The Omnivore's Dilemma, Page 8

These were my thoughts as we sped down the highway putting away our fast-food lunch. What is it about fast food? Not only is it served in a flash, but more often than not it’s eaten that way too. We finished our meal in under ten minutes. From the packaging to the taste, fast food is designed to be eaten quickly. Real food is a pleasure to eat. You want to take your time and enjoy every bite. There’s no point in taking your time with fast food. After a few bites, you forget what you’re eating. It’s not exactly food, but a kind of food substitute. So you eat more and eat more quickly, bite after bite, until you feel not satisfied, exactly, but simply, regrettably, full.

  PART II

  The Industrial Organic Meal

  10

  Big Organic

  ONCE UPON A TIME

  I’m certainly not the only one who has learned the truth about the industrial food chain. In recent years, more and more Americans have discovered the same sad facts. A lot of them are trying to get away from the kingdom of corn and processed foods by buying organic food. And in my part of the world, there is no greater temple to all things organic, natural, and unprocessed than my local Whole Foods supermarket.

  I confess that I really enjoy shopping at Whole Foods. It has some of the same feeling as browsing a good bookstore. Maybe that’s because at Whole Foods I spend a lot of my time reading—not books, but labels. Every food item in the store seems to have a little story attached to it.

  Take the “range-fed” sirloin steak in the meat case. There’s a flyer on the counter that says once upon a time the steak was part of a steer that spent its days “living in beautiful places.” Among the places the steer got to visit were “high-mountain meadows,” “thick aspen groves,” and “miles of sagebrushfilled flats.” Now, a steak like that has got to taste better than one without a story. You can bet it will cost more too.

  These food stories are showing up everywhere. On a recent shopping trip I filled my shopping cart with:• Eggs “from cage-free vegetarian hens”

  • Milk from cows that live “free from unnecessary fear and distress”

  • Wild salmon caught by Native Americans in Yakutat, Alaska (population 833)

  • “Heirloom” tomatoes from Capay Valley Farm ($4.99 a pound), “one of the early pioneers of the organic movement”

  The organic chicken I picked even had a name: Rosie. Rosie was a “free-range chicken” from Petaluma Poultry.

  Almost all of the labels featured the word organic. Forty years ago there was no such category as “organic” food. Today it is a $20-billion business—the fastest growing part of the food industry. The word organic has become a kind of shorthand for food that is healthier or more natural or chemical-free. Yet as I had learned, “organic” has different meanings. Now I had more questions than answers. For example, can there be such a thing as an organic TV dinner? What about an organic Twinkie? Exactly how different is “organic” food from industrial food? I was about to find out.

  THE BIRTH OF ORGANIC FOOD

  Once upon a time all food was “organic.” It was grown without the help of fossil fuels, pesticides, or chemical fertilizers. As we have seen, that all began to change about fifty years ago, with the growth of the industrial food chain.

  One of the first to notice this change was a man named J. I. Rodale. In 1940 he started a magazine called Organic Gardening and Farming. In his magazine, Rodale wrote about the health benefits of growing food without synthetic chemicals—“organically.”

  But the idea of organic food did not really catch on until 1969. That year marked the height of the counterculture of the 1960s. Civil rights and anti-war protests rocked the country. Young people were rebelling against a society they thought was violent, corrupt, and immoral. Some “dropped out” to join communes, groups of people living and working on farms.

  One part of this counterculture was the environmental movement. It was spurred in part by a 1962 book called Silent Spring by a woman named Rachel Carson. In it, she warned of the dangers of pesticides like DDT. Events in the news in 1969 also made people aware of the dangers of pollution. A giant oil spill off Santa Barbara blackened California’s coastline. A river in Cleveland was so full of filth that it caught fire.

  Suddenly people started using the word ecology and talking about cleaning up the planet. The first Earth Day was held in April 1970. And the idea of organic food began to catch on. Eating whole wheat bread and whole grains like brown rice became a symbol of the new movement. Processed food like white bread was called “plastic food.” The first organic food co-ops were founded. Neighbors would get together once a week and order organic vegetables from farmers. They had to agree on what to order. Often they bought whatever the local farmers had to offer.

  To the young people who founded those first co-ops, the word organic meant more than a method of farming. It meant living in harmony with nature instead of trying to control it. It meant being free from the control of big corporations. Growing organic food was a way to live their principles and not just talk about them.

  Most of those food co-ops are gone now. Many of them have been driven out of business by national “organic” supermarket chains like Whole Foods. Today in the average supermarket there’s a selection of organic fruits and vegetables flown in from all over the world. You can buy your organics at any time of the year, no matter the season. And you don’t have to get a dozen other people to agree on what to buy.

  INDUSTRIAL ORGANIC

  But if you look a little closer you’ll see that something has been left behind. The organic food in stores like Whole Foods is organic because it is grown without chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Yet much of it is also industrial. Most organic vegetables in the U.S. are grown in large monoculture farms (farms growing only one crop), far from the people who eat it. Most of it is processed and sold by the same industrial food chain as the corn from George Naylor’s farm. Because this food chain has elements of both, I call it “industrial organic.”

