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  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: "homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org" <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Organic and us
  • Date: Sun, 04 Jun 2006 09:07:54 -0500

The Way We Live Now


Mass Natural

[]


By MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: June 4, 2006

"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 <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/john_kerry/index.html?inline=nyt-per>John Kerry 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 <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/e/european_union/index.html?inline=nyt-org>European Union, 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.

The last two pages of this story can be found at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/magazine/04wwln_lede.html?pagewanted=2
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In a message dated 6/4/2006 10:08:41 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
genegerue AT ruralize.com writes:

From Gene's Article:

But you knew it was over for John Kerry in the farm belt when his wife,
Teresa,
helpfully suggested to Missouri farmers that they go organic.

I wonder if the author made the connection that Heinz Co. markets more
"organic:" [wink, nod, nudge] than any other entity in the world.


What has been happening for several years now to pave the way for WalMart to
mass market cheap organic produce is a gradual weakening or the definition of
'organic', not that the USDA definition isn't weak enough already.

Back in the unshaven hippie days of organic food a pile of manure was a good
sign and chemical nitrates were completely verboden! Now the manure pile
does not qualify as organic unless it is turned and mixed in a very certain
unproductive way which is out of the reach of small producers. Yet chemical
nitrate is permitted since you COULD be using imported and expensive bat
guano; but
chemical nitrate produced from fossil fuel is CHEMICALLY the same thing so
it's OK to use it (up to 20% of total nitrogen).

Expect to see a great deal of what WalMart sells for organic to be imported.
"Is this really organic??" "Of course, amigo, trust me!"






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