What to Eat

First the important stuff: Japanese chicken fingers are fried battered chicken cartilage - most likely chicken toes.
In October, 2005, Congress passed the 2006 Agricultural Appropriations Bill. A rider was attached to this bill that basically said that synthetic ingredients (up to 5%) would be allowed in certified organic products, and that dairy cows could be raised conventionally until a year before their milk was to be labeled organic, and that if organic feed for your livestock was twice as expensive as the non organic, you could feed them the pesticide, hormone laced non organic food and still call the meat organic. I have done lots of web searching on all of this and there doesn't appear to be one place to get all the information so that I could verify that this is still the case and has not been repealed. I am fairly certain it is still the case and if anyone knows more please please let me know.
In my searches I found some notable websites that I list here.

Arthur Harvey tried to repeal portions of the rider and this website looks like a gold mine, but I just found it and I'm running out of time to fiddle on the computer: http://www.restoreorg...
Also check out the other pages on this site, starting with "Home".

On importing "organic" vegies from China (it's really true!):
http://www.mindfully....

This is a list of companies that supported the 2006 "sneak attack" on organic standards. Whole Foods is on the list. One company, Michigan based Eden Foods, did not support the lowering of standards.
http://www.organiccon...

Organic Bytes (the OCA newsletter) has some brief articles on the topic:
Issue 68 (Oct 28, 2005), Issue 69 (Nov 14, 2005), and Issue 105 (Mar 22, 2007).
Also of note - FDA said that cloned animals are just fine to eat - Issue 99 (Dec 29, 2006)
Going back over all the newsletter archives reminds me of the frog in the soup pot - they keep slowly turning up the heat and no one notices.
Now it's time to go look for a job.....

Thanks for sharing some more information on this topic Kathy and thanks for recommending the book. I also sent Brianna a message asking about the Organic Milk ratings website she mentioned at our discussion.

Here is a link for those who are interesting
http://cornucopia.org...

Definitely a rich topic with a lot of consumer information available for informed, impactful decision making.

After having recently cooked and eaten a roasting chicken I can say with certainty that the cartilage was from the tip of the bone running down the center of the chicken (breast bone??).
My traveling partner says that our next culinary adventure will be seahorse on a stick in China.
It could take a while, but I may come to appreciate Burger King.