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By Root 643 0

for Organic” was the cover line on one newsweekly, and overnight, demand from the supermarket chains soared. The ragtag industry was not quite ready for prime time, however. Like a lot of organic producers, Gene Kahn borrowed heavily to finance an ambitious expansion, contracted with farmers to grow an awful lot of organic produce—and then watched in horror as the bubble of demand subsided along with the headlines about Alar. Badly overextended, Kahn was forced to sell a majority stake in his company—to Welch’s—and the onetime hippie farmer set out on what he calls his “corporate adventure.”

“We were part of the food industry now,” he told me. “But I wanted to leverage that position to redefine the way we grow food—not what people want to eat or how we distribute it. That sure as hell isn’t going to change.” Becoming part of the food industry meant jettisoning two of the three original legs on which the organic movement had stood: the countercuisine—what people want to eat—and the food co-ops and other alternative modes of distribution. Kahn’s bet was that agribusiness could accommodate itself most easily to the first leg—the new way to grow food—by treating organic essentially as a niche product that could be distributed and marketed through the existing channels. The original organic ideal held that you could not divorce these three elements, since (as ecology taught) everything was connected. But Gene Kahn, for one (and he was by no means the only one), was a realist, a businessman with a payroll to meet. And he wasn’t looking back.

“You have a choice of getting sad about all that or moving on. 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. We can call it sacred, we can talk about communion, but it’s just lunch.”

IN THE YEARS after the Alar bubble burst in 1990, the organic industry recovered, embarking on a period of double-digit annual growth and rapid consolidation, as mainstream food companies began to take organic (or at least the organic market) seriously. Gerber’s, Heinz, Dole, ConAgra, and ADM all created or acquired organic brands. Cascadian Farm itself became a miniconglomerate, acquiring Muir Glen, a California organic tomato processor, and the combined company changed its name to Small Planet Foods. Nineteen ninety also marked the beginning of federal recognition for organic agriculture: That year, Congress passed the Organic Food and Production Act (OFPA). The legislation instructed the Department of Agriculture—which historically had treated organic farming with undisguised contempt—to establish uniform national standards for organic food and farming, fixing the definition of a word that had always meant different things to different people.

Settling on that definition turned out to be a grueling decade-long process, as various forces both within and outside the movement battled for control of a word that had developed a certain magic in the marketplace. Agribusiness fought to define the word as loosely as possible, in part to make it easier for mainstream companies to get into organic, but also out of fear that anything deemed not organic—such as genetically modified food—would henceforth carry an official stigma. At first, the USDA, acting out of long-standing habit, obliged its agribusiness clients, issuing a watery set of standards in 1997 that—astoundingly—allowed for the use of genetically modified crops and irradiation and sewage sludge in organic food production. Some saw the dark hand of companies like Monsanto or ADM at work, but it seems more likely the USDA was simply acting on the reasonable assumption that the organic industry, like any other industry, would want as light a regulatory burden as possible. But it turned out organic wasn’t like other industries: It still had a lot of the old movement values in its genetic makeup, and it reacted to the weak standards with fury. An unprecedented flood of public comment from outraged organic farmers and consumers forced the