NEWS: Mass Produced Natural Foods - Pollan: NYT 6/4/06

[Guest guest]

Just another document to use to educate temple presidents and others on

the statement that Srila Prabhupada made in France, "Anything grown in a

garden is 100 times more valuable than if it is bought in the market."

Store-bought organic food can never be a satisfactory replacement for

food grown in the garden by Krsna's devotees. It will always be second

best, soon to be tenth best!

 

Also, in view of the challenges we face of peak oil production, I found

Michael Pollan's reference to the long distance shipping factor,

particularly salient, "These foods may contain no pesticides, but they

are drenched in petroleum even so." It's an "organic" that is clearly

not sustainable!

 

your servant,

 

Hare Krsna dasi

 

************************

New York Times

 

June 4, 2006

The Way We Live Now

 

 

Mass Natural

 

By MICHAEL POLLAN

 

"Elitist" is just about the nastiest name you can call someone, or

something, in America these days, a finely-honed term of derision in the

culture wars, and "elitist" has stuck to organic food in this country

like balsamic vinegar to mâche. Thirty years ago the rap on organic was

a little different: back then the stuff was derided as hippie food,

crunchy granola and bricklike brown bread for the unshaved set (male and

female division). So for organic to be tagged as elitist may count as

progress. But you knew it was over for John Kerry

<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/john_kerry/index.

html?inline=nyt-per>

in the farm belt when his wife, Teresa, helpfully suggested to Missouri

farmers that they go organic. Eating organic has been fixed in the

collective imagination as an upper-middle-class luxury, a blue-state

affectation as easy to mock as Volvos or lattes. On the cultural

spectrum, organic stands at the far opposite extreme from Nascar or

Wal-Mart.

 

But all this is about to change, now that Wal-Mart itself, the nation's

largest grocer, has decided to take organic food seriously. (Nascar is

not quite there yet.) Beginning later this year, Wal-Mart plans to roll

out a complete selection of organic foods -- food certified by the

U.S.D.A. to have been grown without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers

-- in its nearly 4,000 stores. Just as significant, the company says it

will price all this organic food at an eye-poppingly tiny premium over

its already-cheap conventional food: the organic Cocoa Puffs and Oreos

will cost only 10 percent more than the conventional kind. Organic food

will soon be available to the tens of millions of Americans who now

cannot afford it -- indeed, who have little or no idea what the term

even means. Organic food, which represents merely 2.5 percent of

America's half-trillion-dollar food economy, is about to go mainstream.

At a stroke, the argument that it is elitist will crumble.

 

This is good news indeed, for the American consumer and the American

land. Or perhaps I should say for some of the American land and a great

deal more of the land in places like Mexico and China, for Wal-Mart is

bound to hasten the globalization of organic food. (Ten percent of

organic food is imported today.) Like every other commodity that global

corporations lay their hands on, organic food will henceforth come from

wherever in the world it can be produced most cheaply. It is about to go

the way of sneakers and MP3 players, becoming yet another rootless

commodity circulating in the global economy.

 

Oh, but wait. . .I meant to talk about all the good that will come of

Wal-Mart's commitment to organic. Sorry about that. When you're talking

about global capitalism, it can be hard to separate the good news from

the bad. Because of its scale and efficiency and notorious ruthlessness,

Wal-Mart will force down the price of organics, and that is a good thing

for all the consumers who can't afford to spend more for food than they

already do. Wal-Mart will also educate the millions of Americans who

don't yet know exactly what organic food is or precisely how it differs

from conventionally grown food.

 

The vast expansion of organic farmland it will take to feed Wal-Mart's

new appetite is also an unambiguous good for the world's environment,

since it will result in substantially less pesticide and chemical

fertilizer being applied to the land -- somewhere. Whatever you think

about the prospect of organic Coca-Cola, when it comes, and come it

surely will, tens of thousands of acres of the world's cornfields --

enough to make all that organic high-fructose corn syrup -- will no

longer receive an annual shower of pesticides like Atrazine. O.K.,

you're probably registering a flicker of cognitive dissonance at the

conjunction of the words "organic" and "high-fructose corn syrup," but

keep your eye for a moment on that Atrazine.

 

Atrazine is a powerful herbicide applied to 70 percent of America's

cornfields. Traces of the chemical routinely turn up in American streams

and wells and even in the rain; the F.D.A. also finds residues of

Atrazine in our food.

