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The Green Guide

Is Industrial Organic Really Organic?

THE SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
July 29, 2001, Sunday , FINAL
SECTION: P-I FOCUS, Pg. D7

HEADLINE: THE NEW ORGANICS OF AGRIBUSINESS
MIGRANT LABORERS, COMBINES AND THOUSANDS
OF ACRES OF BROCCOLI ARE NOW THE FACE OF
ORGANIC FARMING

BY MICHAEL POLLAN

Almost overnight, the amount and variety of organic food in my local
supermarket has mushroomed. Fresh produce, milk, eggs, cereal, frozen food,
even junk food - all of it has its own organic doppelganger, and more often
than not these products wind up in my shopping cart.

I like buying organic, for the usual salad of rational and sentimental
reasons. At a time when the whole food system feels somewhat precarious,
I assume that a product labeled organic is more healthful and safer, more
"wholesome," though if I stop to think about it I'm not exactly sure what
that means.

I also like the fact that by buying organic I'm casting a vote for a more
environmentally friendly kind of agriculture: "Better Food for a Better
Planet," in the slogan of Washington state's Cascadian Farm, one of the
older organic brands. Just look at the happy Vermont cow on that carton of
milk, wreathed in wildflowers like a hippie at her wedding around 1973.
Look a little closer, though, and you begin to see cracks in the pastoral
narrative. It took me more than a year to notice, but the label on that
carton of Organic Cow has been rewritten recently. It doesn't talk about
happy cows and Vermont family farmers quite so much anymore, probably
because the Organic Cow has been bought out by Horizon, a Colorado company.
Horizon is a $127 million public corporation that has become the Microsoft
of organic milk, controlling 70 percent of the retail market. Notice, too,
that the milk is now "ultrapasteurized."

When I asked a local dairyman about this he said the chief reason to
ultrapasteurize - a high-heat process that "kills the milk," destroying its
enzymes and many of its vitamins - is so you can sell milk over long
distances. Arguably, ultrapasteurized organic milk is less nutritious than
conventionally pasteurized conventional milk. This dairyman also bent my ear
about Horizon's "factory farms" out West, where thousands of cows that never
encounter a blade of grass spend their days confined to a fenced dry lot,
eating (certified organic) grain and tethered to milking machines three
times a day.

He made me wonder whether I really knew what organic meant anymore. I
understood organic to mean - in addition to being produced without synthetic
chemicals - less processed, more local, easier on the animals. So I started
looking more closely at some of the other organic items in the store. One of
them in the frozen-food case caught my eye: an organic TV dinner (now there
are three words I never expected to string together) from Cascadian Farm.
When I looked at the ingredients list, I felt a small jolt of cognitive
dissonance. It included such enigmas of modern food technology as natural
chicken flavor, high-oleic safflower oil, guar and xanthan gum, soy
lecithin, carrageenan and natural grill flavor, this last culinary
breakthrough achieved with something called "tapioca maltodextrin." The
label assured me that most of these additives are organic, which they no
doubt are, and yet they seem about as jarring to my conception of organic
food as, say, a cigarette boat on Walden Pond. But then, so too is the fact
(mentioned nowhere on the label) that Cascadian Farm has recently become a
subsidiary of General Mills, the third-biggest food conglomerate in North
America.

Clearly, my notion of supermarket pastoralism has fallen hopelessly out of
date. The organic movement has become a $7.7 billion business: Call it
Industrial Organic. Although that represents but a fraction of the $400
billion business of selling Americans food, organic is now the
fastest-growing category in the supermarket. Perhaps inevitably, this sort
of growth - sustained at a steady 20 percent a year for more than a decade -
has attracted the attention of the very agribusiness corporations to which
the organic movement once presented a radical alternative and an often
scalding critique.

Now that organic food has established itself as a viable alternative food
chain, agribusiness has decided that the best way to deal with that
alternative is simply to own it. The question is, what will they do with it?
Is the word "organic" being emptied of its meaning?

It turns out the Cascadian Farm pictured on my TV dinner is a real farm in
Rockport, Wash., that grows real food. Originally called the New Cascadian
Survival and Reclamation Project, the farm was started in 1971 by Gene Kahn
with the idea of growing food for the collective of environmentally minded
hippies. At the time, Kahn, 24, was a grad-school dropout from the South
Side of Chicago who, after reading "Silent Spring" and "Diet for a Small
Planet," determined to go back to the land, there to change "the food
system." He went on to become a pioneer of the organic movement and did
much to move organic food into the mainstream.

Today, Cascadian Farm's farm is a General Mills showcase - "a PR farm,"
as its founder freely acknowledges - and Kahn, erstwhile hippie farmer, is a
General Mills vice president and a millionaire. He has become one of the
most successful figures in the organic community and also perhaps one of the
most polarizing; for to many organic farmers and activists, he has come to
symbolize the takeover of the movement by agribusiness.

When the organic industry embarked on a period of double-digit annual growth
and rapid consolidation in the early 1990s, mainstream food companies began
to take organic - or at least, the organic market - seriously. Gerber's,
Heinz, Dole, ConAgra and ADM all created or acquired organic brands.
Cascadian Farm itself became a miniconglomerate, acquiring Muir Glen, the
California organic tomato processors, and the combined company changed its
name to Small Planet Foods.

