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The Green Guide

How Organic Is Corporate/Industrial Organic?

New York Times Magazine
May 13, 2001
Behind the Organic-Industrial Complex
By MICHAEL POLLAN

I. Supermarket Pastoral
II. The Road to Cascadian Farm
III. The Soul of a New TV Dinner
IV. Down on the Industrial Organic Farm
V. Gene Kahn Visits the Mothership
VI. Local Farm

I. Supermarket Pastoral


Almost overnight, the amount and variety of organic food on offer in
my local supermarket has mushroomed. Fresh produce, milk, eggs,
cereal, frozen food, even junk food -- all of it now has its own organic
doppelgänger, 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
Cascadian Farm, one of the older organic brands. Compared with all the
other food in the supermarket, which is happy to tell you everything
about itself except how it was grown, organic food seems a lot more
legible. "Organic" on the label conjures a whole story, even if it is
the consumer who fills in most of the details, supplying the hero
(American Family Farmer), the villain (Agribusinessman) and the
literary genre, which I think of as "supermarket pastoral."

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 (referred to here, in proper pastoral style, as "the Horizon
family of companies"). 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," a process the carton presents as a boon to the
consumer (it pushes the freshness date into the next millennium), but
which of course also allows the company to ferry its milk all over the
country.

When I asked a local dairyman about this (we still have one or two in
town) he said that 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. So maybe Organic Cow milk isn't quite as legible a
product as I thought. I wasn't sure if the farmer had his facts
straight (it would turn out he did), but 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 called Country Herb: "rice, vegetables and grilled
chicken breast strips with a savory herb sauce." The text-heavy box it
came in told the predictable organic stories - about the chicken
(raised without chemicals and allowed "to roam freely in an outdoor
yard"); about the rice and vegetables (grown without synthetic
chemicals); even about the carton (recycled) -- but when I got to the
ingredients list, I felt a small jolt of cognitive dissonance.

For one thing, the list of ingredients went on forever (31 ingredients
in all) and 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. Even today, the rapid
growth of organic closely tracks consumers' rising worries about the
conventional food supply - about chemicals, about additives and, most
recently, about genetically modified ingredients and mad cow disease;
every food scare is followed by a spike in organic sales. And 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 now is, What will they
do with it? Is the word "organic" being emptied of its meaning?

II. The Road to Cascadian Farm

I don't know about you, but I never expect the bucolic scenes and
slogans on my packaged food to correspond to reality (where exactly
is Nature's Valley, anyway?), but it turns out the Cascadian Farm
pictured on my TV dinner is a real farm that grows real food -- though
not quite the same food contained in my TV dinner.

Cascadian Farm occupies a narrow, breathtaking shelf of land wedged
between the Skagit River and the North Cascades in the town of
Rockport, Wash., 75 miles northeast of Seattle. 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 he had hooked up with in nearby
Bellingham. At the time, Kahn was a 24-year-old 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." That particular dream was not so outrageous
in 1971 -- this was the moment, after all, when the whole
counterculture was taking a rural turn -- but Kahn's success in
actually achieving it surely is: 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 P.R. 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.

"Organic is becoming what we hoped it would be an alternative to,"
says Roger Blobaum, who played a key role as a consumer advocate in
pushing Congress to establish the U.S.D.A.'s fledgling organic
program. "Gene Kahn's approach is slowly but surely taking us in that
direction. He's one of the real pioneers, but there are people now who
are suspicious of him." Kahn is apt to call such people "purists,"
"Luddites," "romantics" and "ideologues" who have failed to outgrow
the "antibusiness prejudices" of the 60's. He'll tell you he's still
committed to changing the food system -- but now from "inside." Few in
the movement doubt his sincerity or commitment, but many will tell you
the food system will much sooner change Kahn, along with the whole
meaning of organic.

