II. The Road to Cascadian Farm™
don't know about you, but I never expect the bucolic scenes and slogans
on my packaged food to correspond to reality (where exactly is Nature's
Valley, anyway?), but it turns out the Cascadian Farm pictured on my TV
dinner is a real farm that grows real food -- though not quite the same
food contained in my TV dinner.
Cascadian Farm occupies a narrow, breathtaking shelf of land wedged
between the Skagit River and the North Cascades in the town of Rockport,
Wash., 75 miles northeast of Seattle. Originally called the New
Cascadian Survival and Reclamation Project, the farm was started in 1971
by Gene Kahn with the idea of growing food for the collective of
environmentally minded hippies he had hooked up with in nearby
Bellingham. At the time, Kahn was a 24-year-old grad-school dropout from
the South Side of Chicago who, after reading "Silent Spring" and "Diet
for a Small Planet," determined to go back to the land, there to change
"the food system." That particular dream was not so outrageous in
1971 -- this was the moment, after all, when the whole counterculture
was taking a rural turn -- but Kahn's success in actually achieving it
surely is: he went on to become a pioneer of the organic movement and
did much to move organic food into the mainstream. Today, Cascadian
Farm's farm is a General Mills showcase -- a P.R. farm," as its founder
freely acknowledges -- and Kahn, erstwhile hippie farmer, is a General
Mills vice president and a millionaire. He has become one of the most
successful figures in the organic community and also perhaps one of the
most polarizing; for to many organic farmers and activists, he has come
to symbolize the takeover of the movement by agribusiness.
"Organic is becoming what we hoped it would be an alternative to," says
Roger Blobaum, who played a key role as a consumer advocate in pushing
Congress to establish the U.S.D.A.'s fledgling organic program. "Gene
Kahn's approach is slowly but surely taking us in that direction. He's
one of the real pioneers, but there are people now who are suspicious of
him." Kahn is apt to call such people "purists," "Luddites," "romantics"
and "ideologues" who have failed to outgrow the "antibusiness
prejudices" of the 60's. He'll tell you he's still committed to changing
the food system -- but now from "inside." Few in the movement doubt his
sincerity or commitment, but many will tell you the food system will
much sooner change Kahn, along with the whole meaning of organic.
On an overcast morning not long ago, Kahn drove me out to Rockport from
his company's offices in Sedro-Woolley, following the twists of the
Skagit River east in a new forest green Lexus with vanity plates that
say "ORGANIC." Kahn is a strikingly boyish-looking 54, and after you
factor in a shave and 20 pounds, it's not hard to pick his face out from
the beards-beads-and-tractor photos on display in his office. Back in
the farm's early days, when Kahn supervised and mentored the rotating
band of itinerant hippies who would show up to work a day or a week or a
year on the farm, he drove a red VW Beetle and an ancient, temperamental
John Deere. Kahn lived in a modest clapboard farmhouse on Cascadian Farm
until 1993. Now he lives in a McMansion high in the hills overlooking
Puget Sound.
Like a lot of the early organic farmers, Kahn had no idea what he was
doing at first and suffered his share of crop failures. In 1971, organic
agriculture was in its infancy -- a few hundred scattered amateurs
learning by trial and error how to grow food without chemicals, an ad
hoc grass-roots R. & D. effort for which there was precisely no
institutional support. Though it did draw on various peasant-farming
models, modern-day organic agriculture is a relatively novel and
remarkably sophisticated system with deep roots in the counterculture.
The theoretical roots of organic agriculture go back a bit further,
principally to the work of a British scientist by the name of Sir Albert
Howard. Based on his experiments in India and observations of peasant
farms in Asia, Howard's 1940 treatise "An Agricultural Testament"
demonstrated the connection between the health of the soil and the
ability of plants to withstand diseases and pests. Howard's agricultural
heresies were praised in the pages of "The Whole Earth Catalog" (by
Wendell Berry) and popularized by J.I. Rodale in Organic Gardening and
Farming magazine -- which claimed 700,000 readers in 1971, one of whom
was Gene Kahn.
