• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 535 0

beef being raised in “organic feedlots” and organic high-fructose corn syrup—more words I never expected to see combined. And I learned about the making of the aforementioned organic TV dinner, a microwaveable bowl of “rice, vegetables, and grilled chicken breast with a savory herb sauce.” Country Herb, as the entrée is called, turns out to be a highly industrialized organic product, involving a choreography of thirty-one ingredients assembled from far-flung farms, laboratories, and processing plants scattered over a half-dozen states and two countries, and containing such mysteries of modern food technology as high-oleic safflower oil, guar and xanthan gum, soy lecithin, carrageenan, and “natural grill flavor.” Several of these ingredients are synthetic additives permitted under federal organic rules. So much for “whole” foods. The manufacturer of Country Herb is Cascadian Farm, a pioneering organic farm turned processor in Washington State that is now a wholly owned subsidiary of General Mills. (The Country Herb chicken entrée has since been discontinued.)

I also visited Rosie the organic chicken at her farm in Petaluma, which turns out to be more animal factory than farm. She lives in a shed with twenty thousand other Rosies, who, aside from their certified organic feed, live lives little different from that of any other industrial chicken. Ah, but what about the “free-range” lifestyle promised on the label? True, there’s a little door in the shed leading out to a narrow grassy yard. But the free-range story seems a bit of a stretch when you discover that the door remains firmly shut until the birds are at least five or six weeks old—for fear they’ll catch something outside—and the chickens are slaughtered only two weeks later.

2. FROM PEOPLE’S PARK TO PETALUMA POULTRY

If you walk five blocks north from the Whole Foods in Berkeley along Telegraph Avenue and then turn right at Dwight Way, you’ll soon come to a trash-strewn patch of grass and trees dotted with the tattered camps of a few dozen homeless people. Mostly in their fifties and sixties, some still affecting hippie styles of hair and dress, these men and women pass much of their days sleeping and drinking, like so many of the destitute everywhere. Here, though, they also spend time tending scruffy little patches of flowers and vegetables—a few stalks of corn, some broccoli plants gone to seed. People’s Park today is the saddest of places, a blasted monument to sixties’ hopes that curdled a long time ago. And yet, while the economic and social distances separating the well-heeled shoppers cruising the aisles at Whole Foods from the un-heeled homeless in People’s Park could not be much greater, the two neighborhood institutions are branches of the same unlikely tree.

Indeed, were there any poetic justice in the world, the executives at Whole Foods would have long ago erected a commemorative plaque at People’s Park and a booth to give away organic fruits and vegetables. The organic movement, much like environmentalism and feminism, has deep roots in the sixties’ radicalism that briefly flourished on this site; organic is one of several tributaries of the counterculture that ended up disappearing into the American mainstream, but not before significantly altering its course. And if you trace that particular tributary all the way back to its spring, your journey will eventually pass through this park.

People’s Park was born on April 20, 1969, when a group calling itself the Robin Hood Commission seized a vacant lot owned by the University of California and set to work rolling out sod, planting trees, and, perhaps most auspiciously, putting in a vegetable garden. Calling themselves “agrarian reformers,” the radicals announced that they wanted to establish on the site the model of a new cooperative society built from the ground up; that included growing their own “uncontaminated” food. One of the inspirations for the commission’s act of civil disobedience was the example of the Diggers in seventeenth-century England, who had also seized public land with the aim of