the annual, SEC-required company report card, filed in February of this year, reveals a number of “risk factors” identified by the company, including concerns over “adverse perceptions” of “nutritional content … how we source the commodities we use … [and] product safety issues,” as well as the “impact of social media,” “the risks and cost of our labeling and other disclosure practices,” and “the impact of nutritional, health and other scientific inquiries and conclusions.” The company knows, then, that the public is growing less tolerant of CAFOs, unhealthy food, and large-scale corporate deception about its practices. But despite recognition of these systemic issues, judging by Friday’s announcement and several of the company’s recent PR projects — e.g. enlisting mommy bloggers and releasing pseudo farm-to-table YouTube videos — McDonald’s still seems to believe it has a “public perception” problem and not a reason to make substantial changes to its practices. Yet in a country where more and more people are making the choice to buy responsibly sourced, organic products despite their higher prices (organics sales rose 9.4 percent in 2011), Thompson’s equation of “value” with cheapness might just fall short.

As the single biggest purchaser of beef, chicken, pork, potatoes, apples, and tomatoes in this country, McDonald’s plays an unparalleled role in the food industry. When the company required its pork suppliers to phase out gestation crates in February, for example, it essentially required all pork suppliers to do so, because not being able to sell to McDonald’s will kill a large-scale pork operation in this country. As the company watches its sales drop, it could seize the opportunity to do more than just unroll another marketing campaign.

It has happened before. In addition to the move away from gestation crates, in the late 1980s, public pressure forced McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S. to stop serving burgers in Styrofoam packaging. And after the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare, the restaurant chain complied with the law before it went into effect by posting calorie counts for its menus all over the country.

If McDonald’s wants to change public perception and increase sales, why not stick to this pattern of catering to public demands, and start with better ingredients and more transparency? The company might be surprised by how far that gets it.

Ever since she and a business partner founded Newman’s Own Organics as a division of Newman’s Own in 1993, the image of Newman and her father, Paul, dressed up in their best country gothic guises has appeared on the labels of everything from pretzels (their first product) to their signature Fig Newmans. After becoming an independent company in 2001, Newman’s Own Organics went far beyond the basics, bringing us surprises like organic pet food and fair trade coffee at McDonald’s.

Behind that famous image is a remarkably down-to-earth sustainable food advocate from Santa Cruz, Calif., known for her friendship with Alice Waters, and a regular gig as a judge for the Good Food Awards.

Grist had the chance to chat with Newman recently about her environmentalist roots, her father’s tendency towards wild PR stunts, and her thoughts about the upcoming election.

Q. You are a strong environmentalist, with experience working for the Environmental Defense Fund, and several wildlife and wilderness projects. Why did you decide to start an organic food company?

A. I’ve always been an environmentalist. I grew up in Westport, Conn., when it was very rural. My parents would go back and forth between Connecticut and Beverly Hills — they would make a movie one year and then go back to Connecticut. And my time was spent running around the woods with a pack of dogs, fishing. I was fascinated by nature, particularly birds, and I was really crushed at the age of 10 or 11 to discover that my favorite bird, the peregrine falcon, fastest animal on the planet, had gone extinct east of the Mississippi. They had no idea why, and it was spreading across the United States, this mass disappearance of peregrine falcons. I knew what extinction was — I knew that we had eaten all the dodo birds and shot all the passenger pigeons and I was really horrified. Within the next couple of years they began to figure out it was this thing called DDT, which my mother had to explain to me was something that we sprayed on our food to kill insects. So I guess that was really the catalyst.

Q. Producing anything on a large scale almost always includes some negative environmental impact, whether in production, shipping, packaging, etc. What kinds of measures does your company take to mitigate that impact?

A. All of our products are co-packed, meaning we have other companies that make them for us. The only one that has gone out on a limb to really work on their packaging has been Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. But you know, the packaging thing has just been a complete nightmare; it’s so hard to figure out. For us, our big commitment is to organic agriculture and when somebody comes out with some [green] packaging that keeps our product fresh, is affordable, and isn’t made out of genetically engineered corn, then we’ll be happy to make some changes.

Q. Newman’s Own Organics brings fair trade, organic coffee to 650 McDonald’s locations in New England and New York. How did this partnership come about?