On an overcast morning not long ago, Kahn drove me out to Rockport
from his company's offices in Sedro-Woolley, following the twists of
the Skagit River east in a new forest green Lexus with vanity plates
that say "ORGANIC." Kahn is a strikingly boyish-looking 54, and after
you factor in a shave and 20 pounds, it's not hard to pick his face
out from the beards-beads-and-tractor photos on display in his office.
Back in the farm's early days, when Kahn supervised and mentored the
rotating band of itinerant hippies who would show up to work a day or
a week or a year on the farm, he drove a red VW Beetle and an ancient,
temperamental John Deere. Kahn lived in a modest clapboard farmhouse
on Cascadian Farm until 1993. Now he lives in a McMansion high in the
hills overlooking Puget Sound. Like a lot of the early organic
farmers, Kahn had no idea what he was doing at first and suffered his
share of crop failures. In 1971, organic agriculture was in its
infancy -- a few hundred scattered amateurs learning by trial and
error how to grow food without chemicals, an ad hoc grass-roots R. &
D. effort for which there was precisely no institutional support.
Though it did draw on various peasant-farming models, modern-day
organic agriculture is a relatively novel and remarkably sophisticated
system with deep roots in the counterculture. The theoretical roots of
organic agriculture go back a bit further, principally to the work of
a British scientist by the name of Sir Albert Howard. Based on his
experiments in India and observations of peasant farms in Asia,
Howard's 1940 treatise "An Agricultural Testament" demonstrated the
connection between the health of the soil and the ability of plants to
withstand diseases and pests. Howard's agricultural heresies were
praised in the pages of "The Whole Earth Catalog" (by Wendell Berry)
and popularized by J.I. Rodale in Organic Gardening and Farming
magazine -- which claimed 700,000 readers in 1971, one of whom was
Gene Kahn. But the word "organic" around 1970 connoted a great deal
more than a technique for growing vegetables. The movement's pioneers
set out to create not just an alternative mode of production (the
farms) but of distribution (the co-ops and health-food stores) and
even consumption. A "countercuisine" based on whole grains and
unprocessed ingredients rose up to challenge conventional industrial
"white bread" food. ("Plastic food" was an epithet you heard a lot.)
For a host of reasons that seem risible in retrospect, brown food of
all kinds (rice, bread, wheat, sugar) was deemed morally superior to
white. Much more than just lunch, organic food was "an edible dynamic"
that promised to raise consciousness about the economic order, draw
critical lines of connection between the personal and the political.
It was also, not incidentally, precisely what your parents didn't eat.

Such was dinner and the dinner-table conversation at Cascadian Farm
and countless other counterculture tables in the early 1970's. As for
an alternative mode of distributing food, Kahn recruited a hippie
capitalist named Roger Weschler to help him figure out how to sell his
strawberries before they rotted in the field. Weschler had helped
found something called the Cooperating Community, a network of Seattle
businesses committed to ecological principles and worker
self-management. A new offshoot, Community Produce, began distributing
the food grown at Cascadian Farm, and Weschler and Kahn set out, in
the unembarrassed words of Cascadian Farm's official corporate
history, "to change the world's food system." Twenty-nine years later,
Weschler is still at it, operating a produce brokerage devoted to
supporting family farmers. And Kahn? Weschler, who has lost neither
his scraggly black beard nor his jittery intensity, told me that by
going corporate, his old friend "has made a very different choice."

If Kahn were the least bit embarrassed by the compromises he has made
in his organic principles since those long-ago days, he would surely
have rewritten his company's official history by now -- and never sent
me to interview Weschler. But as we walked around the farm talking
about "how everything eventually morphs into the way the world is," it
seemed clear that Kahn has made his peace with that fact of life,
decided that the gains outweighed the losses.

In time, Kahn became quite a good farmer and, to his surprise, an even
better businessman. By the late 70's, he had discovered the virtues of
adding value to his produce by processing it (freezing blueberries and
strawberries, making jams), and once Cascadian Farm had begun
processing, Kahn discovered he could make more money buying produce
from other farmers than by growing it himself. During the 80's,
Cascadian Farm became an increasingly virtual sort of farm, processing
and marketing a range of packaged foods well beyond the Seattle area.

"The whole notion of a 'cooperative community' we started with
gradually began to mimic the system," Kahn recalled. "We were shipping
food across the country, using diesel fuel -- we were industrial
organic farmers. I was bit by bit becoming more of this world, and
there was a lot of pressure on the business to become more
privatized."

