Thanks, Liza!

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Raw Food Diet Support List
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Liza May
> Sent: Monday, June 18, 2001 6:37 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: NYTimes Article
>
>
> May 13, 2001
> Behind the Organic-Industrial Complex
> By MICHAEL POLLAN
> I. Supermarket Pastoral
>
> lmost overnight, the amount and variety of organic food on offer in my
> local supermarket has mushroomed. Fresh produce, milk, eggs, cereal,
> frozen food, even junk food -- all of it now has its own organic
> doppelgänger, and more often than not these products wind up in my
> shopping cart. I like buying organic, for the usual salad of rational
> and sentimental reasons. At a time when the whole food system feels
> somewhat precarious, I assume that a product labeled organic is more
> healthful and safer, more "wholesome," though if I stop to think about
> it, I'm not exactly sure what that means. I also like the fact that by
> buying organic, I'm casting a vote for a more environmentally friendly
> kind of agriculture: "Better Food for a Better Planet," in the slogan of
> Cascadian Farm, one of the older organic brands. Compared with all the
> other food in the supermarket, which is happy to tell you everything
> about itself except how it was grown, organic food seems a lot more
> legible. "Organic" on the label conjures a whole story, even if it is
> the consumer who fills in most of the details, supplying the hero
> (American Family Farmer), the villain (Agribusinessman) and the literary
> genre, which I think of as "supermarket pastoral." Just look at the
> happy Vermont cow on that carton of milk, wreathed in wildflowers like a
> hippie at her wedding around 1973.
>
> Look a little closer, though, and you begin to see cracks in the
> pastoral narrative. It took me more than a year to notice, but the label
> on that carton of Organic Cow has been rewritten recently. It doesn't
> talk about happy cows and Vermont family farmers quite so much anymore,
> probably because the Organic Cow has been bought out by Horizon, a
> Colorado company (referred to here, in proper pastoral style, as "the
> Horizon family of companies"). Horizon is a $127 million public
> corporation that has become the Microsoft of organic milk, controlling
> 70 percent of the retail market. Notice, too, that the milk is now
> "ultrapasteurized," a process the carton presents as a boon to the
> consumer (it pushes the freshness date into the next millennium), but
> which of course also allows the company to ferry its milk all over the
> country.
>
>
> When I asked a local dairyman about this (we still have one or two in
> town) he said that the chief reason to ultrapasteurize -- a high-heat
> process that "kills the milk," destroying its enzymes and many of its
> vitamins -- is so you can sell milk over long distances. Arguably,
> ultrapasteurized organic milk is less nutritious than conventionally
> pasteurized conventional milk. This dairyman also bent my ear about
> Horizon's "factory farms" out West, where thousands of cows that never
> encounter a blade of grass spend their days confined to a fenced dry
> lot, eating (certified organic) grain and tethered to milking machines
> three times a day. So maybe Organic Cow milk isn't quite as legible a
> product as I thought.
>
> I wasn't sure if the farmer had his facts straight (it would turn out he
> did), but he made me wonder whether I really knew what organic meant
> anymore. I understood organic to mean -- in addition to being produced
> without synthetic chemicals -- less processed, more local, easier on the
> animals. So I started looking more closely at some of the other organic
> items in the store. One of them in the frozen-food case caught my eye:
> an organic TV dinner (now there are three words I never expected to
> string together) from Cascadian Farm called Country Herb: "rice,
> vegetables and grilled chicken breast strips with a savory herb sauce."
>
> The text-heavy box it came in told the predictable organic stories --
> about the chicken (raised without chemicals and allowed "to roam freely
> in an outdoor yard"); about the rice and vegetables (grown without
> synthetic chemicals); even about the carton (recycled) -- but when I got
> to the ingredients list, I felt a small jolt of cognitive dissonance.
> For one thing, the list of ingredients went on forever (31 ingredients
> in all) and included such enigmas of modern food technology as natural
> chicken flavor, high-oleic safflower oil, guar and xanthan gum, soy
> lecithin, carrageenan and natural grill flavor, this last culinary
> breakthrough achieved with something called "tapioca maltodextrin." The
> label assured me that most of these additives are organic, which they no
> doubt are, and yet they seem about as jarring to my conception of
> organic food as, say, a cigarette boat on Walden Pond. But then, so too
> is the fact (mentioned nowhere on the label) that Cascadian Farm has
> recently become a subsidiary of General Mills, the third biggest food
> conglomerate in North America.
>
> Clearly, my notion of supermarket pastoralism has fallen hopelessly out
> of date. The organic movement has become a $7.7 billion business: call
> it Industrial Organic. Although that represents but a fraction of the
> $400 billion business of selling Americans food, organic is now the
> fastest-growing category in the supermarket. Perhaps inevitably, this
> sort of growth -- sustained at a steady 20 percent a year for more than
> a decade -- has attracted the attention of the very agribusiness
> corporations to which the organic movement once presented a radical
> alternative and an often scalding critique. Even today, the rapid growth
> of organic closely tracks consumers' rising worries about the
> conventional food supply -- about chemicals, about additives and, most
> recently, about genetically modified ingredients and mad cow disease;
> every food scare is followed by a spike in organic sales. And now that
> organic food has established itself as a viable alternative food chain,
> agribusiness has decided that the best way to deal with that alternative
> is simply to own it. The question now is, What will they do with it? Is
> the word "organic" being emptied of its meaning?