But the word "organic" around 1970 connoted a great deal more than a
technique for growing vegetables. The movement's pioneers set out to
create not just an alternative mode of production (the farms) but of
distribution (the co-ops and health-food stores) and even consumption. A
"countercuisine" based on whole grains and unprocessed ingredients rose
up to challenge conventional industrial "white bread" food. ("Plastic
food" was an epithet you heard a lot.) For a host of reasons that seem
risible in retrospect, brown food of all kinds (rice, bread, wheat,
sugar) was deemed morally superior to white. Much more than just lunch,
organic food was "an edible dynamic" that promised to raise
consciousness about the economic order, draw critical lines of
connection between the personal and the political. It was also, not
incidentally, precisely what your parents didn't eat.
Such was dinner and the dinner-table conversation at Cascadian Farm and
countless other counterculture tables in the early 1970's. As for an
alternative mode of distributing food, Kahn recruited a hippie
capitalist named Roger Weschler to help him figure out how to sell his
strawberries before they rotted in the field. Weschler had helped found
something called the Cooperating Community, a network of Seattle
businesses committed to ecological principles and worker
self-management. A new offshoot, Community Produce, began distributing
the food grown at Cascadian Farm, and Weschler and Kahn set out, in the
unembarrassed words of Cascadian Farm's official corporate history, "to
change the world's food system." Twenty-nine years later, Weschler is
still at it, operating a produce brokerage devoted to supporting family
farmers. And Kahn? Weschler, who has lost neither his scraggly black
beard nor his jittery intensity, told me that by going corporate, his
old friend "has made a very different choice."
If Kahn were the least bit embarrassed by the compromises he has made in
his organic principles since those long-ago days, he would surely have
rewritten his company's official history by now -- and never sent me to
interview Weschler. But as we walked around the farm talking about "how
everything eventually morphs into the way the world is," it seemed clear
that Kahn has made his peace with that fact of life, decided that the
gains outweighed the losses.
In time, Kahn became quite a good farmer and, to his surprise, an even
better businessman. By the late 70's, he had discovered the virtues of
adding value to his produce by processing it (freezing blueberries and
strawberries, making jams), and once Cascadian Farm had begun
processing, Kahn discovered he could make more money buying produce from
other farmers than by growing it himself. During the 80's, Cascadian
Farm became an increasingly virtual sort of farm, processing and
marketing a range of packaged foods well beyond the Seattle area.
"The whole notion of a 'cooperative community' we started with gradually
began to mimic the system," Kahn recalled. "We were shipping food across
the country, using diesel fuel -- we were industrial organic farmers. I
was bit by bit becoming more of this world, and there was a lot of
pressure on the business to become more privatized."
That pressure became irresistible in 1990, when in the aftermath of the
Alar scare, Kahn nearly lost everything -- and control of Cascadian Farm
wound up in corporate hands. In the history of the organic movement, the
Alar episode is a watershed, marking the birth pangs of the modern
organic industry. After a somewhat overheated "60 Minutes" expos 1/8 on
apple growers' use of Alar, a growth-regulator that the Environmental
Protection Agency declared a carcinogen, middle America suddenly
discovered organic. "Panic for Organic" was the cover line of one
newsweekly, and, overnight, demand from the supermarket chains soared.
The ragtag industry wasn't quite ready for prime time, however. Kahn
borrowed heavily to finance an ambitious expansion, contracted with
farmers to grow an awful lot of organic produce -- and then watched in
horror as the bubble of demand subsided along with the headlines about
Alar. Kahn was forced to sell a majority stake in the company -- to
Welch's -- and set out on what he calls his "corporate adventure."
"We were part of the food industry now," he told me. "But I wanted to
leverage that position to redefine the way we grow food -- not what
people want to eat or how we distribute it. That sure as hell isn't
going to change." Kahn sees himself as very much the grown-up, a sober
realist in a community of unreconstructed idealists. He speaks of
selling out to Welch's as "the time when I lost the company" but doesn't
trouble himself with second thoughts or regrets; in fact, it was all for
the best. "Welch's was my business school," he said. Kahn seems to have
no doubt that his path is the right path, not only for him but for the
organic movement as a whole: "You have a choice of getting sad about all
that or moving on. We tried hard to build a cooperative community and a
local food system, but at the end of the day it wasn't successful. This
is just lunch for most people. Just lunch. We can call it sacred, we can
talk about communion, but it's just lunch."