That pressure became irresistible in 1990, when in the aftermath of
the Alar scare, Kahn nearly lost everything -- and control of
Cascadian Farm wound up in corporate hands. In the history of the
organic movement, the Alar episode is a watershed, marking the birth
pangs of the modern organic industry. After a somewhat overheated "60
Minutes" expos 1/8 on apple growers' use of Alar, a growth-regulator
that the Environmental Protection Agency declared a carcinogen, middle
America suddenly discovered organic. "Panic for Organic" was the cover
line of one newsweekly, and, overnight, demand from the
supermarket chains soared. The ragtag industry wasn't quite ready for
prime time, however. Kahn borrowed heavily to finance an ambitious
expansion, contracted with farmers to grow an awful lot of organic
produce -- and then watched in horror as the bubble of demand subsided
along with the headlines about Alar. Kahn was forced to sell a
majority stake in the company -- to Welch's -- and set out on what he
calls his "corporate adventure."

"We were part of the food industry now," he told me. "But I wanted to
leverage that position to redefine the way we grow food -- not what
people want to eat or how we distribute it. that sure as hell isn't
going to change." Kahn sees himself as very much the grown-up, a sober
realist in a community of unreconstructed idealists. He speaks of
selling out to Welch's as "the time when I lost the company" but
doesn't trouble himself with second thoughts or regrets; in fact, it
was all for the best. "Welch's was my business school," he said. Kahn
seems to have no doubt that his path is the right path, not only for
him but for the organic movement as a whole: "You have a choice of
getting sad about all that or moving on. We tried hard to build a
cooperative community and a local food system, but at the end of the
day it wasn't successful. This is just lunch for most people. Just
lunch. We can call it sacred, we can talk about communion, but it's
just lunch."

In the years after the Alar bubble burst in 1990, the organic industry
recovered, embarking on a period of double-digit annual growth and
rapid consolidation, as mainstream food companies began to take
organic -or at least, the organic market -- seriously. Gerber's,
Heinz, Dole, ConAgra and A.D.M. 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. Nineteen-ninety also
marked the beginning of federal recognition for organic agriculture:
that year, Congress 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.

Settling on that definition turned out to be a grueling decad-long
process, as various forces both within and outside the movement
battled for control of a word that had developed a certain magic in
the marketplace. Agribusiness fought to define the word as broadly as
possible, in part to make it easier for mainstream companies to get
into organic but also out of fear that anything deemed not organic
would henceforth carry an official stigma. At first, the U.S.D.A.,
acting out of longstanding habit, obliged its agribusiness clients,
issuing a watery set of standards in 1997 that, incredibly, allowed
for the use of genetic modification, irradiation and sewage sludge in
organic food production. But an unprecedented flood of public comment
from outraged organic farmers and consumers forced the U.S.D.A. back
to the drawing board, in what was widely viewed as a victory for the
movement's principles.

Yet while the struggle with agribusiness over the meaning of the word
"organic" was making headlines, another, equally important struggle
was under way at the U.S.D.A. 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. The
standards do an admirable job of setting the bar for a more
environmentally responsible kind of farming, but as perhaps was
inevitable, many of the philosophical values embedded in the word
"organic" did not survive the federal rule-making process.

Gene Kahn served on the U.S.D.A.'s National Organic Standards Board
from 1992 to 1997, playing a key role in making the standards safe for
the organic TV dinner and a great many other processed organic foods.
This was no small feat, for Kahn and his allies had to work around the
1990 legislation establishing organic standards, which prohibited
synthetic food additives. Kahn argued that you couldn't have organic
processed foods without synthetics. Several of the consumer
representatives on the standards board contended that this was
precisely the point, and if no synthetics meant no organic TV dinners,
then TV dinners were something organic simply shouldn't do.

Joan Dye Gussow, a nutritionist and an outspoken standards-board
member, made the case against synthetics in a 1996 article that was
much debated, "Can an Organic Twinkie Be Certified?" She questioned
whether organic should simply mirror the existing food supply, with
its highly processed, salted and sugary junk food, or whether it
should aspire to something better -- a countercuisine. Kahn responded
with market populism: if the consumer wants an organic Twinkie, then
we should give it to him. As he put it to me on the drive back from
Cascadian Farm, "Organic is not your mother." In the end, it came down
to an argument between the old movement and the new industry, and the
new industry won: the final standards simply ignored the 1990 law,
drawing up a "national list" of permissible additives and synthetics,
from ascorbic acid to xanthan gum.

