Zeno's Bar & Grill

Yesterday there was an article in the New York Times about The Cornucopia Institute‘s report on how organic the organic milk you buy is. They ranked 65 dairies on a scale from 5 cows to zero based on criteria such as cows per acre, acreage time, and ownership structure of the farm. I was happy to note that the yogurt I buy received five cows, and the milk, four. But how much longer will I be able to get my organic milk? At Trader Joe’s there was nary a drop of organic milk to be found! The Hawaiian shirt frocked cashier told me there was a shortage and that they hadn’t received a shipment that morning and that even Whole Foods was out of organic milk! I decided to investigate. A call to my local Whole Foods revealed that they did indeed have organic milk in stock, but the person who answered the phone had to check. You’d think they would just assume as a matter of course that they had it. Hmm. I decided to do a Google search. The articles on any shortage all seemed to be from mid-2005, so I called Stoneyfield Farm’s customer service line 1-800-PRO-COWS. The nice representative there told me that in fact, there is still an organic milk shortage going on and that it takes about three years for a farm to be converted to an organic operation so the supply can’t be increased very rapidly. This leads back to the fact that we need an institute to rank the purity of our milk. I guess I must have eaten my Wheaties (with organic milk), because I certainly got to the bottom of this one. Or maybe I just have too much time on my hands.

--Kelly