A. We’ve made coffee with Green Mountain now for 10 years. They came to us and we really liked them because of their social mission, and because they had people on the ground in all these countries. They were buying direct long before anyone else was thinking about that. We love working with Green Mountain and in 2005, McDonald’s on the East Coast was looking for a better coffee and they came to Green Mountain and within two or three months, 500 or 600 restaurants had voted that they were going to bring in our coffee. It’s amazing because we’re serving coffee to people that may have never had an organic product, or had the opportunity to have an organic product.

Q. Were you reluctant to enter into that partnership?

A. I had reservations about it until I went and met with them. They were so enthusiastic about wanting our organic fair trade coffee, all I could think was, “What excuse would I have to not want to support them?” It’s a market. They’re offering it to a whole group of customers who have never tried organic products. Who am I to be so holier-than-thou and say no?

Q. What kinds of reactions did you get when you started telling people your plans to manufacture pet food with the same high standards you were manufacturing human food?

A. People were a little shocked and laughed about it because, you know, some people are very interested in making sure that their pets eat good food, but organic seemed a little over the top. But people love their pets and it has proven to be really worthwhile. I don’t know if it has anything to do with the fact that Dad ate a can of pet food on Jay Leno as a joke. I think they put meatballs in it. It was one of those surprise things. He would be on some show and bring some product, like pretzels or cookies. It was really wonderful, a great way to get PR.

Q. What was your reaction to the Stanford meta-study that was said to have found organic food to be less nutritious than conventional food?

A. I read it and I met with several people whose names and opinions I trust. One of the first things that came out was that one of the coauthors had also authored the “cigarettes are safe” study, which was a concern. They also overlooked two very significant studies. I think it was really a matter of how they looked at their results. They didn’t make a point of highlighting the fact that you get less pesticides from eating organic. They were asking the wrong questions, is what it really boiled down to.

Q. What do you say to critics who say the organic industry has gotten too big for its own good?

A. You know, it’s a mixed blessing when you ask the government to come in and regulate you, which is what we did as an industry. The good part was for us when we were buying wheat from one state and figs from another state, you had different standards. You had some states that had no organic standard at all. So part of the rationale for devising a national organic standard was to have an equal playing field and make it so that it was easier to certify a product.

You have big companies coming in and buying smaller companies and trying to make money off it. A lot of the industry doesn’t like that. I think there have been pros and cons to how that’s worked. Some companies have not been as upstanding as others, but I think [the national USDA standard] has really grown the industry when you look at it overall. It’s definitely a mixed blessing and I see both sides of it.

Q. There is obviously a strong relationship, especially for you, between organic food and environmental justice. Do you think that there’s a relationship between organics and social justice?

A. It’s unfortunate — due to farm subsidies partially — that conventional food is cheaper. You would look at that and say how could that possibly be true? Well, [organic is] more labor intensive. So does that make it a food justice issue because it is more expensive and therefore less accessible to people who have less money? I think it does. Wholesome Wave — whose board I sit on — has really tried to make it less of an issue by doing their double value food stamp program through the USDA with local nonprofits to make food at farmers markets more available in underserved areas.

Q. What do you see as the responsibility of your company in that movement?

A. For us, we’re in a tough position. We’re paying a royalty to the Newman’s Own Foundation, which they donate to charity [to a range of nonprofit organizations, including Feeding America]. And that makes us a little more expensive than everybody else.

Q. What do you do when you’re not running Newman’s Own Organics?

A. I have a little tiny garden, I’ve got 10 chickens — which I think is probably one over the limit for Santa Cruz County — a pear tree, a Meyer lemon, a Rangpur lime, and a couple of raised beds. So I do a lot of gardening. I sit on a couple of nonprofit boards. I sit on the board of Ecotrust, which is out of Portland and is committed to sustainable development around the world. And then the other is Wholesome Wave, which was started by Michel Nischan. And I fish and I surf a little bit when it’s not too crowded.

Q. You are also very politically minded. Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share on this year’s election?

A. The election is very nerve-wracking for me as a born-and-bred, bleeding heart liberal, as my dad used to joyously call himself. I think Obama inherited a mess and although he has definitely not been as strong on the environment or GMOs as I would have liked, he is a head above Mitt on all of the important issues to me. I really wish that he had been 15 years older when he became president, so he would have had more experience. But I find Mitt Romney and his running mate more than frightening. With Mitt, his flip-flopping on everything shows a lack of substance as far as I’m concerned. And Ryan — I won’t even go there.