"If we had lost on synthetics," Kahn told me, "we'd be out of
business."

Kahn's victory cleared the way for the development of a parallel
organic food supply: organic Heinz ketchup (already on the shelves in
England), organic Hamburger Helper, organic Miracle Whip and, sooner
or later, organic Twinkies. This is not a prospect everyone relishes.
Even Kahn says: "I'm not looking forward to the organic Twinkie. But I
will defend to the death anyone's right to create one!" Eliot Coleman,
a Maine farmer and writer whose organic techniques have influenced two
generations of farmers, is repulsed by the whole idea: "I don't care
if the Wheaties are organic -- I wouldn't use them for compost.
Processed organic food is as bad as any other processed food."

III. The Soul of a New TV Dinner

Small Planet Foods's headquarters in Sedro-Woolley occupies a downtown
block of 19th-century brick storefronts in this faded and decidedly
funky logging town. The storefronts have been converted into loft like
offices designed in the alternative-capitalist style: brick walls, air
ducts and I-beams all in plain sight -- no facades here. Since every
day is dress-down day at Small Planet Foods, Friday is the day
everybody takes his or her dog to work. I spent a Friday in Woolley,
learning the ins and outs of formulating, manufacturing and selling an
organic TV dinner.

Steve Harper, Small Planet's chief food scientist, described the
challenge of keeping a frozen herb sauce from separating
unappetizingly (instead of modified food starch, organic food
scientists rely on things like carrageenan, a seaweed derivative, to
enhance "freeze-thaw stability") and explained the algorithm governing
the relative size and population of chicken chunks (fewer bigger
chunks give a better "quality perception" than a larger number of
dice-size cubes). He also explained how they get that salty
processed-food taste right inside a chicken chunk: marinade-injecting
hypodermic needles.

If Harper is responsible for the "recipe" of a Cascadian Farm TV
dinner, it falls to Marv Shelby, the company's vice president for
operations, to get the meal "cooked." Shelby, who came to Small Planet
after a career in operations at Birds Eye, handles the considerable
logistics involved in moving three dozen ingredients on time to the
co-packing plant in Alberta, Canada, where they are combined in a
microwaveable bowl. He described an elaborate (and energy-intensive)
choreography of ingredients, packaging and processes that takes place
over a half-dozen states and two countries. Fresh broccoli, for
instance, travels from a farm in the Central Valley to a plant in
Sanger, Calif., where it is cut into florets, blanched and frozen.

From California, the broccoli is trucked to Edmonton, Alberta, there
to meet up with pieces of organic chicken that have traveled from a
farm in Petaluma, Calif., with a stop at a processing plant in Salem,
Ore., where they were defrosted, injected with marinade, cubed, cooked
and refrozen. They don't call it processed food for nothing.

Most everyone I met at Small Planet Foods expressed a fervently held
belief in the value of organic farming. There was a politics to their
work, and if they had had to compromise
certain ideals in order to adapt their products to the mainstream food
system, all this was in service to a greater good they seemed never to
lose sight of: converting the greatest number of acres of American
farmland to organic agriculture. The solitary exception to this
outlook was a vice president for marketing, the man most responsible
for developing Cascadian's new slogan, "Taste You Can Believe In." R.
Broos Gekler is a marketing star at General Mills who was installed at
Small Planet Foods immediately after the acquisition. A year later,
Gekler, a handsome, well-spoken New York University M.B.A., was still
something of an outsider at Small Planet Foods. "There are people here
who regard me as the Antichrist," he joked. I think it was around the
time he explained to me, apropos of his colleagues, that "some
principles can be an obstacle to success" that I understood why this
might be so.

"I came here to help the company identify its consumer target," Gekler
explained crisply, "which is different from what they believed." In
marketing parlance, Small Planet (like the rest of the organic
industry) had traditionally directed its products toward someone
called "the true natural" -- a committed, activist consumer. True
naturals are the people on whom the organic food industry has been
built, the outwardly directed, socially conscious consumers devoted to
the proposition of "better food for a better planet." But while their
numbers are growing -- true naturals now represent about 10 percent of
the U.S. food market, as a large proportion of Gen X'ers join their
ranks -- the future of organic, General Mills says, lies with a
considerably larger group of even more affluent consumers called the
"health seekers." It is to this group that Cascadian Farm is targeting
its new TV dinners.

