tim campbell

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
Mass Natural

By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: June 4, 2006
"Elitist" is just about the nastiest name you can call someone, or
something, in America these days, a finely-honed term of derision in
the culture wars, and "elitist" has stuck to organic food in this
country like balsamic vinegar to mâche. Thirty years ago the rap on
organic was a little different: back then the stuff was derided as
hippie food, crunchy granola and bricklike brown bread for the unshaved

set (male and female division). So for organic to be tagged as elitist
may count as progress. But you knew it was over for John Kerry in the
farm belt when his wife, Teresa, helpfully suggested to Missouri
farmers that they go organic. Eating organic has been fixed in the
collective imagination as an upper-middle-class luxury, a blue-state
affectation as easy to mock as Volvos or lattes. On the cultural
spectrum, organic stands at the far opposite extreme from Nascar or
Wal-Mart.


But all this is about to change, now that Wal-Mart itself, the nation's

largest grocer, has decided to take organic food seriously. (Nascar is
not quite there yet.) Beginning later this year, Wal-Mart plans to roll

out a complete selection of organic foods - food certified by the
U.S.D.A. to have been grown without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers

- in its nearly 4,000 stores. Just as significant, the company says
it will price all this organic food at an eye-poppingly tiny premium
over its already-cheap conventional food: the organic Cocoa Puffs and
Oreos will cost only 10 percent more than the conventional kind.
Organic food will soon be available to the tens of millions of
Americans who now cannot afford it - indeed, who have little or no
idea what the term even means. Organic food, which represents merely
2.5 percent of America's half-trillion-dollar food economy, is about to

go mainstream. At a stroke, the argument that it is elitist will
crumble.
This is good news indeed, for the American consumer and the American
land. Or perhaps I should say for some of the American land and a great

deal more of the land in places like Mexico and China, for Wal-Mart is
bound to hasten the globalization of organic food. (Ten percent of
organic food is imported today.) Like every other commodity that global

corporations lay their hands on, organic food will henceforth come from

wherever in the world it can be produced most cheaply. It is about to
go the way of sneakers and MP3 players, becoming yet another rootless
commodity circulating in the global economy.
Oh, but wait. . .I meant to talk about all the good that will come of
Wal-Mart's commitment to organic. Sorry about that. When you're talking

about global capitalism, it can be hard to separate the good news from
the bad. Because of its scale and efficiency and notorious
ruthlessness, Wal-Mart will force down the price of organics, and that
is a good thing for all the consumers who can't afford to spend more
for food than they already do. Wal-Mart will also educate the millions
of Americans who don't yet know exactly what organic food is or
precisely how it differs from conventionally grown food.
The vast expansion of organic farmland it will take to feed Wal-Mart's
new appetite is also an unambiguous good for the world's environment,
since it will result in substantially less pesticide and chemical
fertilizer being applied to the land - somewhere. Whatever you think
about the prospect of organic Coca-Cola, when it comes, and come it
surely will, tens of thousands of acres of the world's cornfields -
enough to make all that organic high-fructose corn syrup - will no
longer receive an annual shower of pesticides like Atrazine. O.K.,
you're probably registering a flicker of cognitive dissonance at the
conjunction of the words "organic" and "high-fructose corn syrup," but
keep your eye for a moment on that Atrazine.
Atrazine is a powerful herbicide applied to 70 percent of America's
cornfields. Traces of the chemical routinely turn up in American
streams and wells and even in the rain; the F.D.A. also finds residues
of Atrazine in our food.
So what? Well, the chemical, which was recently banned by the European
Union, is a suspected carcinogen and endocrine disruptor that has been
linked to low sperm counts among farmers. A couple of years ago, a U.C.

Berkeley herpetologist named Tyrone Hayes, while doing research on
behalf of Syngenta, Atrazine's manufacturer, found that even at
concentrations as low as 0.1 part per billion, the herbicide will
chemically emasculate a male frog, causing its gonads to produce eggs
- in effect, turning males into hermaphrodites. Atrazine is often
present in American waterways at much higher concentrations than 0.1
part per billion. But American regulators generally won't ban a
pesticide until the bodies, or cancer cases, begin to pile up -
until, that is, scientists can prove the link between the suspect
molecule and illness in humans or ecological catastrophe. So Atrazine
is, at least in the American food system, deemed innocent until proved
guilty - a standard of proof extremely difficult to achieve, since it
awaits the results of chemical testing on humans that we, rightly,
don't perform.


