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?
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