n the years after the Alar bubble burst in 1990, the organic industry
recovered, embarking on a period of double-digit annual growth and rapid
consolidation, as mainstream food companies began to take organic -- or
at least, the organic market -- seriously. Gerber's, Heinz, Dole,
ConAgra and A.D.M. all created or acquired organic brands. Cascadian
Farm itself became a miniconglomerate, acquiring Muir Glen, the
California organic tomato processors, and the combined company changed
its name to Small Planet Foods. Nineteen-ninety also marked the
beginning of federal recognition for organic agriculture: that year,
Congress passed the Organic Food Production Act. The legislation
instructed the Department of Agriculture -- which historically had
treated organic farming with undisguised contempt -- to establish
uniform national standards for organic food and farming, fixing the
definition of a word that had always meant different things to different
people.
Settling on that definition turned out to be a grueling decadelong
process, as various forces both within and outside the movement battled
for control of a word that had developed a certain magic in the
marketplace. Agribusiness fought to define the word as broadly as
possible, in part to make it easier for mainstream companies to get into
organic but also out of fear that anything deemed not organic would
henceforth carry an official stigma. At first, the U.S.D.A., acting out
of longstanding habit, obliged its agribusiness clients, issuing a
watery set of standards in 1997 that, incredibly, allowed for the use of
genetic modification, irradiation and sewage sludge in organic food
production. But an unprecedented flood of public comment from outraged
organic farmers and consumers forced the U.S.D.A. back to the drawing
board, in what was widely viewed as a victory for the movement's
principles.
Yet while the struggle with agribusiness over the meaning of the word
"organic" was making headlines, another, equally important struggle was
under way at the U.S.D.A. between Big and Little Organic, and this time
the outcome was decidedly more ambiguous. Could a factory farm be
organic? Was an organic cow entitled to dine on pasture? Did food
additives and synthetic chemicals have a place in organic processed
food? If the answers to these seem like no-brainers, then you, too, are
stuck in an outdated pastoral view of organic. Big Organic won all three
arguments. The final standards, which will take effect next year, are
widely seen as favoring the industry's big players. The standards do an
admirable job of setting the bar for a more environmentally responsible
kind of farming, but as perhaps was inevitable, many of the
philosophical values embedded in the word "organic" did not survive the
federal rule-making process.
Gene Kahn served on the U.S.D.A.'s National Organic Standards Board from
1992 to 1997, playing a key role in making the standards safe for the
organic TV dinner and a great many other processed organic foods. This
was no small feat, for Kahn and his allies had to work around the 1990
legislation establishing organic standards, which prohibited synthetic
food additives. Kahn argued that you couldn't have organic processed
foods without synthetics. Several of the consumer representatives on the
standards board contended that this was precisely the point, and if no
synthetics meant no organic TV dinners, then TV dinners were something
organic simply shouldn't do.
Joan Dye Gussow, a nutritionist and an outspoken standards-board member,
made the case against synthetics in a 1996 article that was much
debated, "Can an Organic Twinkie Be Certified?" She questioned whether
organic should simply mirror the existing food supply, with its highly
processed, salted and sugary junk food, or whether it should aspire to
something better -- a countercuisine. Kahn responded with market
populism: if the consumer wants an organic Twinkie, then we should give
it to him. As he put it to me on the drive back from Cascadian Farm,
"Organic is not your mother." In the end, it came down to an argument
between the old movement and the new industry, and the new industry won:
the final standards simply ignored the 1990 law, drawing up a "national
list" of permissible additives and synthetics, from ascorbic acid to
xanthan gum.
"If we had lost on synthetics," Kahn told me, "we'd be out of business."
Kahn's victory cleared the way for the development of a parallel organic
food supply: organic Heinz ketchup (already on the shelves in England),
organic Hamburger Helper, organic Miracle Whip and, sooner or later,
organic Twinkies. This is not a prospect everyone relishes. Even Kahn
says: "I'm not looking forward to the organic Twinkie. But I will defend
to the death anyone's right to create one!" Eliot Coleman, a Maine
farmer and writer whose organic techniques have influenced two
generations of farmers, is repulsed by the whole idea: "I don't care if
the Wheaties are organic -- I wouldn't use them for compost. Processed
organic food is as bad as any other processed food."
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