I don't know about you, but as the father of an adolescent boy, I sort
of like the idea of keeping such a molecule out of my son's diet, even
if the scientists and nutritionists say they still don't have proof
that organic food is any safer or healthier. I also like that growing
food organically doesn't pollute the rivers and water table with
nitrates from synthetic fertilizer or expose farm workers to toxic
pesticides. And the fact that animals raised organically don't receive
antibiotics or synthetic growth hormones. Sounds like a better
agriculture to me - and Wal-Mart has just put the force of its great
many supermarkets behind it.


But before you pour yourself a celebratory glass of Wal-Mart organic
milk, you might want to ask a few questions about how the company plans

to achieve its laudable goals. Assuming that it's possible at all, how
exactly would Wal-Mart get the price of organic food down to a level
just 10 percent higher than that of its everyday food? To do so would
virtually guarantee that Wal-Mart's version of cheap organic food is
not sustainable, at least not in any meaningful sense of that word. To
index the price of organic to the price of conventional is to give up,
right from the start, on the idea, once enshrined in the organic
movement, that food should be priced not high or low but responsibly.
As the organic movement has long maintained, cheap industrial food is
cheap only because the real costs of producing it are not reflected in
the price at the checkout. Rather, those costs are charged to the
environment, in the form of soil depletion and pollution (industrial
agriculture is now our biggest polluter); to the public purse, in the
form of subsidies to conventional commodity farmers; to the public
health, in the form of an epidemic of diabetes and obesity that is
expected to cost the economy more than $100 billion per year; and to
the welfare of the farm- and food-factory workers, not to mention the


Wal-Mart, the biggest purveyor of cheap food in America - should be:
Cheap at any price!
To say you can sell organic food for 10 percent more than you sell
irresponsibly priced food suggests that you don't really get it -
that you plan to bring business-as-usual principles of industrial
"efficiency" and "economies of scale" to a system of food production
that was supposed to mimic the logic of natural systems rather than
that of the factory.
We have already seen what happens when the logic of the factory is
applied to organic food production. The industrialization of organic
agriculture, which Wal-Mart's involvement will only deepen, has already

given us "organic feedlots" - two words that I never thought would
find their way into the same clause. To supply the escalating demand
for cheap organic milk, agribusiness companies are setting up
5,000-head dairies, often in the desert. These milking cows never touch

a blade of grass, instead spending their days standing around a dry-lot

"loafing area" munching organic grain - grain that takes a toll on
both the animals' health (these ruminants evolved to eat grass, after
all) and the nutritional value of their milk. But this is the sort of
milk (deficient in beta-carotene and the "good fats" - like omega 3's
and C.L.A. - that come from grazing cows on grass) we're going to see
a lot more of in the supermarket as long as Wal-Mart determines to keep

organic milk cheap.
We're also going to see more organic milk - and organic foods of all
kinds - coming from places like New Zealand. The globalization of
organic food is already well under way: at Whole Foods you can buy
organic asparagus flown in from Argentina, raspberries from Mexico,
grass-fed meat from New Zealand. In an era of energy scarcity, the
purchase of such products does little to advance the ideal of
sustainability that once upon a time animated the organic movement.
These foods may contain no pesticides, but they are drenched in
petroleum even so.


Whether produced domestically or not, organic meat will increasingly
come not from mixed, polyculture farms growing a variety of species (a
practice that makes it possible to recycle nutrients between plants and

animals) but from ever-bigger Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or
CAFO's, which, apart from using organic feed and abjuring antibiotics,
are little different from their conventional counterparts. Yes, the
federal organic rules say the animals should have "access to the
outdoors," but in practice this often means providing them with a tiny
exercise yard or, in the case of one organic egg producer in New
England, a screened-in concrete "porch" - a view of the outdoors.
Herein lies one of the deeper paradoxes of practicing organic
agriculture on an industrial scale: big, single-species CAFO's are even

more precarious than their conventional cousins, since they can't use
antibiotics to keep the thousands of animals living in close
confinement indoors from becoming sick. So organic CAFO-hands (to call
them farmhands seems overly generous) keep the free ranging to a
minimum and then keep their fingers crossed.


Related
Michael Pollan: On the Table
Wal-Mart will buy its organic food from whichever producers can produce

it most cheaply, and these will not be the sort of farmers you picture
when you hear the word "organic." Big supermarkets want to do business
only with big farmers growing lots of the same thing, not because big
monoculture farms are any more efficient (they aren't) but because it's

easier to buy all your carrots from a single megafarm than to contract
with hundreds of smaller growers. The "transaction costs" are lower,
even when the price and the quality are the same. This is just one of
the many ways in which the logic of industrial capitalism and the logic

of biology on a farm come into conflict. At least in the short run, the

logic of capitalism usually prevails.
Wal-Mart's push into the organic market won't do much for small organic

