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Last year, Gourmet magazine editor and veteran food-writer Ruth Reichel asked the question—local or organic? "Eating organically is a wonderful thing," she wrote, "but once you start calculating the real cost of food, you begin to think about the expense of flying it halfway around the world. What price do we pay in fuel, in government subsidies, in loss of flavor? Perhaps most importantly, what does it cost our community when we support people in other places at the expense of our neighbors?" These are questions widely asked today in the sustainable food movement, whose slogan has become: "local is the new organic."
Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California
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In many ways this is what organic was always supposed to mean. Organic was farming for the small scale, seeking to supply local markets with food that was grown with regard for the land. Organic meant food that one could check up on. And the small number of people who were committed to organics did check up on it—they built relationships with farmers, and together the farmers and customers built co-ops. The goal was to create an agriculture that would work at nature's pace and be financially viable. In most of these regards organic farming was successful. Farmers were turning profits and customers were getting fresh produce that they didn't have to worry about.
But a good thing is hard to keep, especially when profits are to be had. Organic moved from being the domain of small farmers to a value-added label in the product portfolios of Fortune 500 companies.
Julie Guthman's Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California is a study of this transition, showing how the organic movement's early hopes were betrayed not only by the co-opting of the movement by conventional farmers but also by flaws in the organic movement's agrarian vision.
The first step in transition came with the growing demand for organics. In the 1960s and '70s, "organic" was a label one could only find in health food stores or co-ops. But in 1971 Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkley—an eatery that served only fresh and seasonal ingredients which were grown without synthetic chemicals. Chez Panisse was the first restaurant to put organic on its menu. As the restaurant grew in fame and Alice Waters and her disciples energetically promoted organic food, "organic" began to be synonymous not only with health and quality but also with chic, and the newly rising Bohemian Bourgeois class was there to patronize the places that would serve it.
Around the same time that organic was becoming the food of yuppies there were two major scares involving food contaminated with agricultural chemicals. People didn't want to eat poison-coated vegetables, but that is exactly how they began to view what they could buy in the grocery store, so many began to demand a change.
This new demand attracted attention from conventional farmers, who saw their prices going down. But while they wanted the profits of organics, they were not always willing to go along with the philosophy. As Guthman writes, "Although some new entrants were beginning to question agribusiness as usual, growers' decisions to convert did not turn on a newly found critique of agricultural industrialization for the most part."
The impact of international trade on American farmers was a second force that pushed industrial farmers toward organics. Under nafta, imports of high-margin vegetables and fruits from Mexico began to erode the profits of California farms. Farmers had to find a way to add value to their products to survive, and organics became the answer for many.
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