  For example, some organic milk comes from cows on small farms. But most organic milk comes from factory farms. The cows on these “farms” spend their time in a fenced lot eating organic grain except for the three times a day they are hooked up to milking machines. Likewise, organic beef is often raised in “organic feedlots.” The cows are fed corn just like the cows at Poky, but their feed is organic.

  The government rules about organic food allow companies to make organic high-fructose corn syrup—words I never expected to see combined. This organic HFCS could come in useful when making “organic” processed foods, like organic soda or organic TV dinners. I found one such TV dinner that included thirty-one ingredients, from guar and xanthan gum to “natural grill flavor.” Several of the ingredients were synthetic additives that are permitted under federal organic rules.

  A field of organic leafy greens being grown for Cascadian Farms.

  HIPPIE FOOD

  The TV dinner was made by a company called Cascadian Farm. The story of Cascadian tells you a lot about the growth of the organic food movement and how it has changed.

  Cascadian started as a kind of hippie commune in 1972, founded by a fellow named Gene Kahn and his friends. Like other young people at the time, Kahn had the idea of getting back to the land and changing the American food system. Today Cascadian is owned by General Mills, and Kahn is a General Mills vice president. Cascadian doesn’t even grow its own food anymore. Instead the company buys produce from large (organic) industrial farms, many of them monocultures.

  I bought and ate this TV dinner made by Cascadian Farms. Once a hippie commune in Washington State, Cascadian is now an industrial organic brand owned by food giant General Mills.

  On the Cascadian package there’s a picture of a pretty little farm—the original commune. The place still exists, but it’s just for show. (I guess so they can take photos of it.) One overcast morning Gene Kahn himself drove me out to see it, about seventy-five miles northeast of Seattle. We followed the twists of the Skagit River in his new forest-green
Lexus. (His vanity license plates say “Organic.”)

  Kahn is a boyish-looking man in his fifties. He spoke without regret about the compromises he’s made along the path from organic farmer to agribusiness executive. He explained that part of the idea behind Cascadian was to get folks to eat whole foods instead of processed foods. They wanted people to be able to buy their food from local farmers instead of from big corporations. But somewhere along the way, Kahn decided that it was impossible to make all of those changes. So he decided to focus on how food was grown.

  “You have a choice of getting sad about all that or moving on,” he told me. “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.”

  AGRIBUSINESS MOVES IN

  So Kahn, like some other organic farmers, started following the model of the industrial food chain. Cascadian started “adding value” to some of its food, by freezing berries or making them into jam. Once they started processing food, they discovered they could make more money by buying produce from other farmers than by growing it themselves.

  The demand for organic food really jumped in the year 1990, after the Alar food scare. Alar was a chemical conventional growers sprayed on apples to help them ripen. In 1990 the Environmental Protection Agency found that Alar could cause cancer. Suddenly the demand for organic apples and all sorts of organic produce shot through the roof. People who had never thought about organic food started buying it.

  Organic food companies saw their business boom overnight. Some, like Cascadian, borrowed money to increase their production. Having borrowed too much, when the rush to buy organic food slowed down, Gene Kahn was forced to sell control of Cascadian to Welch’s. The hippie commune was now under the control of corporate America.

  Other large agribusiness corporations started paying attention to organic food. It wasn’t because they suddenly saw the error of their ways. They just recognized that a growing number of consumers wanted organic food, and they wanted a piece of that business. Gerber’s, Heinz, Dole, ConAgra, and ADM all bought organic brands or started their own.

  GROWING BY THE RULES

  Now all sorts of foods with labels like “natural” and “organic” began to show up in supermarkets. Those words had become great marketing tools. But what exactly did they mean? In 1990 Congress passed a law telling the Department of Agriculture (the USDA) to decide on some rules for organic food. What followed was a great debate to determine the future of the organic industry.

  On one side of the fight were the agribusiness corporations, which had just jumped onto the organic food bandwagon. They fought to define organic as loosely as possible. For example, they wanted the right to call genetically modified food (GMO) organic. They also wanted to be able to fertilize their “organic” fields with sewage sludge. At first the USDA went along. In 1997 it proposed a very loose set of rules that gave agribusiness everything it wanted. In response there was a huge outcry from small organic farmers and the public. A flood of protest forced the USDA back to the drawing board.

  One big question was whether there could be such a thing as organic processed food. Gene Kahn sat on the board that set the new standards. He argued that the rules for organics had to allow synthetic additives and preservatives. Without synthetics, processed foods like TV dinners just can’t be manufactured. Many people from the old organic movement argued that to put synthetics in a processed food and then call it organic was a fraud. They said there could be no such thing as a truly organic Twinkie or TV dinner. In the end, Kahn’s side won out. That’s why there are now “organic” processed foods, although still no organic Twinkie.

  These new rules cleared the way for a huge growth in the organic food market. “If we had lost on synthetics,” Gene Kahn told me, “we’d be out of business.”

  DOWN ON THE INDUSTRIAL ORGANIC FARM

  I guess I missed the old Cascadian, the one on the package. Or at least, I missed the idea of it. This just didn’t fit my picture of what an organic farm should look like.