Health seekers, who today represent about a quarter of the market, are
less "extrinsic" -- that is, more interested in their own health than
that of the planet. They buy supplements, work out, drink wine, drive
imported cars. They aren't interested in a countercuisine, which is
why Cascadian's new line of frozen entrees eschews whole grains and
embraces a decidedly middle-of-the road "flavor profile."

The chief reason the health seeker will buy organic is for the
perceived health benefits. This poses a certain marketing challenge,
however, since it has always been easier to make the environmental
case for organic food than the health case. Although General Mills has
put its new organic division under the umbrella of its "health
initiatives" group, "organic" is not, at least officially, a health,
nutrition or food-safety claim, a point that Dan Glickman, then
secretary of agriculture, took pains to emphasize when he unveiled the
U.S.D.A.'s new label in December: organic, he stressed, is simply "a
production standard."

"At first, I thought the inability to make hard-hitting health
claims" -- for organic -- was a hurdle," Gekler said when I asked him
about this glitch. "But the reality is, all you have to say is
'organic' -- you don't need to provide any more information." These
particular consumers -- who pay attention to the media, to food scares
and to articles like this one -- take their own health claims to the
word.

Suddenly the genius of Cascadian Farm's new slogan dawned on me.
"Taste You Can Believe In": meaningless in and of itself, the slogan
"allows the consumer to bring his or her personal beliefs to it,"
Gekler explained. While the true natural hears social values in the
phrase "Believe In," the health seeker hears a promise of health and
flavor. The slogan is an empty signifier, as the literary theorists
would say, and what a good thing that is for a company like General
Mills. How much better to let the consumers fill in the marketing
message -- healthier, more nutritious, no pesticides, more wholesome,
sustainable, safer, purer -- because these are controversial
comparative claims that, as Gekler acknowledged, "make the
conventional food industry very uncomfortable."

Before I left his office, I asked Gekler about his own beliefs -
whether or not he believed that organic food was better food. He
paused for a long time, no doubt assessing the cost of either answer,
and deftly punted.

"I don't know yet."

IV. Down on the Industrial Organic Farm

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
mega-farms. 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." To
prove his point, Kahn sent me to visit large-scale farms whose organic
practices were in many ways quite impressive, including the Central
Valley operation that grows vegetables for his frozen dinners and
tomatoes for Muir Glen.

Greenways Organic is a successful 2,000-acre organic-produce operation
tucked into a 24,000-acre conventional farm outside Fresno; the crops,
the machines, the crews, the rotations and the fields were
indistinguishable, and yet two very different kinds of industrial
agriculture are being practiced here side by side.

In place of petrochemical fertilizers, Greenways's organic fields are
nourished by compost made by the ton at a horse farm nearby. Insects
are controlled with biological agents and beneficial insects like
lacewings. Frequent and carefully timed tilling, as well as propane
torches, keeps down the weeds, perhaps the industrial organic farmer's
single stiffest challenge. This approach is at best a compromise:
running tillers through the soil so frequently is destructive to its
tilth, yet weeding a 160-acre block of broccoli by hand is
unrealistic.

Since Greenways grows the same crops conventionally and organically, I
was interested to hear John Diener, one of the farm's three partners,
say he knew for a fact that his organic crops were "better," and not
only because they hadn't been doused with pesticide. When Diener takes
his tomatoes to the cannery, the organic crop reliably receives higher
Brix scores -- a measure of the sugars in fruits and vegetables. It
seems that crops grown on nitrogen fertilizer take up considerably
more water, thereby diluting their nutrients, sugars and flavors. The
same biochemical process could explain why many people -- including
the many chefs who swear by organic ingredients -- believe organic
produce simply tastes better. With less water in it, the flavor and
the nutrients of a floret of organic broccoli will be more
concentrated than one grown with chemical fertilizers.

It's too simple to say that smaller organic farms are automatically
truer to the organic ideal than big ones. In fact, the organic ideal
is so exacting -- a sustainable system that requires not only no
synthetic chemicals but also few purchased inputs of any kind and that
returns as much to the soil as it removes -- that it is most often
honored in the breach. Yet the farmers who come closest to achieving
this ideal do tend to be smaller in scale. These are the farmers who
plant dozens of different crops in fields that resemble quilts and
practice long and elaborate rotations, thereby achieving the rich
biodiversity in space and time that is the key to making a farm
sustainable.