In 1990, Congress had passed the Organic Food Production Act. The
legislation instructed the Department of Agriculture, which historically had
treated organic farming with undisguised contempt, to establish uniform
national standards for organic food and farming, fixing the definition of a
word that had always meant different things to different people.

Yet while the struggle with agribusiness over the meaning of the word
"organic" made headlines, another, equally important struggle was under way
at the USDA between Big and Little Organic, and this time the outcome was
decidedly more ambiguous. Could a factory farm be organic? Was an organic
cow entitled to dine on pasture? Did food additives and synthetic chemicals
have a place in organic processed food? If the answers to these seem like
no-brainers, then you, too, are stuck in an outdated pastoral view of
organic. Big Organic won all three arguments. The final standards, which
will take effect next year, are widely seen as favoring the industry's big
players.

No farm I have ever visited before prepared me for the industrial organic
farms I saw in California. When I think about organic farming, I think
family farm, I think small scale, I think hedgerows and compost piles and
battered pickup trucks. I don't think migrant laborers, combines, thousands
of acres of broccoli reaching clear to the horizon. To the eye, these farms
look exactly like any other industrial farm in California - and in fact the
biggest organic operations in the state today are owned and operated by
conventional megafarms. The same farmer who is applying toxic fumigants to
sterilize the soil in one field is in the next field applying compost to
nurture the soil's natural fertility.

Is there something wrong with this picture? It all depends on where you
stand. Gene Kahn makes the case that the scale of a farm has no bearing
on its fidelity to organic principles and that unless organic "scales up" it
will "never be anything more than yuppie food."

Today five giant farms control fully one-half of the $400 million organic
produce market in California. Partly as a result, the price premium for
organic crops is shrinking. This is all to the good for expanding organic's
market beyond yuppies, but it is crushing many of the small farmers for whom
organic has represented a profitable niche.

My journey through the changing world of organic food has cured me of my
naive supermarket pastoralism, but it hasn't put me off my organic feed. I
still fill my cart with the stuff. The science might still be sketchy, but
common sense tells me organic is better food - better, anyway, than the kind
grown with organophosphates, with antibiotics and growth hormones, with
cadmium and lead and arsenic (the EPA permits the use of toxic waste in
fertilizers), with sewage sludge and animal feed made from ground-up bits of
other animals as well as their own manure. Very likely it's better for me
and my family, and unquestionably it is better for the environment.
For even if only 1 percent of the chemical pesticides sprayed by American
farmers end up as residue in our food, the other 99 percent are going into
the environment - which is to say, into our drinking water, into our rivers,
into the air that farmers and their neighbors breathe. By now it makes
little sense to distinguish the health of the individual from that of the
environment.

Still, while it surely represents real progress for agribusiness to be
selling organic food rather than fighting it, I'm not sure I want to see
industrialized organic become the only kind in the market. Organic is
nothing if not a set of values (this is better than that), and to the extent
that the future of those values is in the hands of companies that are
finally indifferent to them, that future will be precarious.

If the word "organic" means anything, it means that the way we grow food is
inseparable from the way we distribute food, which is inseparable from the
way we eat food. The original premise that got Kahn started in 1971 was that
the whole industrial food system - and not just chemical agriculture - was
in some fundamental way unsustainable. It's impossible to read the papers
these days without beginning to wonder if this insight wasn't prophetic.
I'm thinking, of course, of mad cow disease, of the 76 million cases of food
poisoning every year (a rate higher than in 1948), of StarLink corn
contamination, of the 20-year-old farm crisis, of hoof-and-mouth disease and
groundwater pollution, not to mention industrial food's dubious "solutions"
to these problems: genetic engineering and antibiotics and irradiation.
Buying food labeled organic protects me from some of these things, but not
all; industrial organic may well be necessary to fix this system, but it
won't be sufficient.

Many of the values that industrial organic has jettisoned in recent years I
find compelling, so I've started to shop with them in mind. I happen to
believe, for example, that farms produce more than food; they also produce a
kind of landscape, and if I buy my organic milk from halfway across the
country, the farms I like to drive by every day will eventually grow nothing
but raised ranch houses. So instead of long-haul ultrapasteurized milk from
Horizon, I've started buying my milk, unpasteurized, from a dairy right here
in town, Local Farm.

I'm also trying to get away from the transcontinental strawberry (5 calories
of food energy, I've read, that it takes 435 calories of fossil-fuel energy
to deliver to my door) and the organic "home meal replacement" sold in a
package that will take 500 years to decompose.

Not all of the farmers I'm buying from are certified organic. But I talk to
them, see what they're up to, learn how they define the term. Sure, it's
more trouble than buying organic food at the supermarket, but I'm resolved
to do it anyway.

NOTES:
FOCUS COMMENTARYMichael Pollan, a contributing writer for The New York Times
Magazine, is the author of "The Botany of Desire." C. 2001 New York Times.