The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [72]
In Appetite for Change, his definitive account of how the sixties’ counterculture changed the way we eat, historian Warren J. Belasco writes that the events in People’s Park marked the “greening” of the counterculture, the pastoral turn that would lead to the commune movement in the countryside, to food co-ops and “guerilla capitalism,” and, eventually, to the rise of organic agriculture and businesses like Whole Foods. The moment for such a turn to nature was ripe in 1969: DDT was in the news, an oil spill off Santa Barbara had blackened California’s coastline, and Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River had caught fire. Overnight, it seemed, “ecology” was on everybody’s lips, and “organic” close behind.
As Belasco points out, the word “organic” had enjoyed a currency among nineteenth-century English social critics, who contrasted the social fragmentation and atomism wrought by the Industrial Revolution with the ideal of a lost organic society, one where the bonds of affection and cooperation still held. Organic stood for everything industrial was not. But applying the word “organic” to food and farming occurred much more recently: In the 1940s in the pages of Organic Gardening and Farming. Founded in 1940 by J. I. Rodale, a health-food fanatic from New York City’s Lower East Side, the magazine devoted its pages to the agricultural methods and health benefits of growing food without synthetic chemicals—“organically.” Joel Salatin’s grandfather was a charter subscriber.
Organic Gardening and Farming struggled along in obscurity until 1969, when an ecstatic review in the Whole Earth Catalog brought it to the attention of hippies trying to figure out how to grow vegetables without patronizing the military-industrial complex. “If I were a dictator determined to control the national press,” the Whole Earth correspondent wrote,
Organic Gardening would be the first publication I’d squash, be cause it’s the most subversive. I believe that organic gardeners are in the forefront of a serious effort to save the world by changing man’s orientation to it, to move away from the collective, centrist, superindustrial state, toward a simpler, realer one-to-one relationship with the earth itself.
Within two years Organic Gardening and Farming’s circulation climbed from 400,000 to 700,000.
As the Whole Earth encomium suggests, the counterculture had married the broader and narrower definitions of the word “organic.” The organic garden planted in People’s Park (soon imitated in urban lots across the country) was itself conceived of as a kind of scale model of a more cooperative society, a landscape of reconciliation that proposed to replace industrialism’s attitude of conquest toward nature with a softer, more harmonious approach. A pastoral utopia in miniature, such a garden embraced not only the humans who tended and ate from it but “as many life kingdoms as possible,” in the words of an early account of Berkeley’s People’s Gardens in an underground paper called Good Times. The vegetables harvested from these plots, which were sometimes called “conspiracies of soil,” would supply, in addition to wholesome calories, an “edible dynamic”—a “new medium through which people can relate to one another and their nourishment.” For example, organic’s rejection of agricultural chemicals was also a rejection of the war machine, since the same corporations—Dow, Monsanto—that manufactured pesticides also made napalm and Agent Orange, the herbicide with which the U.S. military was waging war against nature in Southeast Asia. Eating organic thus married the personal to the political.
Which was why much more was at stake than a method of farming. Acting on the ecological premise that everything’s connected to everything else, the early organic movement sought to establish not just an alternative mode of production (the chemical-free farms), but an alternative system of distribution