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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

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!"