VI. Local Farm

y journey through the changing world of organic food has cured me of my
naive supermarket pastoralism, but it hasn't put me off my organic feed. I
still fill my cart with the stuff. The science might still be sketchy, but
common sense tells me organic is better food -- better, anyway, than the
kind grown with organophosphates, with antibiotics and growth hormones, with
cadmium and lead and arsenic (the E.P.A. permits the use of toxic waste in
fertilizers), with sewage sludge and animal feed made from ground-up bits of
other animals as well as their own manure. Very likely it's better for me
and my family, and unquestionably it is better for the environment. For even
if only 1 percent of the chemical pesticides sprayed by American farmers end
up as residue in our food, the other 99 percent are going into the
environment -- which is to say, into our drinking water, into our rivers,
into the air that farmers and their neighbors breathe. By now it makes
little sense to distinguish the health of the individual from that of the
environment.

Still, while it surely represents real progress for agribusiness to be
selling organic food rather than fighting it, I'm not sure I want to see
industrialized organic become the only kind in the market. Organic is
nothing if not a set of values (this is better than that), and to the extent
that the future of those values is in the hands of companies that are
finally indifferent to them, that future will be precarious.

Also, there are values that the new corporate -- and government --
construction of "organic" leaves out, values that once were part and parcel
of the word but that have since been abandoned as impractical or
unprofitable. I'm thinking of things like locally grown, like the humane
treatment of animals, like the value of a shorter and more legible food
chain, the preservation of family farms, even the promise of a
countercuisine. To believe that the U.S.D.A. label on a product ensures any
of these things is, as I discovered, naive.

Yet if the word "organic" means anything, it means that all these things are
ultimately connected: that the way we grow food is inseparable from the way
we distribute food, which is inseparable from the way we eat food. The
original premise, remember, the idea that got Kahn started in 1971, was that
the whole industrial food system -- and not just chemical agriculture -- was
in some fundamental way unsustainable. It's impossible to read the papers
these days without beginning to wonder if this insight wasn't prophetic. I'm
thinking, of course, of mad cow disease, of the 76 million cases of food
poisoning every year (a rate higher than in 1948), of StarLink corn
contamination, of the 20-year-old farm crisis, of hoof-and-mouth disease and
groundwater pollution, not to mention industrial food's dubious "solutions"
to these problems: genetic engineering and antibiotics and irradiation.
Buying food labeled organic protects me from some of these things, but not
all; industrial organic may well be necessary to fix this system, but it
won't be sufficient.

Many of the values that industrial organic has jettisoned in recent years I
find compelling, so I've started to shop with them in mind. I happen to
believe, for example, that farms produce more than food; they also produce a
kind of landscape, and if I buy my organic milk from halfway across the
country, the farms I like to drive by every day will eventually grow nothing
but raised ranch houses. So instead of long-haul ultrapasteurized milk from
Horizon, I've started buying my milk, unpasteurized, from a dairy right here
in town, Local Farm. Debra Tyler is organic, but she doesn't bother
mentioning the fact on her label. Why? "My customers can see for themselves
what I'm doing here," she says. What she's doing is milking nine pastured
Jersey cows whose milk changes taste and hue with the seasons.

"Eat Your View!" is a save-the-farms bumper sticker you see in Europe now. I
guess that's part of what I'm trying to do. But I'm also trying to get away
from the transcontinental strawberry (5 calories of food energy, I've read,
that it takes 435 calories of fossil-fuel energy to deliver to my door) and
the organic "home meal replacement" sold in a package that will take 500
years to decompose. (Does that make me a True Natural?) So I've tracked down
a local source for grass-fed beef (Chris Hopkins), eggs (Debra Tyler again)
and maple syrup (Phil Hart), and on Saturday mornings I buy produce at a
farmer's market in a neighboring town. I also have a line on a C.S.A.
("community supported agriculture"), or "subscription farm," a new marketing
scheme from Europe that seems to be catching on here. You put up a couple of
hundred dollars every spring and then receive a weekly box of produce
through the summer. Not all of the farmers I'm buying from are certified
organic. But I talk to them, see what they're up to, learn how they define
the term. Sure, it's more trouble than buying organic food at the
supermarket, but I'm resolved to do it anyway. Because organic is not the
last word, and it's not just lunch.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author of
"The Botany of Desire," to be published this week.