  Get over it, Gene Kahn told me. Just because a farm is big doesn’t mean it isn’t organic. The important thing, he would argue, is that behind every organic TV dinner or chicken stands acres of land that will no longer be doused with chemicals. I could see his point. This is clearly a great thing for the environment and the public health. So I decided to go see some industrial organic farms for myself.

  Kahn sent me to visit a large organic farm operation called Greenways, in California’s Central Valley. That’s where they grow vegetables for Cascadian Farm frozen dinners.

  Greenways Organic is really 2,000 acres of organic farmland tucked into a 24,000-acre conventional farm. That gave me a chance to compare the two types of farming side by side. Even up close it’s almost impossible to tell them apart. The crops, the machines, the crews, and the fields look the same. The big difference is one you can’t see. For every chemical that is put on the conventional fields, Greenways finds a substitute for the organic fields.

  In place of petrochemical fertilizers, Greenways’s organic acres are fed with compost from a nearby horse farm and by poultry manure. Instead of toxic pesticides, crops are sprayed with natural substances, like BT, a pesticide made from a common soil bacteria.

  ORGANIC WEEDING

  Organic farming rules do not allow chemical weed killers, so Greenways has to use other methods to fight weeds. Even before the crops are planted, the fields are watered to get any weed seeds to grow. A tractor then plows the field to kill them. This is repeated several times. Later, when the crops are high, farmworkers use propane torches to burn the weeds by hand. The result of all this hard work is fields that look just as clean as if chemical weed killers had been used.

  No chemicals means no toxic runoff into rivers and oceans. But it turns out that plowing the land over and over damages the soil almost as much as chemical weed killers do. It kills off the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that make the soil fertile. It releases a lot of nitrogen into the air. Because of this damage, industrial organic farmers have to add a lot of nitrogen fertilizer to their fields. Where do they get it? From compost, manures, or fish meal.

  Most of the organic food sold in America comes from farms like Greenways. Supermarket chains like Whole Foods or Wal-Mart are not set up to do business with dozens of small family-owned farms. It takes too much time and money to coordinate. It makes much more sense (for them) to buy from large suppliers like Cascadian. And for the same reason, it’s much easier for Cascadian to buy its produce from large farms like Greenways.

  Demand for certified organic produce and meat has increased dramatically since the early 1990s—although organic items make up only about 3.5% of the total U.S. food supply in 2009.

  Sources: USDA and the Organic Trade Association.

  Earthbound Farm grows 80% of the organic lettuce sold in America.

  To meet the demands of their customers, Greenways has to farm on an industrial scale. It must plant one or two crop varieties that ripen at the same time. It must plant foods that can survive shipment across the country. It must buy fertilizer from someone else instead of getting it from animals on the farm.

  Again, Gene Kahn and many other people think this is just fine. After all, because of companies like his, thousands of acres of American farmland are now chemical-free. Organic food can now be found in most supermarkets. Surely that is a very good thing.

  LET US SELL YOU LETTUCE

  I learned more about the industrial organic system when I visited Earthbound Farm. Earthbound grows 80 percent of the organic lettuce sold in America. You may have seen some of it in plastic boxes in your supermarket. You could argue that Earthbound represents industrial organic farming at its best.

  The company was started in the 1980s by Drew and Myra Goodman, two farmers who started with exactly no farming experience. They are childhood friends from New York City, who started dating when they both went to college in Ca
lifornia. During a break before going to grad school, they started a roadside organic farm on a few rented acres, growing raspberries and baby salad greens. Every Sunday Myra would wash and bag a bunch of lettuce for their own use, a salad for each night of the week. They discovered that the whole-leaf lettuces stayed fresh right through to dinner the following Saturday. So began the pre-washed salad business in America.

  Before the Goodmans, salad for most Americans meant ice-berg lettuce. They introduced dozens of different salad mixes to mainstream America. Along the way, they changed the way lettuces were grown, harvested, cleaned, and packed. And today Earthbound is a company that takes in $400 million a year.

  I met Myra Goodman, now a tanned, talkative forty-two-year-old, over lunch at the company’s roadside stand in the Carmel Valley. Unlike Cascadian Farm, Earthbound still grows its own produce. Most of its farmland is an hour northeast of Carmel, in the Salinas Valley. That fertile valley is cooled by sea breezes, making it an ideal spot for growing lettuces nine months of the year. In winter, the company picks up and moves its operation, and many of its employees, south to Yuma, Arizona.

  Myra explained that Earthbound Farm’s growth exploded in 1993. That’s when the Costco chain placed an order. “Costco was moving two thousand cases a week to start,” Myra said, “and the order kept increasing.” Other chains like Wal-Mart, Lucky, and Albertsons soon followed. The Goodmans realized their days of washing lettuce in the living room were over.

  “We didn’t know how to farm on that scale,” Drew told me, “and we needed a lot more land—fast.” So the Goodmans entered into partnerships with growers who knew how to grow, harvest, pack, and distribute large quantities of produce. As part of the deal, the growers had to agree to change to organic farming methods.