 

So what? Well, the chemical, which was recently banned by the European

Union

<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/e/european_u

nion/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,

is a suspected carcinogen and endocrine disruptor that has been linked

to low sperm counts among farmers. A couple of years ago, a U.C.

Berkeley herpetologist named Tyrone Hayes, while doing research on

behalf of Syngenta, Atrazine's manufacturer, found that even at

concentrations as low as 0.1 part per billion, the herbicide will

chemically emasculate a male frog, causing its gonads to produce eggs --

in effect, turning males into hermaphrodites. Atrazine is often present

in American waterways at much higher concentrations than 0.1 part per

billion. But American regulators generally won't ban a pesticide until

the bodies, or cancer cases, begin to pile up -- until, that is,

scientists can prove the link between the suspect molecule and illness

in humans or ecological catastrophe. So Atrazine is, at least in the

American food system, deemed innocent until proved guilty -- a standard

of proof extremely difficult to achieve, since it awaits the results of

chemical testing on humans that we, rightly, don't perform.

 

 

I don't know about you, but as the father of an adolescent boy, I sort

of like the idea of keeping such a molecule out of my son's diet, even

if the scientists and nutritionists say they still don't have proof that

organic food is any safer or healthier. I also like that growing food

organically doesn't pollute the rivers and water table with nitrates

from synthetic fertilizer or expose farm workers to toxic pesticides.

And the fact that animals raised organically don't receive antibiotics

or synthetic growth hormones. Sounds like a better agriculture to me --

and Wal-Mart has just put the force of its great many supermarkets

behind it.

 

But before you pour yourself a celebratory glass of Wal-Mart organic

milk, you might want to ask a few questions about how the company plans

to achieve its laudable goals. Assuming that it's possible at all, how

exactly would Wal-Mart get the price of organic food down to a level

just 10 percent higher than that of its everyday food? To do so would

virtually guarantee that Wal-Mart's version of cheap organic food is not

sustainable, at least not in any meaningful sense of that word. To index

the price of organic to the price of conventional is to give up, right

from the start, on the idea, once enshrined in the organic movement,

that food should be priced not high or low but responsibly. As the

organic movement has long maintained, cheap industrial food is cheap

only because the real costs of producing it are not reflected in the

price at the checkout. Rather, those costs are charged to the

environment, in the form of soil depletion and pollution (industrial

agriculture is now our biggest polluter); to the public purse, in the

form of subsidies to conventional commodity farmers; to the public

health, in the form of an epidemic of diabetes and obesity that is

expected to cost the economy more than $100 billion per year; and to the

welfare of the farm- and food-factory workers, not to mention the

well-being of the animals we eat. As Wendell Berry once wrote, the motto

of our conventional food system -- at the center of which stands

Wal-Mart, the biggest purveyor of cheap food in America -- should be:

Cheap at any price!

 

To say you can sell organic food for 10 percent more than you sell

irresponsibly priced food suggests that you don't really get it -- that

you plan to bring business-as-usual principles of industrial

"efficiency" and "economies of scale" to a system of food production

that was supposed to mimic the logic of natural systems rather than that

of the factory.

 

We have already seen what happens when the logic of the factory is

applied to organic food production. The industrialization of organic

agriculture, which Wal-Mart's involvement will only deepen, has already

given us "organic feedlots" -- two words that I never thought would find

their way into the same clause. To supply the escalating demand for

cheap organic milk, agribusiness companies are setting up 5,000-head

dairies, often in the desert. These milking cows never touch a blade of

grass, instead spending their days standing around a dry-lot "loafing

area" munching organic grain -- grain that takes a toll on both the

animals' health (these ruminants evolved to eat grass, after all) and

the nutritional value of their milk. But this is the sort of milk

(deficient in beta-carotene and the "good fats" -- like omega 3's and

C.L.A. -- that come from grazing cows on grass) we're going to see a lot

more of in the supermarket as long as Wal-Mart determines to keep

organic milk cheap.

 

We're also going to see more organic milk -- and organic foods of all

kinds -- coming from places like New Zealand. The globalization of

organic food is already well under way: at Whole Foods you can buy

organic asparagus flown in from Argentina, raspberries from Mexico,

grass-fed meat from New Zealand. In an era of energy scarcity, the

purchase of such products does little to advance the ideal of

sustainability that once upon a time animated the organic movement.

