The mouth revolution short film, put up here on 26th Jan, is great fun, and the guys who made it, free range studios, do lots of good work. (Can you see it comin....?)

However I did think for a while before puting it up, because i was uneasy about one thing I thought I'd seen on one of their shorts.... right in the middle of a recent 'watering down of organic standards' scandal in the US, I was sure I saw the Organic Trade Association logo on one of the films. An overview of what happened from what could be called a movement perspective is here

though the situation may at least be more complex; click here to also get into another blog on organic food and beyond, and enter the wonderful world of Tom Philpott

I contacted Free Range studios, to ask them about their connections to the OTA. They got back and said they'd ring, but haven't as of yet. Not sure why they wouldn't replay via email, and it's been a couple of weeks at this stage.

As you'll have seen if you clicked on any of the links, the debate on standards was in many ways about large agri-business corporations and the general conventionalisation of organics within the food system (my own academic work deals with the occurance or otherwise of this in some detail - a previous post has all my academic work listed - I'm not allowed just post them up here for copyright reasons, though may sum some sometime soon -

(ever noticed how you don't get a fumbletongue when you think rather than say a convoluted sequence of words?).

Anyhoo, for the OTA to sponsor something that advocated local, small scale organic farming, in a context where they were being accused of being a corporate front seemed deeply ironic, and a previously unimaginable form and level of commodity fetishism

I looked around their site again, and it turned out to be store wars the OTA sponsored -
Aggagh! Of all their cute short polemicial films, this was the one most against the corporate takeover of organics...and in 2005, the year the standards debate was happening - bad timing to say the least

here's what free range have said about their involvment with OTA on their own site

Now, as I said, I think they are creative, fun guys (free range that is!) and they could in particular be turning on kids to organic food, and a more sustainable food supply system....
so I put the link up to their most recent offering....which is the most professional and creative to date, I'd say...