The natural label’s takeover is not just anecdotal. In 2008, Mintel’s Global New Products Database found that “all-natural” was the second most used claim on new American food products. And a recent study by the Shelton Group [PDF], an advertising company focusing on sustainability, found that it’s also the most popular. When asked, “Which is the best description to read on a food label?” 25 percent of consumers answered, “100 percent natural.”

So what does natural mean? Well, that depends on who you’re asking. A salesperson in the meat department at Shoprite in Chester, N.Y., told me that Tyson’s all natural chicken is “basically the same thing” as organic. At General Mills, 100 percent natural means “that all ingredients used are from a natural source and a natural process,” though when I asked for clarification on what counts as a “natural process,” the customer service agent was out of answers.

According to Rachel Saks, co-founder of the Brooklyn-based nutrition consulting company tABLE health, for her health-conscious clients, natural “means whatever they want it to mean.” Clients with high blood pressure, for example, “tend to interpret natural as good for their blood pressure, maybe not too high in salt.” Clients looking to lose weight, meanwhile, read the claim to mean the food is low-calorie. “It solves whatever problem they want to solve.”

With all of these disparate interpretations of a once-straightforward word, it may come as a surprise that there is, at least on principle, some official government guidance to how the word should be used.

What confuses most people, however, is that the two agencies that regulate food in this country — the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — have very different approaches to the term.

A meaty approach

The USDA, which is tasked with regulating meat and poultry, says that a product is “natural” if it contains “no artificial ingredient or added color and is only minimally processed. Minimal processing means that the product was processed in a manner that does not fundamentally alter the product.”

As little as this definition really tells us, Stephen Gardner, director of litigation for the Center of Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), says it beats the FDA’s definition hands down. “Meat is an easy one. Natural, at a minimum, should be what you get off the cow, or the pig, or the chicken. It shouldn’t be treated.” And for the most part, that is what natural means when used on meat products. It says nothing about what happened to the animal before slaughter, what it was fed or treated with while alive (read: GMO corn or grass, antibiotics or not), or under what kinds of conditions it was raised. But it does mean that between the slaughterhouse and the supermarket, nothing was added or done to it. (Gardner notes that there are some outliers that seem to have escaped the USDA’s eye, like chicken that is pumped with salt water to give it a healthier appearance and better taste.)

Everything else

The real problem, according to Gardner, is the lack of regulation on non-meat products, which, despite being called “natural,” are often highly processed. Gardner and CSPI are taking this issue to the courts in a lawsuit against General Mills for marketing its Nature Valley granola bars, which contain additives like maltodextrin, as “100% Natural.” The suit challenges the practice as misleading advertising, not as running afoul of FDA rules — probably because the rules themselves allow the practice to continue.

The FDA says on its website, “from a food science perspective, it is difficult to define a food product that is ‘natural’ … [The] FDA has not developed a definition for use of the term natural or its derivatives. However, the agency has not objected to the use of the term if the food does not contain added color, artificial flavors, or synthetic substances.”

How’s that for hard-lined? Seriously, though, “natural” can mean anything a food producer wants it to, no matter how misleading, and the FDA won’t “object.” Even though the agency is aware of how misunderstood the term is, it has been willfully avoiding opportunities to define it since the late 1970s.

“What should happen is that the FDA should just adopt, as first the Sugar Association and then CSPI [PDF] asked it to do about five years ago, the USDA definition of natural, which is minimally processed,” says Gardner. The term “minimally processed” refers to “stuff you could do in your own kitchen.” General Mills, on the other hand,  claims that “natural” means the ingredients are derived from a “natural process” — a vague phrase if there is one.

Saks encounters this “natural” misunderstanding with as much as 15 percent of her clientele, who are often, but not always, well-educated and concerned with the quality of their food. While she’d like to see stricter standards for the term, she admits, “that’s tough too, because you’d have to be defining it by something that it’s not,” as in not made with corn derivatives, genetically modified organisms, or other synthesized ingredients.

Even among the food lawyers there is a debate about what “natural” should mean on a food label and whether the FDA should step in. Yve Golan, founding partner of The Golan Firm and a specialist in food labeling law, has disagreed with Gardner’s contention that the FDA should define the term. Pointing to loopholes in the organic label, she worries that an FDA definition will lead to “a hyper-technical definition riddled with needless exceptions.”

