• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 528 0

white meat chicken had been striped nicely with grill marks and impregnated with a salty marinade that gave the meat that slightly abstract chicken taste processed chicken often has, no doubt owing to the “natural chicken flavor” mentioned on the box’s list of ingredients. The chicken chunks and allied vegetables (soft carrots, peas, green beans, and corn) were “blanketed in a creamy rosemary dill sauce”—a creaminess that had evidently been achieved synthetically, since no dairy products appeared among the ingredients. I’m betting it’s the xanthan gum (or maybe the carrageenan?) that bears responsibility for the sauce’s unfortunate viscosity. To be fair, one shouldn’t compare an organic TV dinner to real food but to a conventional TV dinner, and by that standard (or at least my recollection of it) Cascadian Farm has nothing to be ashamed of, especially considering that an organic food scientist must work with only a tiny fraction of the synthetic preservatives, emulsifiers, and flavor agents available to his colleagues at Swanson or Kraft.

Rosie and her consort of fresh vegetables fared much better at dinner, if I don’t mind saying so myself. I roasted the bird in a pan surrounded by the potatoes and chunks of winter squash. After removing the chicken from the oven, I spread the crinkled leaves of kale on a cookie sheet, sprinkled them with olive oil and salt, and slid them into the hot oven to roast. After ten minutes or so, the kale was nicely crisped and the chicken was ready to carve.

All but one of the vegetables I served that night bore the label of Cal-Organic Farms, which, along with Earthbound, dominates the organic produce section in the supermarket. Cal-Organic is a big grower of organic vegetables in the San Joaquin Valley. As part of the consolidation of the organic industry, the company was acquired by Grimmway Farms, which already enjoyed a virtual monopoly in organic carrots. Unlike Earthbound, neither Grimmway nor Cal-Organic has ever been part of the organic movement. Both companies were started by conventional growers looking for a more profitable niche and worried that the state might ban certain key pesticides. “I’m not necessarily a fan of organic,” a spokesman for Grimmway recently told an interviewer. “Right now I don’t see that conventional farming does harm. Whether we stay with organic for the long haul depends on profitability.” Philosophy, in other words, has nothing to do with it.

The combined company now controls seventeen thousand acres across California, enough land that it can, like Earthbound, rotate production up and down the West Coast (and south into Mexico) in order to ensure a twelve-month national supply of fresh organic produce, just as California’s conventional growers have done for decades. It wasn’t many years ago that organic produce had only a spotty presence in the supermarket, especially during the winter months. Today, thanks in large part to Grimmway and Earthbound, you can find pretty much everything, all year round.

Including asparagus in January, I discovered. This was the one vegetable I prepared that wasn’t grown by Cal-Organic or Earthbound; it had been grown in Argentina and imported by a small San Francisco distributor. My plan had been a cozy winter dinner, but I couldn’t resist the bundles of fresh asparagus on sale at Whole Foods, even though it set me back six dollars a pound. I had never tasted organic South American asparagus in January, and felt my foray into the organic empire demanded that I do. What better way to test the outer limits of the word “organic” than by dining on a springtime delicacy that had been grown according to organic rules on a farm six thousand miles (and two seasons) away, picked, packed, and chilled on Monday, flown by jet to Los Angeles Tuesday, trucked north to a Whole Foods regional distribution center, then put on sale in Berkeley by Thursday, to be steamed, by me, Sunday night?

The ethical implications of buying such a product are almost too numerous and knotty to sort out: There’s the expense, there’s the prodigious amounts