The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [73]
A countercuisine based on whole grains and unprocessed organic ingredients rose up to challenge conventional industrial “white bread food.” (“Plastic food” was an epithet thrown around a lot.) For a host of reasons that seem ridiculous in retrospect, brown foods of all kinds—rice, bread, wheat, eggs, sugar, soy sauce, tamari—were deemed morally superior to white foods. Brown foods were less adulterated by industry, of course, but just as important, eating them allowed you to express your solidarity with the world’s brown peoples. (Only later would the health benefits of these whole foods be recognized, not the first or last time an organic conceit would find scientific backing.) But perhaps best of all, brown foods were also precisely what your parents didn’t eat.
How to grow this stuff without chemicals was a challenge, especially to city kids coming to the farm or garden with a head full of pastoral ideals and precisely no horticultural experience. The rural communes served as organic agriculture’s ramshackle research stations, places where neophyte farmers could experiment with making compost and devising alternative methods of pest control. The steepness of their learning curve was on display in the food co-ops, where sorry-looking organic produce was the rule for many years. But the freak farmers stuck with it, following Rodale’s step-by-step advice, and some of them went on to become excellent farmers.
ONE SUCH NOTABLE success was Gene Kahn, the founder of Cascadian Farm, the company responsible for the organic TV dinner in my Whole Foods cart. Today Cascadian Farm is foremost a General Mills brand, but it began as a quasi-communal hippie farm, located on a narrow, gorgeous shelf of land wedged between the Skagit River and the North Cascades about seventy-five miles northeast of Seattle. (The idyllic little farmstead depicted on the package turns out to be a real place.) 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 he had hooked up with in nearby Bellingham. At the time Kahn was a twenty-four-year-old grad school dropout from the South Side of Chicago, who had been inspired by Silent Spring and Diet for a Small Planet to go back to the land—and from there to change the American food system. This particular dream was not so outrageous in 1971, but Kahn’s success in actually realizing it surely is: He went on to become a pioneer of the organic movement and probably has done as much as anyone to move organic food into the mainstream, getting it out of the food co-op and into the supermarket. Today, the eponymous Cascadian 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. Cascadian Farm is precisely what Joel Salatin has in mind when he talks about an organic empire.
Like most of the early organic farmers, Kahn had no idea what he was doing at first, and he suffered his share of crop failures. In 1971 organic agriculture was in its infancy—a few hundred scattered amateurs learning by trial and error how to grow food without chemicals, an ad hoc grassroots R&D effort for which there was no institutional support. (In fact, the USDA was actively hostile to organic agriculture until recently, viewing it—quite rightly—as a critique of the industrialized agriculture the USDA was promoting.) What the pioneer organic farmers had instead of the USDA’s agricultural extension service was Organic Gardening and Farming (to which Kahn subscribed) and the model of various premodern agricultural systems, as described in books like Farmers of Forty Centuries by F. H. King and