That, of course, brings us back to the original problem Saks pointed to: “Natural” currently means something different to every consumer. And, if that’s really the case, how can it mean anything at all?

When Sadie Scheffer decided to start her own vegan, gluten-free baking company, the logistics were not her top priority. Like many small food companies without retail spaces, she started Bread SRSLY by delivering her breads and muffins on a bike, using a makeshift online ordering system through email and Etsy, and taking cash on delivery. Scheffer’s system worked when she was fielding a few orders at a time, but when it came time to scale up, it was less than ideal.

Enter Good Eggs, a San Francisco-based startup that provides online tools for small and sustainable food producers. Now Scheffer’s orders come through the Good Eggs online platform, and on top of taking orders from house to house, she now also drops off a lot of product at once at community pickup spots arranged by the company. She sells three times as many loaves of bread as she did before Good Eggs. Scheffer admits that she’s had trouble keeping up with orders, but adds: “That’s the fun part, the scary part, and the only way I’m going to grow.”

When Good Eggs was founded in the summer of 2011, co-founders Rob Spiro and Alon Salant knew they wanted to build “a product and company to serve and grow local food systems,” even if they didn’t know what it would look like. But Spiro and Salant are no amateurs: Spiro is an original co-founder of Aardvark, which sold to Google in 2010 for $50 million, and Salant is a co-founder of a software design company called Carbon Five.

The pair quickly set out to figure out how they could use technology to boost the local food community. They discovered that most small food businesses were built by food people, not tech people, and they were often missing the software they needed for even the most basic operations. Many, they found, were spending time they could be baking, pickling, or curating filling out charts on Google Docs by hand and taking one-off email orders.

As Good Eggs handles the logistics, its vendors are watching sales climb. But whether or not Good Eggs — and other sites like it — will be able to truly enable small sustainable businesses to scale up over the long term (after the trend factor dies down) is an open question. The costs of labor and quality local ingredients are still incredibly high, and while Good Eggs offers some solutions, it’s not a one-stop shop for all local food producers’ problems.

“One of the earliest surprises was that the food industry is not one industry, it’s a dozen industries,” Spiro told me. “So the way that a baker is selling their fresh bread subscription through Good Eggs is totally different than the way a ranch is selling a quarter of a cow.”

Click to see the invite.

Good Eggs launched its own site today, but for the past several months, the team has been building and running online storefronts on 40 San Francisco-based vendors’ websites. For 3 percent of each transaction, the Good Eggs team works closely with each to build a personalized online marketplace. “Our strategy is to align our incentives with the food producers,” says Spiro. The company also helps with marketing and promotion through what it hopes will become a large social media network of its own.

Take the Mission Community Market, a San Francisco nonprofit farmers market. It uses a Good Eggs platform to sell its Chef’s Market Box — a box of locally sourced ingredients with recipes from local chefs — but it also gets the company’s help writing and testing recipes, doing photo shoots, and handling delivery. It’s unclear which of these services will be available to Good Eggs clients in the future, but for Jeremy Shaw, executive director of Mission Community Market, it has made a world of difference. According to Shaw, “Without Good Eggs, the box wouldn’t be possible.”

Good Eggs is neither the first nor the last of the food-related startups scrambling to fill this space. Farmigo was one of the first of its kind when it was founded in 2008, and has since grown to provide 3,100 communities with farm-direct produce and CSA shares.

Plovgh similarly connects consumers with farmers, but gives buyers more flexibility and choice than a typical community-supported agriculture (CSA) box.  The New York-based site, FarmersWeb, offers an ordering system for local produce in bulk at wholesale prices. And because customers have to pay in advance, farmers no longer have to track them down and demand payment. Sarah Teale of the Adirondack Grazers’ Cooperative says working with FarmersWeb is “like having an agent.” “I really don’t want to be the one calling the restaurant saying, ‘pay up,’” she adds.

Technology has long played a role in advancing the food system — but that has usually meant the use of chemicals, hardware, and machinery to improve efficiencies. Now, says Danielle Gould, the founder of the website Food+Tech Connect, “technology is becoming increasingly focused on information flow. The internet, software, and low-cost hardware are making it easy for everyone along the food supply chain to connect and coordinate logistics.”

