The Organic Myth?
Cover by BusinessWeek
From the cover story of the latest issue of BusinessWeek: “Pastoral ideals are getting trampled as organic food goes mass market.”
Next time you’re in the supermarket, stop and take a look at Stonyfield Farm yogurt. With its contented cow and green fields, the yellow container evokes a bucolic existence, telegraphing what we’ve come to expect from organic food: pure, pesticide-free, locally produced ingredients grown on a small family farm.
So it may come as a surprise that Stonyfield’s organic farm is long gone. Its main facility is a state-of-the-art industrial plant just off the airport strip in Londonderry, N.H., where it handles milk from other farms. And consider this: Sometime soon a portion of the milk used to make that organic yogurt may be taken from a chemical-free cow in New Zealand, powdered, and then shipped to the U.S. True, Stonyfield still cleaves to its organic heritage. For Chairman and CEO Gary Hirshberg, though, shipping milk powder 9,000 miles across the planet is the price you pay to conquer the supermarket dairy aisle. “It would be great to get all of our food within a 10-mile radius of our house,” he says. “But once you’re in organic, you have to source globally.”
Hirshberg’s dilemma is that of the entire organic food business. Just as mainstream consumers are growing hungry for untainted food that also nourishes their social conscience, it is getting harder and harder to find organic ingredients. There simply aren’t enough organic cows in the U.S., never mind the organic grain to feed them, to go around. Nor are there sufficient organic strawberries, sugar, or apple pulp—some of the other ingredients that go into the world’s best-selling organic yogurt.
Now companies from Wal-Mart (WMT) to General Mills (GIS) to Kellogg (K) are wading into the organic game, attracted by fat margins that old-fashioned food purveyors can only dream of. What was once a cottage industry of family farms has become Big Business, with all that that implies, including pressure from Wall Street to scale up and boost profits. …
As food companies scramble to find enough organically grown ingredients, they are inevitably forsaking the pastoral ethos that has defined the organic lifestyle. For some companies, it means keeping thousands of organic cows on industrial-scale feedlots. For others, the scarcity of organic ingredients means looking as far afield as China, Sierra Leone, and Brazil—places where standards may be hard to enforce, workers’ wages and living conditions are a worry, and, say critics, increased farmland sometimes comes at a cost to the environment.
The story goes on to say that, by becoming successful “beyond [its] wildest dreams,” the organic industry has shot itself in the proverbial foot. The big, looming question, it seems, is if organic food production can be replicated on a mass scale—and if it can feed the world. (The short answer: Yes, yes, yes, and yes.)
Even BusinessWeek agrees that most adherents of the organic movement don’t want any part in the conventional big-box system of production.
When consumers shell out premiums of 50 percent or more to buy organic, they are voting for the Butterworks ethic. They believe humans should be prudent custodians not only of their own health but also of the land and animals that share it. They prefer food produced through fair wages and family farms, not poor workers and agribusiness. They are responding to tales of caged chickens and confined cows that never touch a blade of grass; talk of men losing fertility and girls becoming women at age nine because of extra hormones in food. They read about pesticides seeping into the food supply and genetically modified crops creeping across the landscape.
Yet neither the article nor organic food production’s staunchest critics lay any blame on conventional farming’s chemical-intensive, monoculture approach, the insidious federal farm subsidies that sponsor them, or our cheap oil policy. Nor do they address our nation’s two-tiered food production’s contribution to the growing divisiveness between the rich who can afford nutritious, pesticide-free food, and the poor who can’t. The entry of big-box-companies such as Wal-mart into the fray may, as Slate’s Field Maloney says, help “democratize the nation’s food supply,” but it still sounds like it’s conventional, industrial agriculture that needs to be turned on its head—and completely overhauled—for impeding the evolution of an alternative, truly sustainable model of food production (not to mention making us fat and sick).
Until that happens, I’ll continue to do the localmotion, supporting my neighborhood small farms, and, where possible, making the choice for both local and organic. My food doesn’t need to travel more (and thus pollute more) than I do, organic or not.