These foods may contain no pesticides, but they are drenched in

petroleum even so.

 

Whether produced domestically or not, organic meat will increasingly

come not from mixed, polyculture farms growing a variety of species (a

practice that makes it possible to recycle nutrients between plants and

animals) but from ever-bigger Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or

CAFO's, which, apart from using organic feed and abjuring antibiotics,

are little different from their conventional counterparts. Yes, the

federal organic rules say the animals should have "access to the

outdoors," but in practice this often means providing them with a tiny

exercise yard or, in the case of one organic egg producer in New

England, a screened-in concrete "porch" -- a view of the outdoors.

Herein lies one of the deeper paradoxes of practicing organic

agriculture on an industrial scale: big, single-species CAFO's are even

more precarious than their conventional cousins, since they can't use

antibiotics to keep the thousands of animals living in close confinement

indoors from becoming sick. So organic CAFO-hands (to call them

farmhands seems overly generous) keep the free ranging to a minimum and

then keep their fingers crossed.

 

Wal-Mart will buy its organic food from whichever producers can produce

it most cheaply, and these will not be the sort of farmers you picture

when you hear the word "organic." Big supermarkets want to do business

only with big farmers growing lots of the same thing, not because big

monoculture farms are any more efficient (they aren't) but because it's

easier to buy all your carrots from a single megafarm than to contract

with hundreds of smaller growers. The "transaction costs" are lower,

even when the price and the quality are the same. This is just one of

the many ways in which the logic of industrial capitalism and the logic

of biology on a farm come into conflict. At least in the short run, the

logic of capitalism usually prevails.

 

Wal-Mart's push into the organic market won't do much for small organic

farmers, that seems plain enough. But it may also spell trouble for the

big growers it will favor. Wal-Mart has a reputation for driving down

prices by squeezing its suppliers, especially after those suppliers have

invested heavily to boost production to feed the Wal-Mart maw. Having

done that, the supplier will find itself at Wal-Mart's mercy when the

company decides it no longer wants to pay a price that enables the

farmer to make a living. When that happens, the notion of responsibly

priced food will be sacrificed to the imperatives of survival, and the

pressure to cut corners will become irresistible.

 

Up to now, the federal organic standards have provided a bulwark against

that pressure. Yet with the industrialization of organic, these rules

are themselves coming under mounting pressure, and forgive my

skepticism, but it's hard to believe that the lobbyists from Wal-Mart

are going to play a constructive role in defending those standards from

efforts to weaken them. Just this past year the Organic Trade

Association used lobbyists who do work for Kraft Foods to move a bill

through Congress that will make it easier to include synthetic

ingredients in products labeled organic.

 

Organic is just a word, after all, and its definition now lies in the

hands of the federal government, which means it is subject to all the

usual political and economic forces at play in Washington. Inevitably,

the drive to produce organic food cheaply will bring pressure to further

weaken the regulations, and some of K Street's finest talent will soon

be on the case. A few years ago a chicken producer in Georgia named

Fieldale Farms persuaded its congressman to slip a helpful provision

into an appropriations bill that would allow growers of organic chicken

to substitute conventional chicken feed if the price of organic feed

exceeded a certain level. That certainly makes life easier for a chicken

producer when the price of organic corn is north of $5 a bushel, as it

is today, and conventional corn south of $2. But in what sense is a

chicken fed on conventional feed still organic? In no sense but the

Orwellian one: because the government says it is.

 

After an outcry from consumers and some wiser heads in the organic

industry, this new rule was repealed. The moral of the Fieldale story is

that unless consumers and well-meaning organic producers remain vigilant

and steadfast, the drive to make the price of organic foods competitive

with that of conventional foods will hollow out the word and kill the

organic goose, just when her golden eggs are luring so many big players

into the water. Let's hope Wal-Mart recognizes that the extraordinary

marketing magic of the word "organic" -- a power that flows directly

from our dissatisfaction with the very-cheap-food economy Wal-Mart has

done so much to create -- is a lot like the health of an organic chicken

living in close confinement with thousands of other chickens in an

organic CAFO, munching organic corn: fragile.

 

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author,

most recently, of "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four

Meals." He also teaches journalism at the University of California at

Berkeley.