The Organic-Industrial Complex
(article is from June 2001)
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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.
Labels: Agricultural -Industrial Complex, Cascadian Farms Woodstock Farms, Gene Kahn, General Mills, Importes of Chinese food
posted by TheFuriousGourmet | 4:08 PM
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