Also on BusinessWeek Online:
1. Video View: Talking with Stonyfield’s Gary Hirshberg
2. Slide Show: Look Who’s Vying for the Organic Dollar
3. Why the Stink Over China’s Organic Food?
4. Table: Tale of Two Cows
5. Graphic: Healthy Profits
Related articles:
1. Organic/Eco Classifications
2. Unfair Organics
3. Organic’s Edge Questioned
4. Eat Shoots and Leaves
5. Not All Organics Created Equal
6. Chekhov’s Eco Tip: Local or Organic?
6. Blog Love: Pocket Farm
7. The Oy in Soy
Mark said,
October 6, 2006 at 1:00 pm
I think this is part of the growing pains. There’s lots of demand, little supply. If it keeps up, you’ll see a lot more change and maybe, just maybe, our enemy Wal Mart play a big role as more american farm companies try to get onto the gravy train. Then again…
green LA girl » Clicklist: Green teen driver said,
October 6, 2006 at 2:14 pm
[...] Jasmin analyzes Business Week’s cover story on organics and she’s doin’ the localmotion — going for local AND organic whenever possible. [...]
thissinglespark said,
October 6, 2006 at 3:14 pm
Caught the begining of the CBC radio program “Ideas” on Monday night, which was part 3 of “Organics Goes Mainstream”, featuring an interview with Michael Pollan.
Part 2 and 3 are available as podcasts to download at: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/podcast.html
Part 1 is on their website (with lots of links and resources) at: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/organics/index.html
I agree that this is part of the growing pains as demand outstrips supply, and that Walmart will play a big role… I just don’t think that role will be positive. We already have industrial organics, and that’s the sector I think will see the most growth, which in turn cheapens (in all sorts of ways) the many benefits of organic food.
Eunice said,
October 6, 2006 at 4:17 pm
i’ve heard that just because something is organic, it doesn’t mean it’s local. i guess you could say the reverse could be true, just because something is local, it doesn’t mean it was grown according to usda’s (is it usda? or fda?) definition of ‘organic’ or has that label.
there are a number of small farms near my area that sell at farmers’ market who don’t use the label ‘organic’ simply because they cannot afford it. it doesn’t mean that they use chemically damaging practices or do monoculture– they don’t, and i’ve talked with these farmers and visited their farms– but the organic label isn’t worth it to them. They really don’t need the label– their produce pretty much speak for themselves — they’re fresher, tastier, and last longer than the produce from the local grocery (Whole Foods). I just wish our goverment wasn’t so wrapped around agribusiness’ finger(s).
I buy most of my produce (95%) from farmers’ markets and the rest of my grocery staples (like flour and spices) from whole foods. i know that some food environmentalists are concerned about whole foods, but it’s the nearest grocery that I can bike to, and it at least supports food practices that i believe in (no high frutcose corn syrup, local dairy, fair trade coffee, etc).
Chiaw said,
October 6, 2006 at 10:38 pm
Great entry!
I think as consumers, we need to create impetus for businesses to reconcile the disconnect between the product presented to us and the realities behind the production of the product. We need to disallow businesses to reinterpret organic in a way where it is reduced to becoming merely a tool for increasing profits.
The important thing is to keep discussion going, keep educating ourselves and people around us + producers and distributors about what it REALLY means to be organic… and that having “technically organic” foods that defy the principles of organics (eg. good health, sustanability, biodiversity, etc.) just defeats the puporse.
It’s great that demand for organics has increased to a point where businesses are devoting significant amounts of resources to tap this market. We just need to send a clearer, stronger message of what this “demand” really means.
budak said,
October 7, 2006 at 10:30 am
‘Classical’ economists seem to regard the very lowest possible prices (e.g. scenario where large agribusinesses with immense economies of scale can offer products at rock-bottom costs) as an end in itself. For them (and policy makers/beancounters), the uncountable gains of decentralisation of supply for food (and quite a lot of other products and services) leading to a greater heterogeneity of producers, more choice and positive local feedback loops (in a deepening and strengthening rather than hollowing-out of local economies) pale before the ‘evil’ of consumers paying higher prices for their groceries.
Gina said,
October 11, 2006 at 1:56 pm
Arrrr! Very good points and comments on this article, but it hightlights the lack of basic, ecological and “organic” literacy, even among the Business Week writers, I think.
The lable “Organic” has NEVER claimed to be local, small or pastoral; it just sometimes is by accident or by the very nature of which growers decided to go organic. I’ve bought organic produce and dairy for years, but not because I pictured cute, happy cows in pastures or quaint, down home apple orchards. I’d hoped the cows (and the apple pickers) had a good life, but I know that the “Organic” labelling standard refers ONLY to the lack of chemicals or certain banned medications, etc for animals. I think that’s an important issue, but it’s quite separate from the local, fair trade or animal welfare issues.
I think this recent “shock! scandal!” regarding indusrial organic agriculture is just the mainstream media playing on the mainstream public’s lack of knowledge, and managing to make organic look bad. Shame on them. Let’s get educated!