Gould’s hope is that this shift will infuse more democracy into the food system — through access to more information and much more choice in the kinds of foods available.

After all, no matter how ethical and pasture-based the ranch or how local the grains, food companies are only sustainable so long as they can stay in business, and the hope is that new technology will also offer stability.

Of course the irony is that maintaining a diversity of online services isn’t easy. And with all tech bubbles, it’s likely that one or two companies providing infrastructure for local food will outlast the others. But with a growing consumer base for organic food, and farmers frequently faced with more supply than they can sell, these new distribution solutions likely have plenty of room to grow.

As Spiro sees it, “We have a theory that local food as a whole is poised to grow 10 times over. So all ships rise with the rising tide. Farmers markets, food producers, and customers should all win.”  So who loses? “Safeway.”

For farmers all over the country, growing more than they can sell is just a part of doing business. As is routinely tilling surplus produce back into the soil. And because space is limited and time is of the essence, most farmers don’t have many other options — even if it usually means thousands of pounds of uneaten food.

“Nothing is lost when you turn something under; it just goes back into the dirt,” says Andy Griffin, owner of Watsonville, Calif.-based Mariquita Farm. “For us, loss comes when we’ve spent money to pick something, wash it, pack it, refrigerate it, and put it in a box, then [have to] take it out of the box and throw it away.” Of course, one could argue that the water and fertilizer required to grow the food — as well as the labor — is indeed lost, even if these are standard costs to farmers.

As much as Griffin says he’d like to see every vegetable he grows find a home, he has to be realistic. “Sometimes you need a bunch of stuff out of the way. Rather than wait and lose the opportunity to put the next crop in, I turn whatever’s out there under. There’s a choreography to moving stuff through the fields.”

Yet in this tightly timed dance, local food entrepreneur Larry Bain saw a chance to cut in. Owner of a Bay Area-based grass-fed beef hot dog company called Let’s Be Frank, Bain saw an enormous surplus of organic produce and an eager market looking to buy it, but a scarcity of good distribution options. What would happen, he wondered, if someone were to create minimally processed, shelf-stable products out of this extra produce?

This summer, Bain has teamed up with San Francisco’s Bi-Rite Market and several other Bay Area businesses to find out. He’ll buy the surplus produce at a reduced price from California farmers like Griffin, in an effort to “capture the food at its very best moment,” preserve it, and sell it under their new label, The Gleaning Project.

According to the Bi-Rite website, the grocery estimates that “every year [their] farmers plow under almost 50 percent of what they grow when market conditions make them unprofitable to harvest, pack and ship.”

This first summer, Bain says he’s taking a “chaotic approach” with the project. One of the Gleaning Project’s first experiments was green garlic, a crop that’s less perishable than most, making it the perfect starter crop. After buying 280 pounds of green garlic from Griffin at $2.75 per pound — 50 cents lower than Griffin’s target price but high enough for him to pay for labor and still make a profit — Bain sent the large bulk of it to the nearby commercial kitchen where it became 260 jars of green garlic pesto. A smaller portion went to local preservers, which turned it into 85 jars of green garlic pickles. Now, both products are being sold at Bi-Rite for $9.99 per jar. (It’s almost hard to believe that they’re made from the same vegetable: Though both retain that garlicky taste, the pickles are spicy and crunchy — perfect for a Bloody Mary — while the pesto is mild and smooth.) According to Bain, “each of the partners got pretty close to equal portions of the final sale price of the product.” No one will see big money this year, but had Bain not stepped in, that 280 pounds of green garlic would have become fertilizer in Griffin’s fields.

Next, they’ll turn apricots into jam and August’s booming tomato crop into sauce. At the end of the year, they’ll look back and see which products were most successful.

The project’s success hinges on a number of factors and players, highlighting the interconnectedness and unpredictability of a local food system. Griffin may have only a few days to contact Bi-Rite and alert them of a surplus, and within that time, Bain needs to find a commercial kitchen that can handle the pickling and/or preserving.

Because many commercial kitchens have multiple week-long waiting lists, the companies he’s working with play a crucial role by providing the space and skills for pickling on extremely short notice. For Jordan Champagne, co-owner of the preserving company Happy Girl Kitchen, that’s part of the fun. “It’s our flexible production model that really makes it possible. It tends to be kind of chaotic in its nature, but luckily I thrive on chaos, so it’s worked out perfectly.”