The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [79]
Yet while the struggle with the government over the meaning of “organic” was making headlines in 1997, another equally important struggle was underway within the USDA between Big and Little Organic—or, put another way, between the organic industry and the organic movement—and here the outcome was decidedly more ambiguous. Could a factory farm be organic? Was an organic dairy cow entitled to graze on pasture? Did food additives and synthetic chemicals have a place in processed organic food? If the answers to these questions seem like no-brainers, then you too are stuck in an outdated pastoral view of organic. Big Organic won all three arguments. The final standards do a good job of setting the bar for a more environmentally responsible kind of farming but, as perhaps was inevitable as soon as bureaucratic and industrial thinking was brought to bear, many of the philosophical values embodied in the word “organic”—the sorts of values expressed by Albert Howard—did not survive the federal rulemaking process.
From 1992 to 1997 Gene Kahn served on the USDA’s National Organic Standards Board, where he played a key role in making the standards safe for the organic TV dinner and a great many other organic processed foods. This was no small feat, for Kahn and his allies had to work around the original 1990 legislation, which had prohibited synthetic food additives and manufacturing agents outright. Kahn argued that you couldn’t have organic processed food without synthetics, which are necessary to both the manufacture and preservation of such supermarket products. Several of the consumer representatives on the standards board contended that this was precisely the point, and if no synthetics meant no organic TV dinners, then TV dinners were something organic simply shouldn’t do. At stake was the very idea of a countercuisine.
Joan Dye Gussow, a nutritionist and an outspoken standards-board member, made the case against synthetics in a 1996 article that was much debated at the time: “Can an Organic Twinkie Be Certified?” Demonstrating that under the proposed rules such a thing was entirely possible, Gussow questioned whether organic should simply mirror the existing food supply, with its highly processed, salted, and sugary junk food, or whether it should aspire to something better—a countercuisine based on whole foods. Kahn responded with an argument rooted in the populism of the market: If the consumer wants an organic Twinkie, then we should give it to him. As he put it to me on the drive back from Cascadian Farm, “Organic is not your mother.” In the end it came down to an argument between the old movement and the new industry and the new industry won: The final standards simply ignored the 1990 law, drawing up a list of permissible additives and synthetics, from ascorbic acid to xanthan gum.*
“If we had lost on synthetics,” Kahn told me, “we’d be out of business.”
The same might be said for the biggest organic meat and dairy producers, who fought to make the new standards safe for the organic factory farm. Horizon Organic’s Mark Retzloff labored mightily to preserve the ability of his company—which is the Microsoft of organic milk, controlling more than half of the market—to operate its large-scale industrial dairy in southern Idaho. Here in the western desert, where precious little grass can grow, the company was milking several thousand cows that, rather than graze on pasture (as most consumers presume their organic cows are doing), spend their days milling around a dry lot—a grassless fenced enclosure. It’s doubtful a dairy could pasture that many cows even if it wanted to—you would need at least an acre of grass per animal and more hours than there are in a day to move that many cows all the way out to their distant acre and then back again to the milking parlor every morning and evening. So instead, as in the typical industrial dairy, these organic cows stood around eating grain and silage when they weren’t being milked