Feedback on The Ecological Food Society

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First, EPS is not only broke but about $180,000 in the hole. The doors have been padlocked by the Internal Revenue Service for non-payment of some taxes, and the mail is not being delivered. to us by the post office.

Believe it or not, this does not mean that EFS officially out of business. There have been lots of sweet-talking "nice guys" who wanted to buy EFS and, "out of the goodness of their hearts", continue the "good work" and all that crap. However, we figured if we went broke we might as well do it as honestly as possible, without lending our names whatever they're worth—to something shady.

Finally one group, representing a public company, has put its money, where its mouth is and provided postage to get packages out to members as of March, 17, 1972. They are also authorizing refunds and/or credits: for whatever else is owed. As of this daze (March 30, 1972), it appears that EFS will resume operations (with an outside, hard-nose type in charge of finances, thank heavens) and make good on all its promises and materials as soon as is humanly possible. Those members who want, to stick around and see . . . well, we'll be grateful. Those who are fed up (and not without good reason) can, of course, take their money and run.

By the way, Schiff/Brown Advertising is in the same boat as EFS with offices locked and a deficit of $94,000 owed to it by the Society, so if you think anybody's gotten as ripped-off as we have, you're nuts. Victor and I did not take a penny out of EFS (it's an open corporation and this is a matter of record); on the contrary, we sank every penny we had—privately and otherwise—into an attempt to make it go. In February, we even took our last few hundred bucks in personal savings and bought postage to get out as many back orders and materials as we could. Thousands of packages were all ready to go (partly because we had gone upstate and packed the darned things ourselves after there was no money left to pay the shipping people) but until then we hadn't been able to raise the postage money.

Now, in opposition to what some of your reader complaints say, we did mail out the EFS newsletter . . . 22,000 copies. One was a six-page letter (with photographs) containing such items as our testing procedure with the gas chromatograph (incidentally we did not, as your article reported, say we tested an apple a bushel since this would have cost more than the national debt as one of your readers pointed out) and a lead article on stilbestrol that we feel had some part in prompting subsequent government action.

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