farmers, that seems plain enough. But it may also spell trouble for the

big growers it will favor. Wal-Mart has a reputation for driving down
prices by squeezing its suppliers, especially after those suppliers
have invested heavily to boost production to feed the Wal-Mart maw.
Having done that, the supplier will find itself at Wal-Mart's mercy
when the company decides it no longer wants to pay a price that enables

the farmer to make a living. When that happens, the notion of
responsibly priced food will be sacrificed to the imperatives of
survival, and the pressure to cut corners will become irresistible.
Up to now, the federal organic standards have provided a bulwark
against that pressure. Yet with the industrialization of organic, these

rules are themselves coming under mounting pressure, and f****ve my
skepticism, but it's hard to believe that the lobbyists from Wal-Mart
are going to play a constructive role in defending those standards from

efforts to weaken them. Just this past year the Organic Trade
Association used lobbyists who do work for Kraft Foods to move a bill
through Congress that will make it easier to include synthetic
ingredients in products labeled organic.
Organic is just a word, after all, and its definition now lies in the
hands of the federal government, which means it is subject to all the
usual political and economic forces at play in Washington. Inevitably,
the drive to produce organic food cheaply will bring pressure to
further weaken the regulations, and some of K Street's finest talent
will soon be on the case. A few years ago a chicken producer in Ge****a

named Fieldale Farms persuaded its congressman to slip a helpful
provision into an appropriations bill that would allow growers of
organic chicken to substitute conventional chicken feed if the price of

organic feed exceeded a certain level. That certainly makes life easier

for a chicken producer when the price of organic corn is north of $5 a
bushel, as it is today, and conventional corn south of $2. But in what
sense is a chicken fed on conventional feed still organic? In no sense
but the Orwellian one: because the government says it is.
After an outcry from consumers and some wiser heads in the organic
industry, this new rule was repealed. The moral of the Fieldale story
is that unless consumers and well-meaning organic producers remain
vigilant and steadfast, the drive to make the price of organic foods
competitive with that of conventional foods will hollow out the word
and kill the organic goose, just when her golden eggs are luring so
many big players into the water. Let's hope Wal-Mart recognizes that
the extraordinary marketing magic of the word "organic" - a power
that flows directly from our dissatisfaction with the very-cheap-food
economy Wal-Mart has done so much to create - is a lot like the
health of an organic chicken living in close confinement with thousands

of other chickens in an organic CAFO, munching organic corn: fragile.


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/magazine/04wwln_lede.html?pagewante...

george

I wonder if they will be displayed adjacent to the "Wallys best"
adulterated meat that is soaked in preservatives and water?

axlq@spamcopnet

[snip article]

[snip rest of article]

And it will get easier and easier for places like Wal-Mart to sell
"organic" foods as the standards become more and more watered down.

Already, the USDA certifies as "organic" the feedlot dairies whose
cows never once graze in a pasture. It fits the letter of the
definition, but not the spirit. Soon we'll be seing various waivers
and exceptions for this or that pesticide or fertilizer (e.g. it's
OK to use them below threshold quantities) while still allowing the
producers to label them "organic."

-A

spope33@speedymailorg steve

There's quite a backlash among long-time organic farmers too,
who feel that the hard work they put in creating good-will
among consumers for organic foods has been appropriated
by evildoers.

Some of them apparently have even stopped calling their produce
"organic" because they feel it meets a higher standard,
and the "organic" term has been sullied.

Steve

bill duncan

The same thing will happen when standard crops went corporate - local
producers will be squeezed out of business and the primary requirements
for organics will be low production costs, product conformity and shelf
life. Why would it be any different?

Bill Duncan

steve fenwick

I predict a new term will be adopted by those who drive the "real"
organic movement.

Personally, I like the acronym "SOL": Sustainable, Organic, Local. Also
means "sun", which has a good warm-fuzzy about it.

Yes, I know the other meaning--don't go there!
Steve --
steve <at> w0x0f <dot> com
"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of
arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to
skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, chip shot in the other, body thoroughly
used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO what a ride!"

spope33@speedymailorg steve

In communications engineering, it refers to "Sync Out of Lock",
the condition where the receiving system has hopelessly
lost track of the transmission.

Or did you have yet another meaning in mind? :-)

S.

dan logcher

Yeah, when I hear SOL.. I think the similar phrase as you have
above that describes an individual or situation of ill-fate.

--
Dan

cheryl isaak

On 6/7/06 8:23 AM, in article
4486c50a$0$573$b45e6eb0@senator-bedfellow.mit.edu, "Dan Logcher"

Giggling hysterically!!!
Cheryl

dick margulis

Okay, everyone's had their fun. But how about Sustainable, Local,
Organic (i.e., SLO Food). The slow-food people should like that one. Of
course, they'll probably want to add a W-word, like Wonderful, at the
end, which will just make it icky.