Anna Sussman
NEW YORK, Mar 6 2006 (IPS) – Shopping at the Whole Foods supermarket chain in the United States has been called, among other things, inspirational.
Aisle upon aisle of high-end condiments and piles of picture-perfect produce inspire questions such as, What crackers would go best with this aged Gouda? and perhaps more often, Why is this artichoke so expensive?
For Samuel Fromartz, a longtime business reporter with The New York Times, Business Week and Fortune, a larger question loomed. Having noticed how brisk business was, he decided to purchase Whole Foods stock. And then, as he watched it soar, he wondered, Who would have thought that a natural food supermarket could have offered a financial refuge from the dot-com bust?
The answer to this question, and the many other questions it engendered, became Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew , a new book that examines the rise of the multi-billion-dollar organic food industry and the tensions that plague it.
After having parted with the last of his Whole Foods stock in mid-2002, in order to maintain objectivity, he spent two and a half years researching and writing. It must have been a bittersweet goodbye his return had been over 130 percent in the two and a half years he had held on to the stock, and had he continued to own it, would have been up six-fold at the time of writing.
Organic food sales have risen about 20 percent a year in the U.S. since 1990, reaching 12 billion dollars by 2004, according to the Organic Trade Association.
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So how did organic foods go from a tree-hugging hippie phenomenon to a code word for yuppie lifestyle ?
According to Fromartz s book, organic foods were in style long before polyester bell-bottoms and platform shoes. As early as 1793, the future U.S. president Thomas Jefferson was spreading manure over his garden in order to boost the mineral content of the weak Virginia soil.
But the trend didn t catch on until the 1920s, when British scientist Sir Albert Howard became director of the Institute of Plant Industry in Indore, India, and began testing the benefits of composting in earnest. His method of using vegetative and animal waste to enrich soil, gleaned from his observations of local peasant farmers, worked.
By the time he left India in 1931, the Indore Institute was producing a thousand tonnes of compost annually, and the surrounding fields stood out like a green jewel in the countryside.
Howard published his findings, and the technique quickly spread from London to Nairobi to Malaysia and beyond. His work was translated into Spanish and his method applied to the gigantic coffee plantations of Central America. And here appears the first inkling of future tensions.
Although the organic movement had a strong affinity with agrarianism and small-scale farming, the method as Howard conceived it was not limited by scale, Fromartz writes. It couldn t be, if the aim was to be the alternative to chemically intensive farming.
As Fromartz sees it, this conflict between small farmers and those with dreams of large-scale organic production has been a part of the movement since its inception. In exploring this increasingly visible industry, he has written a fast-paced book with a fascinating cast of characters, ranging from the rugged, back-to-the-land idealistic farmers to Steve Demos, the rich kid-turned-Buddhist-turned Silk Soymilk mogul.
Seminal figures like J.I. Rodale, of Rodale Press, were able to combine business savvy with their ideals but he was spreading information, not manure. Rodale launched his first publication, Organic Gardening , in 1942. It was critical to the rise of the early organic movement in North America, and by the 1970s it was being called the most subversive publication in the country by The Whole Earth Catalog.
Today, no one would call Organic Gardening subversive . The radical element of the organic movement seems to be more concerned with making ends meet than fighting the system, and the money-minded are aware that organics can mean big bucks.
In conducting his research, Fromartz shuttled between the two factions, enjoying home-cooked lunches with farmers and their families, and visiting the factories and corporate headquarters of industry giants like Earthbound Farms and White Wave, which produces Silk soymilk.
The mom-and-pop farms with their heirloom varieties and down-home twangs hold far more appeal. Fromartz met Jim Crawford at his local farmer s market in Dupont Circle, in Washington. He and his wife Moie grow their fruits and vegetables in a Pennsylvania town two and a half hours away, and wake up at 3:30 am to drive to the market.
Of course, Crawford hates giant chains like Whole Foods. But as Fromartz said in a telephone interview earlier this month, His farmer s market continually expanded after Whole Foods opened five blocks away. His sales actually went up. It was good for him because it s growing the market for better produce overall.
Fromartz sees the opposition between small farmers and big chain supermarkets as a false dichotomy each side plays its role in the industry. It s the same consumer shopping at both. It s not a zero-sum game where one side wins, and the other one loses, he told IPS.
Still, as farmland in North America becomes increasingly concentrated in the hands of larger producers, small farmers are going bankrupt.
From a peak of seven million farms in 1935, just two million remainàThe largest two percent (or 46,100 farms) account for half of all of its sales, Fromartz notes.
He gets to know the people behind Natural Selection Foods, which sells under the brand name Earthbound Farms. Natural Selection Foods is the U.S. s largest distributor of organic spring mix, pre-washed bags of salad greens that have, in the past decade, rendered salad spinners all but obsolete.
In their 205,000 square foot processing plant in San Juan Bautista, California, workers in thick coats haul the lettuce around the chilled and noisy processing plant in two ten-hour shifts, with a four-hour cleaning shift in between. Twenty thousand pounds of lettuce are triple-washed and bagged each hour.
The company s founders, Myra and Drew Goodman, are everything that the Crawfords are not urban, sophisticated (Drew s father was an art dealer), and, in the words of one farmer, predatory .
The accepted story seemed to be that they had stolen the organic salad market from smaller farmers, over-producing and dropping the price until these competitors were driven out, writes Fromartz.
But Myra is quick to defend herself. We re offering an organic choice, we re doing something great for the environment, we re providing farm workers a healthier work environment, so I can t feel like I m doing a bad thing.’
To the average U.S. consumer, for whom organic lettuce has never before been cheaper, the Goodmans are undoubtedly a blessing. But to the farmers who have been pushed out of the salad market, they are demons from hell. It depends on how you read the expression corporate social responsibility in this case, is the corporation responsible for the farmer s economic well-being or the consumer s wallet?
Fromartz concludes that Both approaches, growth and purity, are necessary for the organic food industry to thrive. He calls farmers like Jim Crawford the heart of the organic movement, and the big companies are the muscle .
What drives food purchases is taste, he said. You can have the best argument in the world for grass-fed beef, or whatever it is, but what matters at the end of the day is taste.