For better or worse, these are not the kinds of farms Small Planet
Foods does business with today. It's simply more efficient to buy from
one 1,000-acre farm than 10 100-acre farms. Indeed, Cascadian Farm the
corporation can't even afford to use produce from Cascadian Farm the
farm: it's too small. So the berries grown there are sold at a
roadside stand, while the company buys berries for freezing from as
far away as Chile.

The big question is whether the logic of an industrial food chain can
be reconciled to the logic of the natural systems on which organic
agriculture has tried to model itself. Put another way, Is "industrial
organic" a contradiction in terms?

Kahn is convinced it is not, but others both inside and outside his
company see a tension. Sarah Huntington is one of Cascadian's oldest
employees. She worked alongside Kahn on the farm and at one time or
another has held just about every job in the company. "The maw of that
processing plant beast eats 10 acres of cornfield an hour," she told
me. "And you're locked into planting a particular variety like Jubilee
that ripens all at once and holds up in processing. So you see how the
system is constantly pushing you back toward monoculture, which is
anathema in organic. But that's the challenge -- to change the system
more than it changes you."

One of the most striking ways Small Planet Foods is changing the
system is by helping conventional farms convert a portion of their
acreage to organic. Several thousand acres of American farmland are
now organic as a result of the company's efforts, which go well beyond
offering contracts to providing instruction and even management. Kahn
has helped to prove to the skeptical that organic -- dismissed as
"hippie farming" not very long ago -- can work on a large scale. The
environmental benefits of this educational process shouldn't be
underestimated. And yet the industrialization of organic comes at a
price. The most obvious is consolidation: 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, a way out of the
cheap-food economics that has ravaged American farming over the last
few decades. Indeed, many of the small farmers present at the creation
of organic agriculture today find themselves struggling to compete
against the larger players, as the familiar, dismal history of
American agriculture begins to repeat itself in the organic sector.

This has opened up a gulf in the movement between Big and Little
Organic and convinced many of the movement's founders that the time
has come to move "beyond organic" - to raise the bar on American
agriculture yet again. Some of these innovating farmers want to stress
fair labor standards, others quality or growing exclusively for local
markets. In Maine, Eliot Coleman has pioneered a sophisticated market
garden entirely under plastic, to supply his "food shed" with local
produce all winter long; even in January his solar-heated farm beats
California on freshness and quality, if not price. In Virginia, Joel
Salatin has developed an ingenious self-sufficient rotation of
grass-fed livestock: cattle, chickens and rabbits that take turns
eating, and feeding, the same small pasture. There are hundreds of
these "beyond organic" farmers springing up now around the country.
The fact is, however, that the word "organic" - having entered the
vocabulary of both agribusiness and government -- is no longer these
farmers' to redefine. Coleman and Salatin, both of whom reject the
U.S.D.A. organic label, are searching for new words to describe what
it is they're doing. Michael Ableman, a "beyond organic" farmer near
Santa Barbara, Calif., says: "We may have to give up on the word
'organic,' leave it to the Gene Kahns of the world. To be honest, I'm
not sure I want the association, because what I'm doing on my farm is
not just substituting materials."

Not long ago at a conference on organic agriculture, a corporate
organic farmer suggested to a family farmer struggling to survive in
the competitive world of industrial organic agriculture that he
"should really try to develop a niche to distinguish yourself in the
market." The small farmer replied: "I believe I developed that niche
20 years ago. It's called 'organic.' And now you're sitting on it."

V. Gene Kahn Visits the Mothership

In March, I accompanied Gene Kahn on one of his monthly visits to the
General Mills headquarters, a grassy corporate campus strewn with
modern sculptures in the suburbs outside Minneapolis. In deference to
Fortune 500 etiquette, I put on a suit and tie but quickly realized I
was overdressed: Kahn had on his usual khakis and a denim work shirt
embroidered with a bright red Muir Glen tomato. When I said something,
Kahn told me he makes a point of not changing his clothes when he goes
to Minneapolis. I get it: an organic farmer in an embroidered work
shirt is part of what General Mills was acquiring when it acquired
Small Planet Foods. Yet this particular organic farmer is presumably a
far sight wealthier than most of his new corporate colleagues: when
General Mills bought Small Planet Foods for an estimated $70 million,
Kahn still owned 10 percent of the company.

