http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0603-03.htm
Published on Sunday, June 3, 2001 in the Boulder Daily Camera

The Organic-Industrial Complex

What do the words 'organic food' mean, now that the movement has
become a $7.7-billion business dominated by large corporations?

by Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for The New York Times
Magazine, author of "The Botany of Desire."
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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 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 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 (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" in the 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 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." 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
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."

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.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for The New York Times
Magazine, is the author of "The Botany of Desire."

Copyright 2001 The Daily Camera
----------
**  Call to Action!  **  By  [log in to unmask]

**PLEASE CIRCULATE**

International Days of Action against the Biotechnology Industry
June 24-25th, 2001, EVERYWHERE
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Join thousands of activists, farmers, scientists, and others from
around the world in opposing the biotechnology industry!

On June 24th and 25th, 2001 the Biotechnology Industry Organization
(BIO) convention in San Diego, will open its doors to thousands of
executives, lawyers, venture capitalists, and corporate scientists
working to further their agenda of a patented and commodified future.

Outside the convention hall and all over San Diego, thousands of
people will be gathering for Beyond Biodevastation 2001/BIOJUSTICE!
This multi-day event will feature teach-ins, demonstrations, and
direct actions to confront and shed light on the threats to our
health, environment, farms and society posed by genetic engineering.

We are calling for people to come to San Diego with ideas for
affinity group-based actions, and for simultaneous solidarity actions
in communities around the world to stop the commodification of life,
the destruction of food systems, the theft of genetic information and
the loss of community power.

The possibilities are endless. From teach-ins to voluntary GE food
labeling brigades, from demonstrations against the gene giants to
organic potlucks, from direct actions to leafleting, we are calling
for global grassroots organizing against the biotechnology industry.

Since 1987, corporate gene giants have been contaminating the world's
food supply with dangerous and largely untested products of genetic
engineering. Many of these same companies are also major players in
the global pharmaceutical industry, which has made health care
unaffordable for growing numbers of people around the world, while
channeling research funds toward expensive genetic approaches to
health and disease at the expense of more fundamental medical and
health needs.  These companies have also told the world that genetic
engineering will reduce pesticide use, as they engineer their crops
to tolerate more herbicides.

Despite wide spread opposition to genetically engineered food and
demands for affordable health care, the biotechnology industry is
continuing along a path of social and environmental destruction.
Corporations and governments are leading the agenda to globalize
patent laws that privatize life as intellectual property rights,
encourage greed and sell out science to the
profit motive.

To stop the biotechnology industry, to bring power to our
communities, to create sustainable food systems, to create universal
health care, we call communities, individuals, and organizations to
TAKE ACTION!

For more information and updates on the days of action, see:
http://www.biodev.org

The Organizers of Biojustice 2001
The Institute for Social Ecology Biotechnology Project
North East Resistance Against Genetic Engineering - neRAGE.org
-------------------------------------------------------
Background on the Gene Giants:

Monsanto:  Today a much smaller company than before, as a result of a
merger with Pharmacia, and the subsequent spin-off of only the
agriculture, seed and pesticide divisions under the Monsanto name.
Still, Monsanto controls 85% of all genetically engineered germplasm,
and is using its ownership of many of the world's most important
commercial seed companies to saturate the commercial seed supply with
genetically engineered varieties.

Aventis:  Formed two years ago by the merger of the German chemical
giant Hoechst and the French Rhone Poulenc, Aventis is best known for
the "Starlink" variety of pesticidal GE corn.  This variety is not
approved for human consumption and is considered likely to cause
severe allergic reactions in some people.  Still, it has been found
in hundreds of brand-name processed foods, and has thoroughly
contaminated the US supply of corn seed.  Aventis also specializes in
crops resistant to glufosinate herbicides.

Syngenta:  Formed within the past year, when Novartis and Astra-
Zeneca decided to spin off many of their agricultural divisions to
protect the market value of their pharmaceutical divisions, Syngenta
describes itself as "the world's leading agribusiness company."
Syngenta markets numerous varieties of herbicide-tolerant and
pesticidal GE crops.

DuPont:  In 1999, DuPont Chemical completed its purchase of Pioneer
Hi-Bred, the world's largest seed company.  Pioneer aggressively
markets numerous GE varieties from all of the largest biotechnology
companies.

Novartis:  Since its founding in 1996, from the merger of Swiss
chemical giants Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy, Novartis has been one of the
world's most aggressive marketers of pesticidal Bt crops, featuring
an activated toxin spliced from Bt bacteria (Bacillus
thuringiensis).  Novartis has also been heavily involved in
xenotransplantation research, seeking to genetically engineer animals
to provide organs for human transplants; this line of research is
considered extremely abusive to animals and, if it ever succeeds, it
could introduce lethal animal viruses into the human population.

Astra-Zeneca:  Parent company Zeneca in the UK was responsible for
one of the first field trials of genetically engineered trees; Astra-
Zeneca is reportedly continuing to develop Terminator seed
technologies, despite a public pledge to discontinue this research.

Dow Chemical:  Dow's involvement in biotechnology includes its
ownership of the San Diego-based Mycogen, which recently absorbed
Cargill's seed division.  Dow is collaborating with San Diego-based
EPICyte to produce human antibodies in genetically engineered plants.
Cargill:  The world's largest and most vertically integrated
wholesale grain trader.  Its joint venture with Monsanto specializes
in genetically engineered animal feeds.  "Cargill has used its
extreme market power to ensure that the market is GM, against
consumer opinion," states the UK's Corporate Watch.
----------

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