That's why I mention them both. I'm generally fine with anything that has animals outside rather than locked up in a tiny cage, but I prefer meat grown locally in a field that's not certified over meat that's technically certified but shipped from the other side of the world.

As much as I'd love to brain the next deer that's eating under my apple tree I'm also aware that that deer might have been stuffing its face at god knows what dumpster or drinking from the river downstream of town (which has a several hundred year manufacturing history so I wouldn't drink the river water).

Farming animals for meat has its problems but it does impose much stricter controls on the inputs. No farmer raising livestock for human consumption is feeding their animals contaminated food and water if there are other options available. If DuPont is upstream of your farm you're probably SOL but that's the exception not the rule.

As a rule of thumb I would say there is good overlap. In support of my claim, I suggest the report from Olivier de Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food [0].

[0] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-03-09/un-report-supp...

Organic according the USDA means that you use manure to fertilize instead of biosolids and you use something like copper-based pesticides instead of glyphosate.

I don't know enough about agriculture to understand what that means, but I have heard that the US uses a different, presumably lower, standard for organic crops than the EU does.

> I don't know enough about agriculture to understand what that means, but I have heard that the US uses a different, presumably lower, standard for organic crops than the EU does.

It means exactly what you heard. The USDA Organic label doesn't mean that organic crops are sustainable. The organic label doesn't address problems associated with commercial agriculture: monocultures, wide-spread use of pesticides, fertilizer run-off into streams/rivers/ponds/lakes causing them to become hypoxic, destruction of wetlands to create arable land etc.