Together, Kahn and I toured General Mills's Bell Technical Center, a
sprawling research-and-development facility where some 900 food
scientists, chemists, industrial designers and nutritionists dream up
and design both the near- and long-term future of American food. This
was Kahn's first visit to the facility, and as we moved from lab to
lab, I could see his boyish enthusiasm mounting as he collected new
ideas and business cards.

In the packaging-design lab, even before Arne Brauner could finish
explaining how he engineered the boxes, bowls and cups in which
General Mills sells its products, Kahn asked him, "Has there ever been
a completely edible packaging for food?" Brauner rubbed his chin for a
moment.

"The sausage. That was probably the first."

Kahn now told him about the bowl in which Cascadian Farm sold its
frozen entrees. Plastic would have turned off the organic consumer, he
explained, so they were using coated paperboard, which isn't readily
recyclable. Would it be possible, Kahn wondered, to make a
microwaveable bowl out of biodegradable food starch? Brauner said he
had heard about a cornstarch clamshell for fast-food burgers and
offered to look into it. Kahn took his card.

Kahn had another, more off-the-wall request for Perry May, the man in
charge of General Mills's machine shop. This is where engineers and
machinists make the machines that make the food. Kahn asked Perry if
his shop could help develop a prototype for a new weeding machine he
had dreamed up for organic farmers. "It would be an optical weeder
with a steam generator on board," Kahn explained. "The scanner would
distinguish between a weed and a corn plant, say, and then zap the
weed with a jet of hot steam." May thought it might be doable; they
exchanged cards.

"I feel like a kid in a candy store," Kahn told me afterward. "Organic
has never had these kinds of resources at its disposal."

On the drive back from Bell, Kahn grew positively effervescent about
the "organic synergies" that could come from General Mills's
acquisition of Pillsbury, a $10.5 billion deal now awaiting F.T.C.
approval. Pillsbury owns Green Giant, and the prospect of being able
to draw on that company's scientists (and patents) has planted
agronomic fantasies in the fevered brain of the former farmer:
broccoli specifically bred for organic production ("We've never had
anything like that!"); an organic version of Niblets, Green Giant's
popular proprietary corn; carrots bred for extra vitamin content. In
fact, Kahn got so worked up spinning his vision of the industrial
organic future that he got us lost.

To this was how Kahn proposed to change the American food system from
within: by leveraging its capital and know-how on behalf of his dream.
Which prompts the question, Just how does the American food system
feel about all this? As Kahn and I made the rounds of General Mills's
senior management, he in his work shirt, I in my suit, I tried to find
out how these tribunes of agribusiness regarded their new vice
president's organic dream, exactly how it fit into their vision of the
future of food. The future of food, I learned, is toward ever more
health and convenience-- the two most important food trends today --
at no sacrifice of taste. "Our corporate philosophy," as one senior
vice president, Danny Strickland, put it, "is to give consumers what
they want with no trade-offs." Organic fits into this philosophy in so
far as the company's market research shows that consumers increasingly
want it and believe it's healthier.

The acquisition of a leading organic food company is part of a
company-wide "health initiative" -- along with adding calcium to
various product lines and developing "functional foods" like Harmony,
a soy-and-calcium-fortified cereal aimed at menopausal women. When I
asked Ian Friendly, the sharp, young executive in charge of the
company's health-initiative group, if this meant that General Mills
believed organic was more healthful than conventional food, he deftly
shifted vocabulary, suggesting that "wellness' is perhaps a better
word." Wellness is more of a whole gestalt or lifestyle, which
includes things like yoga, massage and working out. It quickly became
clear that in the eyes of General Mills, organic is not a revolution
so much as a market niche, like menopausal women or "ethnics," and
that health is really a matter of consumer perception.

