V. Gene Kahn Visits the Mothership

n March, I accompanied Gene Kahn on one of his monthly visits to the
General Mills headquarters, a grassy corporate campus strewn with modern
sculptures in the suburbs outside Minneapolis. In deference to Fortune
500 etiquette, I put on a suit and tie but quickly realized I was
overdressed: Kahn had on his usual khakis and a denim work shirt
embroidered with a bright red Muir Glen tomato. When I said something,
Kahn told me he makes a point of not changing his clothes when he goes
to Minneapolis. I get it: an organic farmer in an embroidered work shirt
is part of what General Mills was acquiring when it acquired Small
Planet Foods. Yet this particular organic farmer is presumably a far
sight wealthier than most of his new corporate colleagues: when General
Mills bought Small Planet Foods for an estimated $70 million, Kahn still
owned 10 percent of the company.

Together, Kahn and I toured General Mills's Bell Technical Center, a
sprawling research-and-development facility where some 900 food
scientists, chemists, industrial designers and nutritionists dream up
and design both the near- and long-term future of American food. This
was Kahn's first visit to the facility, and as we moved from lab to lab,
I could see his boyish enthusiasm mounting as he collected new ideas and
business cards.

In the packaging-design lab, even before Arne Brauner could finish
explaining how he engineered the boxes, bowls and cups in which General
Mills sells its products, Kahn asked him, "Has there ever been a
completely edible packaging for food?" Brauner rubbed his chin for a
moment.

"The sausage. That was probably the first."

Kahn now told him about the bowl in which Cascadian Farm sold its frozen
entrees. Plastic would have turned off the organic consumer, he
explained, so they were using coated paperboard, which isn't readily
recyclable. Would it be possible, Kahn wondered, to make a microwaveable
bowl out of biodegradable food starch? Brauner said he had heard about a
cornstarch clamshell for fast-food burgers and offered to look into it.
Kahn took his card.

Kahn had another, more off-the-wall request for Perry May, the man in
charge of General Mills's machine shop. This is where engineers and
machinists make the machines that make the food. Kahn asked Perry if his
shop could help develop a prototype for a new weeding machine he had
dreamed up for organic farmers. "It would be an optical weeder with a
steam generator on board," Kahn explained. "The scanner would
distinguish between a weed and a corn plant, say, and then zap the weed
with a jet of hot steam." May thought it might be doable; they exchanged
cards.

"I feel like a kid in a candy store," Kahn told me afterward. "Organic
has never had these kinds of resources at its disposal."

On the drive back from Bell, Kahn grew positively effervescent about the
"organic synergies" that could come from General Mills's acquisition of
Pillsbury, a $10.5 billion deal now awaiting F.T.C. approval. Pillsbury
owns Green Giant, and the prospect of being able to draw on that
company's scientists (and patents) has planted agronomic fantasies in
the fevered brain of the former farmer: broccoli specifically bred for
organic production ("We've never had anything like that!"); an organic
version of Niblets, Green Giant's popular proprietary corn; carrots bred
for extra vitamin content. In fact, Kahn got so worked up spinning his
vision of the industrial organic future that he got us lost.

o this was how Kahn proposed to change the American food system from
within: by leveraging its capital and know-how on behalf of his dream.
Which prompts the question, Just how does the American food system feel
about all this? As Kahn and I made the rounds of General Mills's senior
management, he in his work shirt, I in my suit, I tried to find out how
these tribunes of agribusiness regarded their new vice president's
organic dream, exactly how it fit into their vision of the future of
food.

The future of food, I learned, is toward ever more health and
convenience -- the two most important food trends today -- at no
sacrifice of taste. "Our corporate philosophy," as one senior vice
president, Danny Strickland, put it, "is to give consumers what they
want with no trade-offs." Organic fits into this philosophy in so far as
the company's market research shows that consumers increasingly want it
and believe it's healthier.

The acquisition of a leading organic food company is part of a
company-wide "health initiative" -- along with adding calcium to various
product lines and developing "functional foods" like Harmony, a
soy-and-calcium-fortified cereal aimed at menopausal women. When I asked
Ian Friendly, the sharp, young executive in charge of the company's
health-initiative group, if this meant that General Mills believed
organic was more healthful than conventional food, he deftly shifted
vocabulary, suggesting that "wellness' is perhaps a better word."
Wellness is more of a whole gestalt or lifestyle, which includes things
like yoga, massage and working out. It quickly became clear that in the
eyes of General Mills, organic is not a revolution so much as a market
niche, like menopausal women or "ethnics," and that health is really a
matter of consumer perception. You did not have to buy into the organic
"belief system" to sell it. When I asked Strickland if he believed that
organic food was in any way better, he said: "Better? It depends. Food
is subjective. Perceptions depend on circumstances."

I got much the same response from other General Mills executives. The
words "better food," uttered so unself-consciously in Sedro-Woolley,
rang in their offices like a phrase from a dead language. Steve Sanger,
the company's chairman, said: "I'm certain it's better for some people.
It depends on their particular beliefs." Sheri Schellhaas, vice
president for research and development, said, "The question is, Do
consumers believe organic is healthier?" Marc Belton, a senior vice
president for cereals and the executive most responsible for the Small
Planet acquisition, put it this way: "Is it better food? . . . You know,
so much of life is what you make of it. If it's right for you, it's
better -- if you feel it's better, it is."

At General Mills, it would seem, the whole notion of objective truth has
been replaced by a kind of value-neutral consumer constructivism, in
which each sovereign shopper constructs his own reality: "Taste You Can
Believe In." Kahn understands that there is no percentage in signing
onto the organic belief system, not when you also have Trix and Go-Gurt
and Cinnamon Toast Milk and Cereal Bars to sell, yet, as he acknowledged
later, contemporary corporate relativism drives him a little nuts.

Old-fashioned objective truth did make a brief reappearance when Kahn
and I visited the quality-assurance lab deep in the bowels of the Bell
center. This is where technicians grind up Trix and Cheerios and run
them through a mass spectrometer to make sure pesticide residues don't
exceed F.D.A. "tolerances." Pesticide residues are omnipresent in the
American food supply: the F.D.A. finds them in 30 to 40 percent of the
food it samples. Many of them are known carcinogens, neurotoxins and
endocrine disrupters -- dangerous at some level of exposure. The
government has established acceptable levels for these residues in
crops, though whether that means they're safe to consume is debatable:
in setting these tolerances the government has historically weighed the
risk to our health against the benefit -- to agriculture, that is. The
tolerances also haven't taken into account that children's narrow diets
make them especially susceptible or that the complex mixtures of
chemicals to which we're exposed heighten the dangers.

Harry Leichtweis, a senior research analytical chemist at General Mills,
tests for hundreds of different chemical compounds, not only the 400
pesticides currently approved by the E.P.A. but also the dozens of
others that have been banned over the years as their dangers became
known. Decades later, many of these toxins remain in the soil and
continue to show up in our food. "We still find background levels of DDT
and chlordane," he explained. Now the lab tests Small Planet Foods's
products too. So I asked Leichtweis, who is a pale, rail-thin scientist
with Coke-bottle specs and no discernible affect, if organic foods, as
seen from the perspective of a mass spectrometer, are any different.

"Well, they don't contain pesticide."

Leichtweis had struck a blow for old-fashioned empiricism. Whatever else
you might say about an organic TV dinner, it almost certainly contains
less pesticide than a conventional one. Gene Kahn was beaming.