Don’t smirk. Empathize. Walk in the other fellow’s shoes awhile. Look at things from someone else’s perspective.

OK, I’m trying now. I’ve got myself in a suit and tie and a Washington frame of mind. I’m imagining now what it’s like to plunge into the fight about a once-teensy and much-mocked little industry that sprouted from hippies and has now gone mainstream. It’s organic foods. No grinning, because pound for pound this industry is growing faster than the technology racket.

At least one purveyor has zoomed from practically zero to more than $100 million in a year, capitalizing on the public’s appetite for wholesome nutrition. And overall, sales of organic foods have grown an average of 23 percent a year over the past 10 years.

But there is a problem: The country hasn’t been able to agree on what organic means.

Believe it or not, the federal government has spent 12 years dickering about it. We’ve had false starts, public outcries and bureaucratic foot-dragging. But now, belatedly, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is on track to clarify matters. Organic farmers want it. Consumers demand it. Common sense insists upon it.

So beginning Oct. 21, meat and dairy products can be labeled as organic only if the animals are fed 100 percent organically produced and genetically unaltered feeds, and no supplemental antibiotics or hormones. Organically raised animals cannot be fed animal parts or manure.

Yes, any one of us could have saved them 11 years and 11 months to come up with this definition, but empathize. This is Washington.

So what’s the problem?

Same thing: This is Washington.

Nothing is ever quite as it seems. This is where 12 years’ work comes down to the 12th hour and just a phone call.

We’re talking about carving loopholes in standards that haven’t even taken effect.

A Los Angeles Times report recently disclosed that an influential chicken company in Georgia wants to cash in on the organic craze but cannot exactly meet the test. It’s hard to find organic chicken feed, you see. And it doesn’t cost chicken feed to buy it either. So Fieldale Farms has asked the government for a “waiver.” It would like to sell perhaps as many as 300,000 chickens a week, calling them organically raised when they are not.

The perspective on this is pretty simple: If a consumer is willing to pay, say, twice as much for an organic chicken, a fellow could drive profits right through the old coop roof if his only cost was to change the labels.

In California and scattered other states that have set up their own patchwork standards for organic food, the results would be even greater confusion. Consumers in these states would see their local regulations superseded by the new federal standards, and suddenly nonorganic chickens would show up on the shelves proudly labeled organic.

Don’t smirk. This is why lobbyists live so well.

The office of Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman says it will consider the loophole request just the same as it considers all requests, because government cannot close the door on people, chicken farmers included.

But a deputy said that doesn’t mean Veneman will really consider it, as in make a decision now or any time. “There is nothing on her desk,” the deputy explained. And besides, Congress just ordered up a study of the availability of organic feed, and who knows what that means. Veneman’s aide couldn’t say. Unfortunately for Veneman, another underling had already put things in writing a little differently. In a letter to the Georgia chicken grower, the second deputy allowed that situations may arise “where there is justification for a change in the national standards to help the market perform more efficiently.”

Efficiently? Where did that word come from? The new standards for organic food make no mention of efficiency as far as I can see. Organic agriculture is by its nature inefficient. But remember, we are not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

It’s an old story. You could look back at our securities laws. Originally written in common-sense language to protect investors, they have been hollowed out by decades of wheedling by lawyers and lobbyists and provincial members of Congress. Today, almost anything short of outright embezzlement lies in a vast area of regulatory gray.

No thanks. I tried on the shoes. There’s a barnyard smell to them.

Balzar is a columnist for The Los Angeles Times.