You did not have to buy into the organic "belief system" to sell it.
When I asked Strickland if he believed that organic food was in any
way better, he said: "Better? It depends. Food is subjective.
Perceptions depend on circumstances." I got much the same response
from other General Mills executives. The words "better food," uttered
so unself-consciously in Sedro-Woolley, rang in their offices like a
phrase from a dead language. Steve Sanger, the company's chairman,
said: "I'm certain it's better for some people. It depends on their
particular beliefs." Sheri Schellhaas, vice president for research and
development, said, "The question is, Do consumers believe organic is
healthier?" Marc Belton, a senior vice president for cereals and the
executive most responsible for the Small Planet acquisition, put it
this way: "Is it better food? . . . You know, so much of life is what
you make of it. If it's right for you, it's better -- if you feel it's
better, it is."

At General Mills, it would seem, the whole notion of objective truth
has been replaced by a kind of value-neutral consumer constructivism,
in which each sovereign shopper constructs his own reality: "Taste You
Can Believe In." Kahn understands that there is no percentage in
signing onto the organic belief system, not when you also have Trix
and Go-Gurt and Cinnamon Toast Milk and Cereal Bars to sell, yet, as
he acknowledged later, contemporary corporate relativism drives him a
little nuts.

Old-fashioned objective truth did make a brief reappearance when Kahn
and I visited the quality-assurance lab deep in the bowels of the Bell
center. This is where technicians grind up Trix and Cheerios and run
them through a mass spectrometer to make sure pesticide residues don't
exceed F.D.A. "tolerances." Pesticide residues are omnipresent in the
American food supply: the F.D.A. finds them in 30 to 40 percent of the
food it samples. Many of them are known carcinogens, neurotoxins and
endocrine disrupters -- dangerous at some level of exposure. The
government has established acceptable levels for these residues in
crops, though whether that means they're safe to consume is debatable:
in setting these tolerances the government has historically weighed
the risk to our health against the benefit -- to agriculture, that is.
The tolerances also haven't taken into account that children's narrow
diets make them especially susceptible or that the complex mixtures of
chemicals to which we're exposed heighten the dangers.

Harry Leichtweis, a senior research analytical chemist at General
Mills, tests for hundreds of different chemical compounds, not only
the 400 pesticides currently approved by the E.P.A. but also the
dozens of others that have been banned over the years as their dangers
became known. Decades later, many of these toxins remain in the soil
and continue to show up in our food. "We still find background levels
of DDT and chlordane," he explained. Now the lab tests Small Planet
Foods's products too. So I asked Leichtweis, who is a pale, rail-thin
scientist with Coke-bottle specs and no discernible affect, if organic
foods, as seen from the perspective of a mass spectrometer, are any
different.

"Well, they don't contain pesticide."

Leichtweis had struck a blow for old-fashioned empiricism. Whatever
else you might say about an organic TV dinner, it almost certainly
contains less pesticide than a conventional one. Gene Kahn was
beaming.

VI. Local Farm

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 E.P.A.
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.

Also, there are values that the new corporate -- and government --
construction of "organic" leaves out, values that once were part and
parcel of the word but that have since been abandoned as impractical
or unprofitable. I'm thinking of things like locally grown, like the
humane treatment of animals, like the value of a shorter and more
legible food chain, the preservation of family farms, even the promise
of a countercuisine. To believe that the U.S.D.A. label on a product
ensures any of these things is, as I discovered, naive.

Yet if the word "organic" means anything, it means that all these
things are ultimately connected: 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, remember, the idea 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.
Debra Tyler is organic, but she doesn't bother mentioning the fact on
her label. Why? "My customers can see for themselves what I'm doing
here," she says. What she's doing is milking nine pastured Jersey cows
whose milk changes taste and hue with the seasons.

"Eat Your View!" is a save-the-farms bumper sticker you see in Europe
now. I guess that's part of what I'm trying to do. But 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. (Does that make me a
True Natural?) So I've tracked down a local source for grass-fed beef
(Chris Hopkins), eggs (Debra Tyler again) and maple syrup (Phil Hart),
and on Saturday mornings I buy produce at a farmer's market in a
neighboring town. I also have a line on a C.S.A. ("community supported
agriculture"), or "subscription farm," a new marketing scheme from
Europe that seems to be catching on here. You put up a couple of
hundred dollars every spring and then receive a weekly box of produce
through the summer. 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. Because
organic is not the last word, and it's not just lunch.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author
of "The Botany of Desire," to be published this week.