The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [86]
The contrast of the simplicity of this sort of eating, with all its pastoral overtones, and the complexity of the industrial process behind it produced a certain cognitive dissonance in my refrigerated mind. I began to feel that I no longer understood what this word I’d been following across the country and the decades really meant—I mean, of course, the word “organic.” It is an unavoidable and in some ways impolite question, and very possibly besides the point if you look at the world the way Gene Kahn or Drew and Myra Goodman do, but in precisely what sense can that box of salad on sale in a Whole Foods three thousand miles and five days away from this place truly be said to be organic? And if that well-traveled plastic box deserves that designation, should we then perhaps be looking for another word to describe the much shorter and much less industrial food chain that the first users of the word “organic” had in mind?
This at least is the thinking of the smaller organic farmers who, not surprisingly, are finding it impossible to compete against the impressive industrial efficiencies achieved by a company like Earthbound Farm. Supermarket chains don’t want to deal with dozens of different organic farmers; they want one company to offer them a complete line of fruits and vegetables, every SKU in the produce section. And Earthbound has obliged, consolidating its hold on the organic produce section of the American supermarket, and in the process growing into a $350 million company. “Everything eventually morphs into the way the world is.” Drew Goodman told me a day had come several years ago when he suddenly no longer felt comfortable manning his usual stall at the Monterey farmer’s market. He looked around and understood “we didn’t belong here anymore. We’re really in a whole different business now.” Goodman makes no apologies for that, and rightly so: His company has done a world of good, for its land, its workers, the growers it works with, and its customers.
Yet his success, like Gene Kahn’s, has opened up a gulf between Big and Little Organic and convinced many of the movement’s founders, as well as pioneering farmers like Joel Salatin, that the time has come to move beyond organic—to raise the bar on the American food system once again. Some of these innovating farmers are putting their emphasis on quality, others on labor standards, some on local systems of distribution, and still others on achieving a more thoroughgoing sustainability. Michael Ableman, one of the self-described beyond organic farmers I interviewed in California, said, “We may have to give up on the word ‘organic,’ leave it to the Gene Kahns of the world. To be honest, I’m not sure I want that association, because what I’m doing on my farm is not just substituting inputs.”
A few years ago, at a conference on organic agriculture in California, a corporate organic grower suggested to a small farmer struggling to survive in the competitive world of industrial organic agriculture that “you should really try to develop a niche to distinguish yourself in the market.” Holding his fury in check, the small farmer replied as levelly as he could manage:
“I believe I developed that niche twenty years ago. It’s called ‘organic.’ And now you, sir, are sitting on it.”
4. MEET ROSIE, THE ORGANIC FREE-RANGE CHICKEN
The last stop on my tour of California industrial organic farming took me to Petaluma, where I tried without success to find the picturesque farmstead, with its red barn, cornfield, and farmhouse, depicted on the package in which the organic roasting chicken I bought at Whole